Dan Among Den

August 04, 2005

Handcuffs

This is a true story from my college years, though the names have been changed to protect the clueless. I cross-posted it to the Elevator Blog.

I got on at One, coming back from a late evening stroll through campus. Elevator traffic had died off, so I was able to snag one for just me. I punched the button, leaned against the cool metal wall, and shoved my hands into the loose pockets of my sweats. I was expecting a smooth, uninterrupted ride up to Eleven, but it stopped short at Three.

Three was the Virgin Vault, an all-girls floor where no men were allowed, so I was quite surprised to see two guys step in, the second followed closely by a cute brunette, almost as through linked at the wrist. “I don’t know about this, Steve,” she said.

I took a closer look at Steve and his hapless girl and realized that they really were linked at the wrist. Handcuffs. “Don’t worry, Jen, it’ll only take a few minutes,” Steve replied and nodded to his nameless friend who punched Ten.

Ah, the Men of Ten. Ten was an all-male floor notorious for low brow stunts and equally low GPA’s. Most of them were pledging one fraternity or another, so in addition to inter-house rivalries, they were always being dispatched on one mission of stupidity or another. I casually shifted my way into the corner of the elevator and waited for us to get going again.

Jen was holding up her wrist, taking a closer look at the cuffs. “You’re sure there’s no other way to get these open?”

“Just the key, but I’m pretty sure I know where it is.”

I recognized the handcuffs immediately. They weren’t police caliber. They weren’t even serious security cuffs. They were just toys, but still solid steel toys. The locks on that kind of thing were just a single-pin tumbler, really just a lever that needed to be moved to release the lock catch. Anything narrow and bent could open those: a hairpin, a paperclip, even a decent length fingernail.

How did I know so much about those handcuffs? I had a pair just like them. Why? Well, that’s my own damn business, but I had once learned an important lesson. You never want to be far from the key, so I’d long ago put one of the keys on my key ring. In my pocket, my fingers instinctively searched for it.

Of course, I could have offered up the key immediately, but that was against the elevator rules. Do not initiate contact. Even if others are talking to each other, you do not initiate contact. Eyes front. Do not speak unless spoken to. Anything else shatters the illusion that we’re comfortably riding along to our destination in our own privacy buffer zone. A single word, even eye contact, can instantly transforms us into a herd, packed body to body, trapped in a metal box. So, I just stood there watching Jen out of the corner of my eye, all the while idly fingering her salvation in my pocket.

“Five minutes,” Steve was saying. “Five minutes, tops. I’m sure I can find the key.”

“I still don’t like it,” Jen replied. “Doesn’t anyone else have a key?”

“Come on, Jen, it’s not like…” Steve paused and turned to me. “Hey, you, do you have a key to these handcuffs?”

I looked at them and made full eye contact – I’d been given explicit permission – Steve with his smug grin, Jen with her pleading eyes. “As a matter of fact, I do.” I pulled the key from my pocket, already grasped between thumb and forefinger, ready to go. I took one step, reached for Jen’s wrist, and promptly unlocked her side of the cuffs.

She looked up at the floor display and quickly jabbed Nine, bringing the elevator to as sudden a stop as it could manage. “See you later guys,” she told them, and as the door opened for her, she looked right at me. “Thank you.”

The ride of just one floor, from Nine to Ten, was objectively only thirteen seconds, but Steve’s glare made it seem much longer. “Yeah, thanks,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “thanks a lot.”

I shrugged. “Hey, you asked for the key.”

Nameless Friend prodded Steve towards the open door. “He’s right, Steve. You did ask.”

They exited with unintelligible grumbles from Steve, and I proceeded up to Eleven. A lot of those guys on Ten are Business or Pre-Law. I sometimes think Steve went on to be a lawyer and that I taught him a very valuable lesson that day. When you’re in front of the jury, never ask the witness a question that you don’t already know the answer to.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 29, 2005

Fish Need Air

This isn't my narrative, but it's a great little true story of how greed overcame stupidity and laziness to save some fish.

Fish Need Air, Too

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 21, 2005

Women and Coffee

I had a nice evening out with MAW tonight. The food was good and the service was excellent. With dessert, MAW ordered a decaf, and when our waitress brought it back she asked, "Would you like cream in that?"

MAW said no, and this was no surprise to me, since I know she takes her coffee with nothing added. But not satisfied with that, my brain took a sharp left turn, and it was the best I could do to repress my grin until after our waitress departed.

"What is it?" MAW asked.

"My wife likes her coffee the way she likes her women: hot, black, and decaffeinated."

MAW sputtered so hard I almost wore that decaf home.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 07, 2005

The London Bombing

On this morning of the London bombing, I am reminded of a concert given shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It was an annual event, a concert series called the Proms held in England in the late summer through early fall.

This particular concert was the last in the series, and it was the first held after 9/11. The orchestra's conductor was an American, something that had been a bit of a controversial choice a few years earlier, but all had come to accept and embrace him over time. There was no mention of 9/11 until almost the very end, when he addressed the audience.

He thanked them for all their support over the previous years and in particular the outpouring of support in that prior week. "I know that this, the last night of the Proms, is supposed to be a happy and joyous occasion, but as you know, my nation is in grief. In England, your national music of grief is...", alas, my memory fails me. "In my country, it is Barber's Adagio for strings."

What followed was the most heart-rending performance of that piece I have ever heard. You may not be familiar with the piece, or you may know it without realizing it. It was most famously used as the end-title music for the 1986 movie, Platoon. Sufficed to say, by the end, the audience was in tears.

It was followed by a full-chorus performance of that timeless British anthem, "Jerusalem", a piece known so well, the audience gladly joined in.

In many ways, England is the father of the American nation, and while they fought in America's adolescence, they have come to appreciate each other: the father proud of his son's accomplishments, the son proud to have come from such a lineage.

Today, America weeps for its father.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 16, 2005

The neighborhood owl

Andrew just wrote about a neat experience he had with a neighborhood owl. I was going to leave this as a comment, but... well, maybe he should double check his LJ configuration screen. Or not.

Anyway, there's an owl in our neighborhood. He... at least I think of it as "he"... likes to sit on the peak of our roof. Given the hill and neighborhood layout, it's probably the highest spot for a few hundred yards. (Yeah, we'll talk about the lightning some other time.)

I discovered him about a year ago when he was hooting away on the roof over my head. I wandered around the house trying to find the noise, eventually going up to the attic where the noise was much louder but not enough to locate. Eventually I went outside to see if I could find it, and there was the owl, sitting atop the roof, sillouhetted against the moonlit clouds like just one more vent pipe. He's big, though, almost two feet from head to tail.

Other nights when I've had reason to go out, I look up to his perch. It's usually empty, but he's there often enough to keep his claim, and he's usually very quiet. His one night of hooting was a singular performance. He could be up there right now, and I wouldn't know it. I like that.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 30, 2005

RSS Package Tracking via Bloglines

I'm waiting for a software package to arrive, and I just got my packing number yesterday. Then this morning, Bloglines announced to me that they can track packages via an RSS feed. I tried it, and it works. Very slick.

But mostly it reminded me of how MAW and I compared package tracking to little blogs for boxes. After that comparison, I wrote a little blog while waiting for my camera last summer. Here's a repost to get it into my new blog:

And so I present, the short blog of a package called 650152785933.

July 13, 2004, Tuesday, 6:44pm

Wow, here I am ready to start my trip. I'm all packed up, and I'm even bringing my new camera. I can't quite see my ticket, but it's tucked safely in my breast pocket. At least the ticket agent was nice, and it looks like I'll be taking the FedEx shuttle bus to the airport. Of course, here in Harahan, Louisiana, that's a bit of a drive.

9:13pm:

Ok... a little hitch. I have to wait for a bit of a transfer, but there's lots of other packages around to talk to. One of them is even going to Paris. Ooo, I hope I get to go to Paris someday. Ok, here we go again.

11:21pm:

If I read the signs right, I'm in Kenner, Lousiana now. Still no sign of the airport. I guess we're just going to be taking the bus for part of this trip, but it looks like maybe we're going to have just hole up here for the night.

July 14, 2004, Wednesday, 5:59am

All right! A fresh cup of coffee, and we're on our way. I didn't get a seat next to that cute Paris box this time, but this crate's going to California. He's got his surfboard and everything!

9:30am

Wow, Memphis! Maybe we'll get to out to Graceland! Hmmm, but it looks like we've got to hang out a while in... well, it looks about as organized as baggage claim. I was smart though, cause I only did carry-on.

3:29pm

Ok, I've got my boarding pass, and I'm getting onto my flight. It's a short hop to Austin, TX. My seat's a little closed in though, and none of the windows are open. I must be flying on Funsaver fares or something.

5:54

Damn but Austin is hot today. It's like 100 degrees out here, even hotter in the shuttle bus. Still, Austin, live music capital of the world! That should make up for missing Graceland.

9:11

Baggage claim took forever again, and me with just my carry-on! It's too late to get a hotel now, so it looks like we're just gonna hunker down here for the night.

July 15, 2004, Thursday, 6:34am

Man, I just gotta say, FedEx has the freshest coffee in the world. I'm feeling on top of the world. Plus, it's at least a little cooler in the bus this morning.

8:02am

Ok, we're pulling out at last. I wonder if we'll get to see the capitol building?

11:05am

Finally, it looks like I'm here. A bit more rural than the brochure suggested, but it's nice. Big open sky, pretty lake... I'm glad I brought my camera. And hey! This totally hot, red-headed chick just signed for me. Wow. Maybe I'll get to take her picture if you know what I mean. (wink, wink)

11:45am

Hey, who's this guy? Is he the red-head's brother? No! Oh my god -- it's the jealous husband! He's standing over me with this strange gleam in his eye, and... and... he's got a KNIFE IN HIS HAND!!!

AAAAGGGH!!! I'm being gutted here! Someone call 911!!

And now, he's reaching inside... I don't know how much more of this I can take! Where's that travel agent!

My camera! That knife-wielding hoodlum is stealing my camera! My brand new camera!

12:02pm

My life is ruined. Here I lie, a mere shell of my former self, tossed aside like so much garbage.

I so wanted to see Paris.

Blog /Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

Elevator blog

Gord pointed me towards an interesting little blog of experiences in an elevator. It's an open community blog and has posts from quite a few different folks. I added mine here as well as below. It's a true story.

I got on the elevator on twelve. Normally I get on at eleven. I don’t live on eleven. I used to, but now I live up on twelve. Several of us took over the short hallway as sort of an eleventh-floor annex, and we typically walk down one flight to get on at eleven. After all, if you’re going to be stuck in the lobby for five minutes waiting, you may as well be with friends.

But today I got on at twelve because I have an eye infection. My left eye has been slathered with medicated goop and then covered with an oversized cotton gauze bandage taped across my face. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore, but with only one eye my depth perception is gone, so I’m avoiding stairs as much as possible this week.

Two girls were talking when I got on, probably coming down from fourteen. They paused briefly and shifted towards the corner, but they picked up their banter again as soon as I turned to face the door.

“You going on Saturday?”

“Maybe. Jason’s been a bit of a shit lately.”

The elevator stopped on eleven, and Michael got in. He doesn’t live on eleven either, but eleven is funny that way. He nodded and let the doors close.

The girls in the corner started up again, and we let it go for three more floors before Michael turned to me and asked calmly, “So, the old fencing wound opening up again?” It was completely out of the blue. I didn’t even fence. Michael was like that.

But so was I. “Yeah,” I nodded. “And the puss is really thick this time.”

“You should get that checked.”

“After lunch.”

The rest of the ride down was in utter silence, broken only by the occasional jangle of the elevator cable. We got off on two for the cafeteria, and as the doors closed behind us, we smiled at the long-repressed “Ewwwww!” from the girls in the corner.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 01, 2005

Clinging to the steering wheel in a cold sweat

I'm out in the San Francisco Bay area this week on my first trip for the year. I've been told that there will be a lot of them this year, so this should become a common refrain:

If you need to get hold of me by email, you could try my work email (if you've got it), or you can reach me at

As for the rest of it, I had a little flight trouble, but at least I didn't get stranded in Chicago. I then managed to drop my cell phone in the Oakland airport and didn't realize it until I reached my hotel in San Rafael, thirty miles away. I retrieved it Monday night on a trip back to Oakland to visit Jerry.

Generally speaking, I really enjoy my trips out here. The SF Bay is a great place to visit though I'd hate to live here. The weather seems to be forever perfect, the vistas beautiful, and the architecture both grand and classic. My main complaint, however, is a hire-wire act I dread each trip: the Richmond Bridge.

There are three main bridges in the central part of the SF Bay: the Bay Bridge (which is actually two bridges joined at Treasure Island), the Golden Gate, and the Richmond Bridge. It was the Bay Bridge that partially collapsed in the 89 earthquake, though that section is being replaced by a new bridge. The other half of the Bay Bridge seems to be much newer or at least looks sturdier, a Golden Gate rendered in monochrome grey. The Golden Gate, of course, is a timeless classic.

The Richmond Bridge, however, is an afterthought, joining the East Bay with the North Bay. It's a 3-lane double-decker with two high-rising humps. Its design was to take two shorter bridges and just tie them together to make a longer bridge. There is no broad pedestrian sidewalk on this bridge. Instead, you're up very close the the side-rail of the bridge, and the side rail itself is not a solid thing. It's a collection of metal rails and pipes that has a six-inch gap at the bottom next to the pavement, presumably to let the air flow across the bridge smoothly. This also means that as a driver, you have a nice view through that gap to the water a hundred or so feet below.

Another amazing vista? In this case, no. You see, as rational and intelligent as I might present myself as, I'm afraid of heights. This is not a concious thing where I say, "Oh dear, I might fall." No, this is a visceral, hind-brain reaction to what appears to be my imminent death. Exactly when this hits me is a strange thing since I can stand next to a high-rise window without worry as long as the window does not reach the floor. Also, airplanes give me no worries at all. But a balcony, a subway grate, even a staircase that lets you see through the steps... I'm locked into a state of heart-racing panic. This bridge is particularly bad because I'm moving along at 40-50 mph and needing to keep up with shifting lane boundaries due to ongoing reconstruction and refitting. I'm not standing still next to imminent death. I'm running along next to the very precipice.

Normally I can make it across this bridge by a bit of Ego over Id: deep breaths and maintaining my visual focus on some detail of the vehicle in front of me. However, this has been getting harder recently as the lane-jogs have gotten worse, making it difficult to keep up with the car in front of me. Last night going back over to Oakland was particularly bad with the lower deck closed and all traffic squeezed into one lane each way across the top. Oncoming headlights, a bumpy ride, and certain death just inches away. On the other side, I had to pull over because my hands hurt so bad from their grip on the steering wheel.

Completely irrational... I know. My greatest risk of death was that I might be so badly freaked out that I would lose control and have a head on collision with oncoming traffic. Still, I have found that my conscious mind has very little control here, a subtle reminder that we're not too far from being shaven apes.

On the way back, I opted to take the southern route through San Francisco. That turned out to be very nice in its own right. It was late at night, and I was listening to one of my "Oomph!" mix-CDs. I crossed the Golden Gate to the fanfare of the end titles of the movie "Grand Canyon".

But even now, my knuckles still ache from the Richmond Bridge.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 17, 2005

Coolest Mom

I'm taking Sammy to school these days, and every morning is a familiar traffic jam as every other parent swings through that parking lot. The other day, though, I saw something unusual that I just have to share.

I'd already taken Sammy into class and was waiting for a gap to back out of my parking spot when I saw it. Creeping along in the next row was a white van with a commercial label on the driver's door. I can't remember it precisely, but it was something like:

In-Home Gatherings, Entertainment, Demonstrations
http://www.girlsnightoutparty.com/elika
Ask about my toy box...

In another setting, I'd have put it together immediately, but I wasn't thinking along those lines so close to a kindergarten class. By the time I realized what it was, it had already passed on, the URL a mere fleeting memory. Don't bother trying it -- it's not accurate.

Still, that kid has the coolest mom. It's not quite the Ice Cream Truck, but you've got to give it up for someone getting dropped off in the Vibrator Van.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 04, 2005

Where’s My Kung Fu Grip?

MAW and I were taking the twins into the doctor’s office for a checkup this morning, and they were playing with a few toys in the backseat. Eventually, Catherine tossed one down between the seat and the door, making a clattering noise as it went.

“What was that?” I asked.

“The plastic car,” MAW replied.

A little while later I heard another noise. “Another car?”

“No,” she replied, “that was the action figure.”

Action figure... the phrase alone brings back vivid childhood memories of G.I. Joes lounging around camp with their equipment arrayed neatly around them. Mind you, these were the original 12-inch G.I. Joes with genuine fuzz for hair and beards, not the cheap, little, die-cast plastic ones that came later with hard heads. No, these had been the real thing, and we had it all: the tower camp, the helicopter (with moving blades!), the 6-wheel amphibious vehicle, and my pride and joy, the tank. And of course, the later versions of these Joes could actually hold and operate all the equipment thanks to their Amazing Kung Fu Grip! Now, those were real action figures, not the little hard plastic doll Catherine had so justly dismissed.

We had one G.I. Joe that we had custom modified, shaving off the bulk of his beard, leaving him only with a super-cool mustache. We called him The General, and did our best to make his outfits appear much dressier like an officer’s. He had been an older model, so we had gone out and bought a Kung Fu Grip model just to steal the hands and graft them onto The General. The Joe donor accepted the stiff hands and was thereafter known as Private Tom and was the subject of every cruelty we could imagine, from testing the homemade parachutes to acting as a target for well... let’s just say “friendly fire” and leave it that.

But The General went onto great glory. We even customized his hands by carefully slicing through the rubber with an exacto-knife to make the fingers individually posable. He could grip that capture German Lugar with ease, handle a grenade, even cup a makeshift wineglass elegantly. He was the absolutely coolest, and all because of the Kung Fu Grip.

I opened my mouth to tell my wife just that. “It’s not a real action figure unless it has Kung Fu Grip,” I was going to say, and yes, Kung Fu Grip was going to be capitalized.

But then, suddenly, it hit me. There was nothing Kung Fu about that Grip at all. It was just a piece of rubber cast into a half-closed fist. I mean, there was nothing about it that cried out “martial arts”. It wasn’t even particularly oriental. And just where in the long Shaolin history is there some amazing grip anyway?

It was just a hunk of rubber. Sorry, General.

I looked over at MAW. “I’ve been had.”

She shot me a quizzical look, and I did my best to explain it, how cool it had been, capital letters and all, and now... it’s all gone, sold off at a garage sale, even the memory now tainted as a cheap marketing trick.

At the stop light, she chuckled. “You sound like a blog entry.”

I just want my Kung Fu Grip back!

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 11, 2004

ISP Rant!

MUST... NOT... NUKE...TECH SUPPORT...

I had a little trouble with my internet connection today.

What is it about calling up on tech support for your internet connection that implicitly states, "I am a complete idiot and will lie to you about the details of my problem"? I'd like to know, because everytime I call in, that's the kind of treatment I get.

What makes matters worse is that the connectivity in my area is spotty. I get great signal strength, so that's not the problem. Just somewhere up the line things get flakey. So, I get connection loss a lot, maybe once a week. Usually all I have to do is reset the cable modem, and then everything is fine, but about once a month, I have to call up tech support.

And that's when the trouble starts. For starters, today I had to wait on hold for about twenty minutes. Every couple of minutes a recording popped up explaining to me that if I was having conflicts between Microsoft Outlook and Norton AntiVirus where you were unable to access certain mail messages, I could follow these simple directions for disabling virus checking on my email. Oh yeah, now that's a good idea.

Eventually, I got through to a human being. At least I think it was. Considering the level of help I actually got, it's possible it was a good Eliza program. I explained that I had already reset the cable modem, and of course, she asked me to reset my cable modem. See what I mean about assuming I must be lying to them?

Well, I was prepared to humor her, so I did it anyway. When it came up again with the same fault showing on the "cable" light, I explained to her that this kind of thing happens all the time, and that it's not a problem at my end but a problem further up the line. She proceeded to query me on just how I had reset the modem. Once she was satisfied with my explanation, she asked me what IP address I was being assigned.

IP address? Like, you know, the thing I would get if I didn't have a fault on the cable line? Again, I humored her. I logged into my router and read off the IP address.

"That's not one of our addresses. Are you sure you're reading the right one?"

"Yes, I'm sure, and I know it's not one of your addresses. DHCP doesn't work if the underlying packet transport if failing."

I point out again that this kind of thing happens frequently, and I ask if she could please check to see if there was a problem in the area. She says she hadn't heard of any problems. I suggest that I might have just been the first to call in. She puts me on hold for a moment before telling me she isn't aware of any problems in my area. I even offer to go to the neighbors to see if their connection was also down, but she demurrs.

Then she's wondering if I have the signal strength, and I point out that the installer and one other guy who had to come out on a service call both went on and on about the incredibly high signal strength I had. Fearing problems in this, I had even told the installer guy to bring an amplification unit, which we chose not to install as it would be overkill.

Then she starts asking about my wiring. Now, remember, it's not like I was a way for six months and came back to find my Internet disconnected. No, I had been using it actively and then *POOF* it was gone. Nothing happened at that moment. No lightning strikes, no meteor strikes, no upper atmosphere EMP's. I pointed out how astronomically unlikely it was for my wiring to have suddenly failed for no reason, compared to the near constant problem of their network fouling up. Mind you, I was still being polite, just pointing out the mathematics of the situation. MAW was there, but she'll probably talk about the edge in my voice and how the veins in my forehead were about to burst.

Undeterred by my amazing recitation of history, logic, and probabilities, my tormentor helpful technician asked if there were any splitters upstream from my modem. (Clearly she was still after the signal strength issue.) I admitted that yes, there was one AND ONLY ONE splitter involved. She asked if I could try to bypass the splitter.

Now, let me say a little something about the wiring in my house, because I am both extremely proud of it and extremely frustrated with it. My goal was to have everything setup in a single closet dedicated to the wiring. Every telecommunications wire, from phone to cable to network, would be a single, direct run from the closet to its source or destination. There would be no connections hidden away in walls or attics. Nothing would ever "get loose" in an inaccessible spot. I even put extra ventilation in that closet so that I could host servers in there without worrying about the heat problem.

And I pretty much got what I wanted. The only problem was that the assholes lazy dipshits incompetant boobs wiring technicians who installed it did not follow my instructions on how to terminate everything in the wiring closet. I told them that I wanted it all layed out on a breadboard so that it was all easily accessible and that most changes could be made by the use of patch cables. Well, they must have figured that I wouldn't know the difference or that "no one does that kind of thing in a house", so they just dumped it all into a cramped metal box and just bundled up the connections wire-to-wire, cable-to-cable, with it all hanging in there loose.

So, when the ever-helpful technician from COX wanted me to bypass the splitter, it involved squeezing into the closet, opening up this metal box, sorting through the bundle of wires and connections, and identifying the one splitter and its input cable. Now, if it weren't for the fact that I desparately needed the internet connection back for some work I was doing "at the office", I would have just hung up and waited for an hour to see if things had sorted themselves out, but I needed it. So I got in there, worked it all out and connected the main source cable directly into the modem and reset it, and...

Drumroll please....

And there was still a fault on the cable light. I assured her that there was no equipment between my modem and their equipment outside the house. Well, now she admits that maybe it might be their problem and wants to schedule a truck to come out. Hopefully, she says, she can schedule it for today. I bite my tongue because their actual field technicians have generally proven to be very savvy, and I knew that one of them would be able to spot the problem immediately and fix it.

But first, the technician notes that I don't have "COX Wiring Insurance" on my account and that any problems the field guy finds in the wiring in my home will cost money to fix. Now, maybe this insurance is a decent idea if the cable was retrofitted into a fifty-year-old house with water damage, but in a two-year-old house with overengineered wiring and an owner who knows what he's doing, it makes no sense at all. It's just a $3/month extortion that will never pay for itself. Still... "Before I schedule the technician, would you like to add this insurance to your account?"

Ok, go with me here. She's still pushing the theory that the problem is in my wiring, but if she really believed that, then why on Earth is she offering to let me convert a $400 wiring charge into a single month's $3 insurance premium? That's like offering a good deal on life insurance to an 90-year old with lung cancer and a heart condition!! But I digress.

"No thank you. I am fairly confident that the problem is not in the wiring for my house. If it is, I will accept that risk."

So now, after about an hour from the time I first picked up the phone, she starts writing up the trouble ticket to schedule a field technician. I'm on hold for a few minutes, still cramped into the wiring closet, not wanting to move lest I lose track of which cable is which. Eventually she comes back on and says that she's forwarded it on to the supervisor and will know shortly when the field technician will be scheduled. I tell her I'm putting the splitter back into the arrangement, and I get started. She puts me back on hold.

I've just gotten the last coax on and tightened -- not just finger-tightened but wrench-tightened -- when she comes back on.

"Do you have the schedule yet?"

"I just got back the note from my supervisor. He'd like you to try to reset the modem again."

Now, on the one hand, I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle her (difficult on a cordless), but on the other hand, I had already unplugged the modem during the most recent cable switch. So I plugged it back in, and... and...

A GREEN CABLE LIGHT!! Halelujah! Halelujah! Halelujah!

For a split second I wondered if I'd been wrong about her. Maybe the problem was in my wiring after all? Had one of the cables been loose, even though I needed the wrench to disconnect them? Had my act of restringing the cables solidified a connection that had just recently become flakey? Was I, in fact, an idiot who had been unknowingly lying to her the entire time?

But the moment passed. "Tell me, just what did your supervisor say?"

"He said he'd checked something and wanted you to 'try it now'."

"He changed something?"

"Yes, I think so. There might have been a problem in your area."

"A problem in my area." The words echoed from half an hour ago. "Well, it's working now."

I spotchecked a couple of computers to confirm that the packets were flowing and started wrapping things up. Part of me wanted to take her back through the steps, pointing out that I had known from the very beginning that the problem was on their side, and that I had told her this repetitively, but that she had ignored me. I wanted to show her how she had wasted both my time and hers, when all she really needed to do was write up the ticket and have her supervisor push whatever magic button he'd pushed to fix it. Mostly, I suppose I wanted an apology for having been treated like an idiot who would lie about the problem in some perverse scheme to get it fixed faster.

But I knew I wasn't going to get it, so I just thanked her for her time and ended the call. Closing up the wiring box was another ordeal, one which has me very close to hiring a professional wiring guy to come redo that closet the way it was supposed to be done. And then I went back to my work.

Now, maybe the other 99% of their callers are idiots, and they have to take those precautions to avoid dispatching repair vans out to someone who will say, "But why should the cable be connected? My laptop has a wireless network card." But I'm not that guy. I'm the guy who knows more about the network than you. I'm the guy who might even know more about the network than your boss. I'm the guy who should get to call in on the Red Phone.

But there is no red phone.

So I sit here in dread, awaiting the next time I have to call, knowing that the first thing they will say is, "I understand, sir, but could you try resetting it again?"

Narrative /Technology by Dan | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 07, 2004

A rather different December 7th anniversary...

Today is December 7, 2004. Most Americans will think of today in terms of the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A few (including my parents) will think of it as the day before their wedding anniversary – a bachelor party which will live in infamy. Me? Well, I think of it as the anniversary of an event twenty years ago today, the theatrical release of 2010. It’s not as dorky as it sounds, really!

Thanksgiving in 1984 was early, one of the few years when we remember that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, not the last Thursday. We had the traditional family gathering out at my aunt’s house, less than a mile from the ancestral family farm. Now, my aunt cooks a great turkey, so by no means do I mean to impugn her cooking skills in this story. However, my piece of turkey had a little extra ingredient, something special just for me: a parasite.

I didn’t realize this, of course, not at first. I just hung out and watched the Cowboys beat New England 20 to 17 in a tryptophan-induced haze – and I was feeling pretty sleepy myself. However, by Sunday I was tethered to the toilet and piling up empty bottles of Kaopectate like beer cans at a frat house. I was a junior in high school, and I tried to go to school on Monday, but I didn’t even last to lunchtime. Though I was not running a fever, I was dehydrated and weak. Pretty much anything that went into me, solid or liquid, came running out my back end within an hour or two.

Over the course of the next week, I was in and out of the doctor’s. At age seventeen, I was still seeing my pediatrician, and this was a little beyond him, I think. Still, he figured out it was a parasite that had settled into my colon, and that it was commonly found it turkey. He couldn’t do much for me, but at least we knew what it was. By the next Monday, the 3rd, the parasite appeared to be gone and I was starting to hang on to my meals long enough to digest them. However, I had lost fifteen of my 155 pounds and was still very weak, barely unable to stand unassisted. The word from the doctor was that I would likely need another week or two of bed rest before I could resume light activities.

More troubling, however, was the word from school. As usual, I had been slacking off, continuing a trend since the fourth grade when I threw away a 4.0 GPA upon discovering that there were intellectual pursuits beyond school. In this particular case, I had been really slacking off in Pre-Calculus. My mother had called the school to have my assignments brought home, and I “overheard” her talking to my math teacher, Mr. Wolgehagen. (Hey, phone taps count as an intellectual pursuit!) He suggested that since I was likely to fall so far behind, I should just drop out of the honors section since I wasn’t doing very well anyway.

Frankly, that pissed me off. How dare he make such an assumption? Sure, I’d been goofing off, not learning the material, failing to turn in homework, and doing poorly on tests, but that didn’t mean I was a bad student. Well, ok, it did mean I was a bad student, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t cut it, just that I hadn’t chosen to do so. I was lazy, not stupid.

So, I sat there in my sickbed, cracked open that trigonometry textbook and got started on chapter seven. That was the section that they had started the Monday that I had left early, and I knew they would be having the test on it at the end of the week, final period of the day. So, slowly but surely, I worked through the material, just figuring it out from the text, and working every single problem in the chapter. Mind you, these were the dreaded “word problems” that made you figure out just what equation you were trying to solve rather than just throwing it at you and asking for the value of theta.

Meanwhile, I had the television on low in the background – ok, so maybe I was a bad student after all – and I began seeing ads for the release of 2010 that Friday. The audio on the ads frequently focused on Dave Bowman’s brief visitation to Heywood Floyd, particularly his words, “You see, something’s going to happen... something wonderful.” All the while, various space images were flashing by at an accelerating pace. (Mind you, this was the effect of cramming all the “action” of the film into fifteen seconds, only a slight compression factor.) Well, for someone weak, disoriented, and going through SF-withdrawal associated with Lucasholism, this was pretty incredible. Each ad ended with a sudden drop to a black screen with white letters emerging in a minimalist font: December 7. Man, I was pumped. I was going to see that film. Something wonderful was going to happen.

And so the week passed. I ate and studied and slept and repeated and repeated. By the end of the day Thursday, I was feeling ready. Friends had told me that my math teacher had given two pop quizzes over the course of the last two weeks, and I knew I would have to make those up as well. So, Friday morning, I showed up in his classroom an hour before school.

“I’m glad to see you back, Dan”, Mr. Wolgehagen told me. I believed his genuine relief because I knew he was a good guy, but I could also detect the “but...” lingering in his tone, as in “but what are you doing here when I said you needed to drop out of the honors section.”

“I heard you gave out two pop-quizzes while I was out. I need to make them up.”

“Ok, I’m giving the chapter test today. You can take the quizzes during the test.”

“No,” I told him. “I’m going to take the test during the test. I would like to take the quizzes now.”

He looked at me strangely, as though I’d just grown a second nose. “Don’t you think you need some time?” See, I said he was a good guy, even willing to cut me some slack.

But I was defiant and confident as Hell in a January heat wave. “You normally give us twenty-five minutes for the quiz, and if we start now, we just have enough time before first period.”

He shook his head grimly. “Ok, Dan, if that’s what you want.” I’m sure he felt as though he was giving me just enough rope to hang myself.

He gave me the first quiz, and I ripped through it like a pizza slice – this was trigonometry after all. Besides, this was the quiz for the first part of the chapter, using skills I’d honed to perfection on the later sections. I checked my answers twice and handed it back in ten minutes. He gave me the second quiz and began grading the first. I walked out with half an hour to spare, and he watched me go, not sure if I was the same student he’d last seen before Thanksgiving.

The rest of the day went fairly smoothly. I had not been cramming on my other subjects, but I was able to fake it with the same skills that had let me get by with slacking all year. Even in band, where I never really practiced, I was able to join the rehearsal by just sight reading the new piece we were working on. Besides, I was riding an adrenaline rush. Either that or I was just a touch bipolar and had been dared into an extreme manic phase. At lunch, my friends talked about how they were getting together a group to go see the opening of 2010 that night, and they wanted to know if I was feeling well enough to go. “Oh yeah, guys, I am absolutely going. I was going anyway.”

I rolled into math class at the end of the day, a little tired, but still burning with a rage to prove myself. Mr. Wolgehagen had graded my quizzes by then, and though he did not give them back to me yet, I knew I had aced them, and it showed in his face as well. He did not even ask me if I was ready to take test, he just handed it out to me like everyone else. Again, I checked my answers twice and turned in my paper before anyone else. Now, I don’t say this to brag or anything, because in the final analysis what we did in high school does not matter all that much. Mostly I say it to describe the rush I was feeling on that day. I knew I had aced the test as well. Wolgehagen graded it before the end of class, and the twin looks of amazement and dismay made it all worthwhile.

I went home, rested a bit and regaled my mother with tales from the day. Clearly full of energy, I was allowed to push the limits and go out with friends that night. She was just grateful that I wouldn’t have to drive myself. We arrived and waited in line, passing an unprotected marquee. Dune was to be released in another week, and we took the liberty of swapping the N and D.

I arrived at the ticket booth and slid my three dollars under the glass – yes, three dollars for an evening showing – and just smiled at the lady. “2010?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I replied, “just one.”

Oh yeah, I was having a major geek-out evening.

We had a great time, and even though the movie was a far cry from the 2001 original, I was far too buzzed to notice. I got home and crashed. In the week that followed, I grew weak again and missed a few more days. I had pushed myself too far, too early, and my body was not really ready yet.

But mostly I remember the days leading up to it and the anticipation, not so much of the movie itself, but this nebulous promise that “something wonderful is going to happen.” I had found a well of focus and energy within myself that could enable me to accomplish things normally considered outside of my grasp. I’ve tapped it numerous times since in the years that followed, and a lot of wonderful things have happened.

And yet the thing I hate most about myself is that I only tap it on occasion. My natural state is still to do just enough to get by until something forces me into the Big Push. Then I am so focused on getting things done that I barely notice the scale of what I am attempting, and only afterwards, in a David-Banneresque state of shock can I come to grips with the discontinuity of results. I always want to tap it permanently or at least on-demand and under control, but I have never managed it.

To this day, eighty percent of my output comes in twenty percent of my time, and I think back to that “something wonderful” promise and do the math: I am operating at only 25% of my theoretical potential. So yeah, I can take on extra hobbies and commitments. It’s not a problem. I just have to find that switch. It’s around here somewhere.

The mid-life crisis countdown clock is at T minus 1000 days and counting.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 05, 2004

What a long, strange trip it's been...

This is actually a rerun from my LJ-blog that I posted back in March, 2004, but I wanted to move it over to this blog for a permanent home. It describes a long and strange trip I had returning to Austin from a business trip in San Francisco.

My trip home began smoothly. I was in San Francisco for business, and the week had gone very smoothly. In truth, there had been very little to do since about half of the planned meetings had been delayed for three weeks. The other out-of-towners had already left the night before, one by car and one on the red-eye. I had thought seriously about trying to switch to the red-eye to get home a little earlier, but instead I opted for the low-stress trip I’d already planned. I stayed up late watching a couple of DVD’s, safe in the knowledge that my flight didn’t leave until noon. Even the planned anti-war protests didn’t phase me. I was only one block from the Civic Center BART entrance.

I rose Saturday morning after seven, showered, dressed and went out for breakfast. My hotel was in a less-than-elite neighborhood, 7th and Market, but I had survived the week there and was feeling good about it. I shied away from the donut shop – a previous day’s breakfast there had featured a drug-deal in progress at the next table – choosing a Carl’s Jr. instead. Inside I began to question my judgment as I saw the sign reading “This section of the dining room closed from midnight to 7am in cooperation with the SFPD.”

One sausage-and-egg breakfast later, I strolled back to my hotel, taking perverse pleasure that after a week of 80-degree days, it had finally gotten cold enough to wear the rugby jersey I’d packed. Back in my room, I packed quickly, taking care to include Sammy’s new “Alcatraz Dig-Run-Swim Triathlon” t-shirt, and then it was back down the street to the BART station. I had missed the previous airport train by about five minutes, so I had to wait a bit, but by 9:50am, I was handing over my luggage to the X-Ray technician and headed for security. Even security went smoothly, not even costing me my shoes. (I had opted to just leave my pocket knife home this time.) By ten, I was sitting at my gate with my laptop plugged in and getting a little work done.

I should say that by this point I had had only one real travel worry, and it was a silly one. Earlier in the week, I’d had a dream that I had met my long-lost younger sister in San Francisco, and due to a terrorist attack shutting down the airlines we’d been forced to drive back to Austin in a rental car. Since neither had happened – not to mention that I have no long-lost younger sister – I felt quite certain that I was getting home that night.

After boarding, we rolled out onto the taxiway and then rolled some more, then stopped, and then rolled some more. At 12:30, the captain came on and said there was a hold pending approval from Chicago. (Yes, I was connecting through Chicago. We’ll get to that later.) I couldn’t even use my cell phone to call home since we were in a “be ready to go” mode. I went over my itinerary again. Suddenly that 35-minute layover looked awfully short. We finally took off at little after 1pm.

The flight itself was fine. I caught enough of “Duplex” sans-headphones to decide to cross it off my Netflix list, and I had enough elbow room to get out my laptop again and do a bit of work. Somewhere over Colorado I called for the flight attendant.

“I’ve got a pretty tight connection in Chicago. Are they holding any of the flights?”

She put her hand on my shoulder reassuringly. “Oh, don’t worry. They’re having a lot of wind shear in Chicago, so all the flights are backed up. Your plane probably isn’t even there yet, so you’ll be fine.”

There are two things to be learned from this: First, if you’re on a plane trying to reassure a worried passenger, starting off with “they’re having a lot of wind shear” is not the best approach. Second, when they pat you on the shoulder and tell you you’re going to make your connection, just give it up. You’re screwed, and they know it. They just don’t want you getting upset mid-flight.

Landing at Chicago was chaotic. First we were told we’d land at 6:30, a scant five minutes before my connection but theoretically possible. Then we were told that we would be in a holding pattern for an hour. Then were told we’d be on the ground at 6:45. Given the amount of turbulence, clouds, and the aforementioned wind-shear, being told we’d be “on the ground” wasn’t the phrasing I was hoping for, but we did manage to land at 6:51 local time. On the tail end, we were able to use our phones as soon as we’d gotten off the runway. I called Julie immediately and had her look up my connecting flight to Austin.

“Hang on, I’ve got to get to a cordless phone.”

“Ok, just do it.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to put you on hold.”

“Ok, just do it.”

“Putting you on hold…”

I pause for a moment considering different phone configurations back at the house, and then I notice it. We’re not moving. No announcement from the captain. We’re just not moving.

“Ok, I’ve got it,” she says. “It’s been delayed…”

Yes!

“… until 7:01. Where are you?”

7:01? I looked at my watch: 6:58. “We’re on the taxiway, but—” We started moving again. “Did you say 7:01?”

“Yes, estimated 7:01. Man, you’re screwed.”

Thanks, honey.

“No, well, maybe. It’s just estimated. You never know. The gates might be close.”

“In Chicago?”

Oh yeah, the confidence is just oozing across the line. “Well, we’ll see. If you don’t hear from me, assume I made it.”

I hung up just as the seatbelt light went off. Two minutes passed getting the door to open. And then first class got off. And the first few rows of coach. I looked around. I was on row 25. By the time I get to agent at the top of the jetway it’s 7:15. A young woman in front of me had just asked “Austin?”

“H8, it’s to the left.”

I clutched my laptop bag to my chest and said, “we’re together,” and took off running. Just to the left, he’d said. Must be close. Then again, we’re just passing L3 or some such, so who knows. At least people were getting out of my way. After about two minutes of running towards one H sign after another, I suddenly wondered, “Was that Austin, or Boston?”

No matter, because that was the moment my second wind failed to arrive, and I had to slow to a brisk walk. The same young woman as before whisked by, running in open-toe sandals, her carryon luggage rolling along behind her. I finally turned the corner into H-territory as I was renewing my commitment to get back in shape, and I glanced up at the departure monitors. Albany, Albuquerque, Boston… I did a quick double take. No Austin. When I finally reached the gate, that young sandaled sprinter was just stepping away from it. It didn’t even say Austin anymore. They were already setting up for the next flight.

At the edge of the waiting area was a bank of red phones for calling the ticketing agents. Frankly, I’d have been better off if they connected to Batman or the Kremlin, but ticketing agents is what we got. The sprinter and I picked up at the same time.

“Yeah, I missed my connection to Austin, flight 1217,” I said. I gave my name and spelled it. It was kind of loud right there between the other passengers and the P.A., but it was almost like hearing an echo.

“Are you traveling with someone else?”

“No,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” said the sprinter next to me.

“Are you sure?” asked the agent.

“Yes, I’m sure,” answered the sprinter.

“Positive,” I answered. “Why would you think that?”

“There’s just another passenger with the same last name who missed that same connection,” the agent explained.

“Wow,” from the sprinter. “That’s weird.”

That was when things turned surreal. There I was, taking part in what sounded like a three-way conversation that couldn’t have been – I mean, we’re talking to different ticket agents. So I took a closer look at the sprinter, and more importantly, her ticket stub. Bang, there’s she was: my long-lost younger sister. She was the other passenger with the same last name. She even looked about right. The dream sister was much younger than me, about fifteen years my junior, petite, and athletic, just like the sprinter next to me. The nose and hair were a bit off, but it was just too close for words.

“I’m sorry, sir,” came the agent, “but there’s nothing else we can get you tonight.”

That pulled me back to reality. The rest of it was a rather anxious and disappointing negotiation where the best the airline could do for me was a Monday flight, arriving in Austin around 2pm. Sunday was the last day of spring break, and every flight was packed. I asked about stand-by, but after quite a few keystrokes she told me that every route she could find into Austin was not only full but oversold. I asked about getting into Dallas or Houston, figuring I could maybe find something from there, but she didn’t even sound very optimistic about that. Eventually I settled for the Monday morning flight and hung up about the same time as my sister, the sprinter.

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

“No, nothing until Monday. I can’t believe it!”

“My wife’s gonna be pissed.”

“I’ve got to work tomorrow night, and oh, I really can’t be late on Monday.”

“I’m gonna call my wife. Maybe she can find something.”

“Yeah, my dad will think of something.”

So we each hit our cell phones. Julie looked up Greyhound for me. The earliest thing there would leave Chicago at 1am Sunday morning and roll into Austin 6am Monday, twenty-nine hours on the bus. I wanted to get home, but not that badly. I thought about driving it, but it’s about 1200 miles. Even trading off drivers it would be tough since I was already feeling pretty tired. Putting a hotel stopover in there would stretch it out to about the same time as the Greyhound. Resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t be home that night, I let Julie go for a bit to see what my new partner had found.

“Anything?”

“No, my dad even tried to get me up to first class, but there’s nothing. You?

“Nothing by air,” I told her. By this point, we had moved to an empty gate and had collapsed on the empty banks of molded seats. I laid out the options of Greyhound or trying to drive it, but neither sounded much better than just waiting until Monday.

“If we could only get to Dallas tomorrow, we could rent a car and drive it down to Austin – four hours, tops.”

She shook her head. “That’d be great, but I’m not old enough to rent a car.”

It was then that I decided I was going to get her to Austin by Sunday night. I’m no knight in shining armor, and she wasn’t exactly a damsel in distress, but I couldn’t help but remember a trip of my own once. Julie and I were driving back from New Hampshire, and we ran out of cash in Tennessee. Vibrant hadn’t been paying any paychecks for a couple of months, so the checking account was down to $8.65, and the credit cards were already over the limit. All I had was the company American Express and the knowledge that its bill would be overdue in three days. We did make it, but I’ll always remember that terrible feeling of desperation.

“I’m Dan,” I told her, holding out my hand, “and I’m old enough to rent a car.”

She took my hand firmly – strong hands. “I’m Lucy.” (Actually, it wasn’t, but I’m trying to grant the lady a little anonymity in this recounting.)

We exchanged cell numbers to coordinate things and split up. I headed for baggage claim to get my suitcase, and Lucy went to the main ticket counter to get us some hotel vouchers. She finished first and found me trying to explain to the luggage agent that no, I didn’t know where I was staying but that they could just call my cell number when they eventually found my bag. I left it at that and we headed for the hotel shuttles.

“You did get two vouchers, right?”

“What?”

I spelled it out. “Two rooms – you got us two rooms, right?”

“Oh… oh yeah.” She gave me mine.

“Good. For a minute there I thought this was going to turn into a bad movie cliché.”

Outside, it was clear that Chicago was not having the 80-degree days of San Francisco. I was in my just-in-case warm shirt, but Lucy was less prepared. If we’d had to wait long, I was going to offer her my jacket, but we found the Holiday Inn shuttle fairly quickly.

“We’re going to the Holiday Inn,” I said.

“Which one?” the driver asked, but between the wind, the traffic, and his accent, I didn’t hear it.

“Ho-li-day Inn,” I repeated, slowly.

“There’s lots of Holiday Inns, man. Which one?”

Lucy was ahead of me on this and had her voucher out. “Elmhurst?”

He looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “Elmherst… oh no, I don’t go out to Elmhurst.”

“Is there another shuttle that does?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I think I’ve seen one, but I don’t know if that one runs on the weekends.”

We got back on the curb, and I asked her, “These are just vouchers, right? They don’t have reservations there for us or anything?”

“No, just that they’d pay for the room.”

“How many people were getting them?”

“He was just handing them out to anyone who asked.”

“So we could get out there and not even have a room.”

“Right.”

At this moment, we both looked up at the building across the street. Hilton. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “It’ll be more expensive though.”

“At this point, I don’t care,” she replied, a gust of wind making her point.

We wormed our way through the shuttles, taxis and limos to cross the street. We get up to the counter, and I’m trying to do the math. Two rooms at Saturday night rates… maybe $250, $300 total. She got there first and slapped down her credit card. “We need two rooms, please.” Like I said, not a damsel in distress.

I put mine down on the counter next to hers. “Yes, two rooms.”

It worked out to just $119 per room, not bad for an airport hotel in the city. Even my fleabag on 7th street had been $89.

“At least let me buy you dinner,” I offered, and we settled down to a fair but overpriced dinner in the hotel restaurant. I’d reached the point where you just stop looking at the price tag. You just do it. Still, she stuck with a chicken Caesar salad.

We talked for a while. Well, at least she talked. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on anything even approaching a first date, but I did remember one piece of sage advice. Ask her about herself, and let her talk. So I found out a lot about her, and she was quite fascinating. She was twenty, just a year behind my long-lost sister, and a professional ballet dancer. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so bad for not keeping up on the race to H8. She called San Francisco home, but her ballet company was based in Austin. Her Sunday appointment was only an evening meeting at her part-time job, but she really needed to get back for rehearsals on Monday morning.

We talked a lot about music and ballet and her childhood growing into it. She knew this was what she wanted as early as five or six. Even at that tender age, she had sat her mother down for a serious discussion about how she couldn’t be late for practice any more. “Mom, sit down. I cannot be late for ballet. That has to stop.” Six years old. She then got into the prestigious San Francisco school of ballet and trained there through high school. I’d actually heard of it once, and I got the impression that it’s a bit like a musician saying they got into Julliard in New York. But she left SF to get some experience elsewhere and because the professional SF ballet has a very specific body type that she didn’t quite fit. From what I’ve heard, she’s just a bit too muscular for that kind of thing.

Her parents had been very supportive of it, but I never got the impression they’d pushed her into it. It was clear that she’d just known early on what she wanted. It was pretty neat, because I knew I wanted to program for a living as early as twelve, and I rarely run into someone else who had that kind of youthful certainty. But ballet is an athletic life (hence the Caesar salad), and it doesn’t last forever. Like most athletes, their careers wind down in their early thirties.

“What then?” I asked.

“I’ll probably take the time off to go to college.”

“What would you major in?” I was expecting Kinesiology or perhaps music.

“Probably business. I’m good at the mathematics and logical analysis, but I also really like using my people skills.”

I had to admit my surprise. “You don’t find that mix in most people.”

“Well, my folks are in business, the restaurant business actually.”

This perked my interest. One of the joys of going to San Francisco on business is sampling the great food there. You could go to a different spot for three meals a day, and not repeat for years. No kidding – I looked it up. “So which restaurant? I’m always on the lookout for good food.”

“Actually they manage a chain.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, they have a franchise of about thirty-five Carl Jr’s.”

“Really?” I grinned. “I had breakfast at one this morning. Terrible neighborhood though.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Seventh and Market?”

It’s a small, small world.

After dinner, we split up to drop things off at our rooms before calling the airline back. I called Julie again just to touch base. She was a little upset that I wouldn’t be home tonight but glad that I was at least making the attempt at getting home Sunday instead of Monday. She also told me that Sammy had been running a low fever all day.

That did boost my motivation to get home soon, but mostly it made me think about my kids. Someday they’d be grown up like Lucy, out and about living their lives. I hoped I would do as good a job at raising them as Lucy’s parents did. I hoped they wouldn’t get stuck in Chicago. But then again, there are good people out there to help out, just like I was doing, so I hoped that if it ever did happen, someone would be there to help. So if my little Catherine ever got stuck in an airport, I hoped a guy like me was there to give her a lift. Yep, I hoped my daughter would hop in a car with some guy she had just met for a cross country drive.

Oh, my, God! Her dad must be freaking out!

I found Lucy down at the check-in counter, already on the phone with the airline. Mostly she was having a hard time convincing them that yes, we really did want to change from a Monday flight to Austin to a Sunday flight to Dallas.

“Yes, I know the original flight was to Austin…. Yes, I know this flight stops in Dallas…. I know. Yes, I am trying to get to Austin, but you can’t get me there, now can you?” She looked at me in bemused frustration. “I’m on hold again. She thinks she can find something into Austin.”

I perked up at that thought. “Really?”

She just laughed. “No, she just doesn’t understand… yes, you did? When?”

I was on my toes…

“Monday morning? Is it flight 1325? No. No, no, no. That’s the flight we’re already on. We’re tying to get into Austin tomorrow, not Monday.” Again, the look of frustration, less bemused this time. “I know there’s no Austin flight tomorrow. That’s why I’m trying to change to the Dallas flight. We’re going to drive down from there.”

I remembered her dad, probably looking up the number for the Texas State Troopers to get started on a missing person report. I tore off a bit of the inside liner of my ticket envelope. I quickly wrote my name, my home address, my home phone number, and my cell number. I slid it across the counter trying to look as harmless as possible while remembering how Kimm once described me, somewhere between a Norse god and a serial killer.

“I’m on hold again.”

“Give that info to your dad, ok? He’s probably freaking out.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s ok. I would be too if my daughter were getting into a car with a stranger. Tell him to call my wife. My mother-in-law is there, too. They’ll tell him I’m not a madman.” I specifically avoided saying “serial killer”, but then I wasn’t so sure that my wife would classify me as sane.

“At 4:11, through Missouri. Yes, that’s the one I was telling you about before, flight 3933. Yes, then 3462. Yes, I know there’s no flight from Dallas to Austin on Sunday night. We’re going to drive the rest of the way.” She gave me a look so deadly I start thinking maybe Julie had better have Lucy’s home address, just in case. “Yes, both of us. Ok, yes, B-E-L-S-A-A, got it. Here’s Dan.” She handed me the phone. “She’s got your confirmation number.”

I shoved it up in the crook of my neck, trying to hold the tiny cell phone while writing on the back of my ticket envelope. I gave it back, and she finished it up.

“It’s an 8:30 flight out of Chicago,” she told me, “then a four hour layover in Missouri.”

“Four hours?”

“Yeah, that sucks.”

“Hey, it’s better than thirty-five minutes. I don’t want to get stuck in Missouri.”

We parted for the night with the understanding that we’d just meet at the gate. I crossed the street again to look for my luggage, figuring I was in for a long line and a many-boxed form to fill out, but as soon as I got to baggage claim 4, there it was. My bag was parading around the conveyer belt all alone. I grabbed it and rolled on out, grateful that I’d spent the time having a good steak rather than hanging around.

I got back to my room after eleven and faced the problem I’d been dreading since the take-off delay at SFO. I was out of underwear. Now, normally I always pack a spare, not just of underwear, but of everything. Extra socks, extra shirts, spare pants, extra breathe-rite strips, even a backup set of contacts in case the first ones don’t go in. But this time, I miscounted. I had extra of everything else, but not underwear.

So I figured I’d do a little laundry, but with midnight approaching, I wasn’t in the mood to go searching for the hotel laundromat. First I thought I’d use the sink, but then I realized I was going to need to brush my teeth there. No, bad idea, just use the tub. I started filling it with hot water and looking for some soap to use, preferably liquid. No ivory, not even soft-soap. I started flipping through the various bottles on the counter. Neutrogena shampoo? What the hell. I poured it in.

I started stripping down, ready to toss in my current pair. Fortunately caution caught me just in time. If something went wrong with this, I’d be really out. I decided to just lay that pair out and toss in a couple pair from my dirty laundry. Using hand agitation and liberal soak time, I put them through two wash cycles, and a double rinse. The smell reminded me of Julie’s hair. Sorry, dear. I wrung them out as well as I could and hung them on the clothesline in the shower. So, it does have a use beyond secret agents eluding their captors. Cool.

The alarm clock had two alarms, and I set them both. And just to be safe, I put in for a wakeup call as well. There was a form for breakfast room service on the bed, and I figured, why not? Well, I could think of about 25 reasons, all named George, but it was after midnight and the schedule in the morning could get tight. I signed up for a ham and cheese omelet and put it on the outer door handle.

Drifting off to sleep around 1am, the surreality of it sunk in again. What the hell was I doing? For that matter, what the hell was she doing? She barely knows me. Was I going to wake up in the morning to find she’d chickened out? Would I wake up and just find her gone? A figment? Or would I wake up back in my San Francisco hotel, swearing to God, my wife, and my doctor to never eat Chinese after ten again?

The music alarm came first. I was still in the what-city-is-this disorientation when the buzzer alarm kicked in. I was over on the left side of the bed trying to turn them off when the wake-up call came in on the right side. By the time all the electronics had died down, I was awake. 5:32 a.m. Twenty-eight minutes before my omelet was set to arrive. I headed for the shower with purpose.

The underwear was still wet. I couldn’t wring anything out, but they were damp. Not just five-minutes-in-the-dryer damp, but ewwww-something-happened-in-my-shorts damp. I showered anyway wishing I hadn’t tossed out that last sliver of my own soap in San Francisco. Then I was faced with that most personal decision: dirty-in, dirty-out, or commando? I’ll leave at least a little decorum in this tale by not answering that question, but I will say that my choice was guided by the nightmare scenario of a fatal accident along the way. I could picture the trooper talking to Lucy’s father. “Now, the man she was with must have been some kind of sex criminal, because when the emergency crew got his pants off…”

The omelet was great, the OJ pulpy, and the milk warm. Ick! I pulled up to the airline ticket counter at 6:30, only to find at 6:40 that I was in the international line. They then sent me over to the domestic line, which was self-service only. I put in my credit card for ID, punched in 3933 for my flight number and got as far as seat selection before it barfed up, “Unable to complete you transaction. See ticket agent.”

Fortunately, it was fine after all, just that this was an American Eagle flight, which the self-service system couldn’t properly connect with, so the ticket agent took care of me promptly and sent me on my way. Security was quick, and I was on my way to G19. At 6:58, I got there and found that it was 1442 to Honolulu. I double-checked my boarding pass: K19. When I finally got there at 7:22, Lucy was waiting calmly.

“Sorry, I went to wrong gate at first.” Oh yeah, she must be feeling really good about my ability to get from Dallas to Austin.

“No problem. I got stuck for a while at check-in.”

“How come?”

She shook her head. “He was hitting buttons for like twenty minutes before he finally said there were no flights into Austin today.”

We both laughed.

We didn’t really talk all that much. I read another two chapters in the latest Honor Harrington book. Rather, I skimmed a couple of chapters. This was still early enough in the book where you’ll get two lines of dialog and then four pages of inner-thought exposition trying to recap everything that’s happened in the previous ten books. Lucy read a magazine. I think at some level we were both aware that we had a long drive ahead of us at the end of the day and were worried we’d either run out of things to say or just be sick of each other by then.

Then it started snowing.

If it had kept up, I was definitely going to be buying some underwear, but fortunately, we boarded a few minutes after it started. It was just a little 25 passenger commuter jet, but at least it was a jet. At six feet, I was cramped the whole way. Lucy looked much more comfortable. I just slept the whole flight, knowing I’d need to be sharp later on.

Missouri was… well, let’s just say I was expecting St. Louis, Missouri, not Springfield Missouri. I’m not saying that it was an asphalt patch and a wind-sock, but for those of you who remember old Robert Mueller airport, that place was LAX compared to Springfield. We were probably the first passengers in a year to use it as a hub. For a moment, it looked like our stay might be much shorter. We found a flight leaving for DFW at 10:30, just 25 minutes away, but when we asked to be put on stand-by, the ticket agent told us that it was overbooked and that she would be bumping people to the next flight. The board listed that next flight as 12:30, a good two hours earlier than our own.

“Well, if there’s room to put folks onto that 12:30 flight, can we get on it too?” I asked.

“Sorry, but there is no 12:30 flight.”

I glanced over at the board. “But, it says right there.”

“Nope, no 12:30 flight.”

“It doesn’t exist?”

“Oh, it exists, just not on Sundays.” I was suddenly reminded of the old Texas “Blue laws”. But then I got worried.

“Does the 2:30 flight exist?”

“Oh yes.”

“Even on Sundays?”

She gave me that be-nice-to-the-crackpot smile. “Yes, even on Sundays.” I half expected her to comfort me with wind shear.

Four hours in Springfield. I decided to forgo the requisite Homer search and get some more work done. Partly this was because I’d thought of a really cool scene-graph optimization earlier in the week but also because of the same fear of conserving our social interaction budget for the drive. Lucy read her magazine. Again. She must have read that thing three times. We took turns watching each others’ carry-on so that we could go have lunch outside of security without having to do that little dance again. I will say this though, as little as the airport was, it was one of the best layovers I’ve ever had. No time pressure, quiet, plenty of seats, even tables with access to power outlets.

The 2:30 flight came into existence and lifted us away from Springfield. I tried to sleep again, but I was crammed up against a bulkhead with no legroom. I skimmed another two chapters of Honor Harrington and had just reached the start of the real plot when we touched down in Dallas. There was something really uplifting about having made it to Dallas, and we both felt it. From here on out, our fate was in our own hands, no longer captives to the capricious whim of air traffic control or weather. We were going to get home.

We had to wait a bit too long for my luggage, but we were soon on our way to the Hertz station. Lucy offered to pay a share of the car rental, and I have to admit that if she’d been a guy, I would have accepted. Maybe that’s considered sexist today, but I just couldn’t take money from a lady. Plus, it was fairly neat getting to impress her with the Hertz Gold treatment. She was clearly a seasoned traveler, but this must have been her first time for this. We just walked up, found my name on the board, and got into the car parked in slot 312. A quick adjustment of the mirrors, and we were on our way towards IH 35.

The conversation began again in earnest, and I kept up my end this time, figuring I’d bled her dry the night before. There was the ballet again, of course, but there was music (Tori Amos and Philip Glas), photography (Schatz and Greenfield), and movies. Glas had led me to Koyaanisqatsi, among other things. There’d been quite a bit of high art in that discussion. But then…

“Did you see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”

I blinked a few times. We were out in the middle of nowhere, that dead zone between Waxahachie and Hillsboro, and she’s bringing up the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I really should have gotten her info to give to Julie.

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t.” Gulp. “Why?”

“Oh, just wondering what town it was supposed to have been in. Not really my kind of movie, but my friends dragged me to it.”

Deep breath. Long sigh. “Not mine either, but a friend once drove me by a house in Round Rock where they filmed the original one. At least, that’s what he said.”

“Cool.”

“You know, I was going to save this for later, because I didn’t want to freak you out, but you should really be more careful about strangers. I mean, I’m safe and all, but you should be more careful.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I know. Normally I wouldn’t just get in a car with some guy I just met, not without getting all his info and everything. But, you know.”

“Yeah, just be more careful next time, ok?”

“Ok.”

And then we got back to the safe subjects: why she doesn’t refer to herself as a ballerina, how we each came by our shared last name, our common Scottish roots, etc. No, she’s not my long-lost sister, but somewhere, way out there in the family shrubbery, perhaps a distant cousin.

Peppered through it all were the occasional phone calls from friends and family making sure I hadn’t murdered her. The best was from her older brother who was really apologetic for having booked her through Chicago when he’d bought her tickets.

“Dad’s really pissed at you,” she told him. “No, it’s going to be ok. We’re almost to Austin now, but next time I’m doing the direct flight from San Jose and you’re driving me to the airport.”

I’m starting to think that’s pretty good advice for me too.

It was dark by the time we got in, but I managed to drop her off at her part-time job at 8:45pm, just fifteen minutes late for the after-hours staff meeting. She called her parents to let them know she’d made it – I’d insisted on that. She thanked me, and we said goodbye. She went through the doors and was gone. I caught just a whiff of the surreal again. My long-lost sister? No, not really, just one of those transitory relationships that springs into your life and then leaves just as quickly, like a stranger sprinting past you in an airport. All that remained was a name and a cell number scrawled on the back of a ticket envelope. Or maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll go to the ballet sometime.

But I also had permanent relationships to attend to. As much as I’d done it to get Lucy home, I did it to get home to my own family. I called Julie to let her know I was on my own again and to see if she would get me at the airport or if I should get a cab home. From the sound of her voice, I knew it was going to be a cab before she told me.

“But can you pick up some McDonald’s as well?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, something burger-ish, with either no pickles or no onions. I don’t want either, but just in case you can only remember one, you know. I just don’t want to get both.”

I had been having a bit of an adventure, but it was clear she’d been through the wringer with the kids. “Sure thing.”

I whipped on down to the airport rental return and walked to the cab line. I always try to get Yellow Checker after one horrific night with a drunk driver in an Austin Cab, but the drivers get really annoyed if you don’t take the first cab in the line. That night it was Roy’s Taxi, Austin Cab, and then Yellow Checker. I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation, so I settled for the Roy’s Taxi in front. She looked ok. Well actually, she looked like she’d seen a lot of years and a lot of sun, but she looked alert and sober. That was good enough.

The cab reeked of cigarette smoke. Strike one.

“Do you smoke?” she asked.

“No,” I replied, trying to decide if it was better to use my nose as an air filter for my lungs or to take it in direct just to avoid smelling it.

“No problem. I won’t smoke then. Never do with a non-smoker, so don’t you worry. I go through two packs a day in here and you wouldn’t know it.”

Admittedly, the cab it spotless, so I hold back my commentary on the environmental disaster seeping out of the upholstery.

We drove up 183, making very good time. Too good. Every now and then she would slow down saying, “The cops like to hang out there.” Strike Two.

We stopped off at the McDonald’s drive through, and I had to switch sides in the back seat to manage the transaction. I remembered about both the pickles and the onions, and I tossed in some fries for good measure. Getting back into my right-hand seat, I buckled up again. “Oh, that’s something I’d never do,” she said.

“Eh?”

“Seatbelts,” she replied, pulling back out onto the road. “Friend of mine got burned up in his seatbelt. Not gonna happen to me.”

Strike three, but we were already moving. I tightened my own belt and looked for her license card. Dora.

“I’m very religious,” she went on, “and when it’s my time, it’s my time. No seat belt is going make a difference.”

I kept quiet. I’d been through too much in the last thirty-six hours for Dora to call my number.

It’s a long ride out to my place, but we made it.

I came through the door with McDonald’s in hand. Julie was there in the entry way. It was the best hug I’d had in a long time, eventually broken by Sam’s voice in the kitchen.

So there I sat in the breakfast nook, with Sammy in my lap resting his head against my chest and Julie across from me munching on fries, and I totaled it up.

Dinner with a ballet dancer: $42

Hotel with room service: $144+tax

Rental car: $72

Taxi ride with Deathwish Dora: $66

Being home with my family: priceless.

MasterCard would have been proud.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 02, 2004

Unsurprising Meme... social status

Tanya alerted me to this meme, with (for us at least) unsurprising results:

You scored as alternative. You're partially respected for being an individual in a conformist world yet others take you as a radical. You have no place in society because you choose not to belong there - you're the luckiest of them all, even if your parents are completely ashamed of you. Just don't take drugs ok? alternative 79% Middle Class 54% Upper middle Class 50% Luxurious Upper Class 46% Lower Class 8% What Social Status are you? created with QuizFarm.com

And what's wrong with taking drugs??

I don't put a lot of faith in these quizzes, but I do find it surprising that I rated so low on the lower class bar. Many of the questions dealt with money, and while I am not now poor, my fundamental perceptions of money came from when I was barely getting by. I learned that money did not provide happiness. All it did was reduce worry. Of course, it's great for that, so I'm not knocking it at all. On the other hand, maybe it's that attitude about money that got me out of the hole.

Over dinner, MAW and I were reminiscing over a Christmas eleven years ago. At the time, I owned 23% of a company that could barely pay me what folks often call "a living wage", and as Christmas approached, the company had hit a rough patch. As we had done before (and would do again), the principal owners gave up their paychecks for a while. A big December order came through, and I managed to extract one paycheck because I absolutely had to have it to pay bills and buy food. When that was done, we had a Christmas budget of $100 to share between the two of us. I know that's not eating dogfood or anything, but it was pretty tight.

Even then it wasn't the tightest things had ever been. That had come over a year earlier when we had $8 in the bank and no idea of when the next paycheck was coming. It had gotten to the point where we were looking around the kitchen to see how long the food was going to last us. I don't know how many of you have been in that place. I would hope very few of you, but at the same time, I feel lucky I passed through that place because of what it taught me. Fortunately, a donor who shall remain nameless heard of our plight and gave us enough to carry us through a few months.

Looking back, I realize that I was making less than minimum wage through much of it, building sweat equity for myself while paying employees more in real dollars. Though it never occured to me at the time, I probably would have qualified for government assistance. Certainly it would have been problematic answering questions about why my job paid so little, but mostly I think it felt like defeat to me. Me against the universe, and I wasn't going to ask for help.

But I've never forgotten the nameless donor, and it forever shaped my perceptions of the right way to do charity. It's not government helping people or even the church helping people. It's people helping people. This is not about efficiency or accountability. It's the personal touch that came with it. The donor was making the ultimate pay-it-forward gesture: "I think you're worth the risk." It was charity for the soul.

Meme /Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 16, 2004

I am a Lucas-holic

(with apologies and sympathy to real AA members)

Hello, my name is Dan, and I am a Lucas-holic.

I’ve been Lucas-free for fifty-one days. I’ve been in the program for almost sixteen years now, and while this last lapse was a pretty small one, it was still a pretty scary one. I told myself I was just going to watch the light-saber duel at the end of Phantom Menace, but before I knew it, I was watching the whole thing from Coruscant to the end, including all the Jar-Jar scenes. Fortunately, I was able to walk it off before my wife and family came home. But for you to truly understand my battle with this addiction, I need to take you back to the beginning.

Like most Lucas-holics of my generation, I got hooked on the big one, Star Wars, long before it was even called “A New Hope”. I didn’t know anything about it, but all my friends were seeing it, so I gave into peer pressure and went to it. I blame my parents too, I suppose, since they acted as the enablers for my addiction, even taking me to see it that first time. I remember the drive home, jumping between excited and quiet, riding that cheap emotional thrill that we all know so well.

At the tender age of nine, I was hooked. It’s a familiar story. The first one is free, but then you’re back for more, blowing all your allowance, selling your treasured G.I. Joe’s to get the money together, even trying to borrow against future chores. In that first year, I saw it eleven times, but not satisfied with that, I had to bring others into it as well. I’m not sure what’s happened to all of them, but every day I curse myself for what I did to their lives.

I was a full-on Lucas-holic, and I was too young to even understand what was happening to me. I collected the pictures, the notebooks, the trading cards. My prize pieces were a card and a notebook bearing an image that didn’t even occur in the film: Luke’s X-Wing firing on Vader’s TIE fighter. Fortunately for me, I never made the jump to the heavier drugs of the action figures and the models. My older brother and his friends spent hours assembling an eight-inch replica of Vader’s TIE fighter. I wanted to join in too, but they told me I was too young for such heavy stuff. What a lucky disappointment.

I rode this out for another year and a half, and I was just getting sober, so to speak, when Lucas struck back with Empire. You know, I probably could have just walked away from Lucas, content that my obsession had just been a phase, but Empire left me with no choice. It was the purest opiate, the fiercest crack, the most euphoric of ecstasies. It was perhaps the most bitter irony that Lucas’ one moment of genius would damn us all to suffer through his years of drivel. A single bite of the forbidden fruit, and we were damned to forever walk the wilderness.

I fell in with a pretty bad crowd after that, hardcore action figure collectors, model collectors, script memorizers, and so forth. I look back on those days with conflicting emotions. It was a time of great joy as we reveled in our addiction to Lucas. He was our god, and he could do know wrong. As a sign of our delusion, we saw his Indiana Jones collaboration as lifting Spielburg to his level. So, in a sense, I look back on that time fondly, with nostalgia for our innocence, but I also look back and hate it. That was the time that cast the painful core of my addiction, that belief that Lucas would always deliver, that he was the god of cinema. No matter how often he disappoints me, no matter how cheesy the storyline, even despite the taste of bile in my mouth, that emotional core is still there whispering, “Don’t worry about this – the good part is coming up next.”

I rode that addiction right through the two-hour line for Jedi, through the cheesy Luke-Jabba confrontation, past the contrived death of Yoda, the inflationary promotion of everyone to general, and yes, even through the Ewoks. Still, I did leave the theater feeling somewhat off. I couldn’t quite identify it at the time, but even then, I knew that my Lucas high wasn’t what I’d been expecting. The answer, clearly, was more Lucas. But Jedi only lasted for so long, and then Star Wars was gone.

I rode through the withdrawal for a while, just subsisting on reciting the movies with friends, and eventually, alone. Don’t look at me that way. You’ve all been there. It’s Saturday night. The only thing on is a Love Boat rerun. Someone makes a comment about the size of a girl’s... well, I can see you’re already ahead of me. “Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?” From there, it’s a short trip to “We’ll meet you at the rendezvous point on Tatooine.”

Eventually, the memories alone weren’t enough, so I started hitting the other Lucas offerings, putting up with anything in search of that high. THX-1138, Willow, those were at least respectable. I could talk to my friends about those, but before long, I was strung out on things like The Ewok Adventure or Droids. Finally, I bottomed out. I was staying up late on a school night to see Howard The Duck on Showtime. A few of you are nodding your heads, but it’s worse. At the same time, just one channel up, Cinemax was showing The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. They say Lucas-holism is purely a mental addiction, but if that’s not proof of hormonal damage, I don’t know what is.

Shortly afterwards, thanks to Lucas-holics Anonymous, I began my long road towards recovery. But as we all know, it’s a day by day affair. I don’t think I could have done it without the strength of my wife, who I should say has been Lucas-free for over five years. That’s right, five years, so we should know that there is hope. It is possible.

I do want to share one last story with you tonight, my most painful fall off the wagon since the Duck. It was 1999. Yes, you all know what that means. I thought I was past the addiction. I’d seen the special editions in the theaters and been able to see that Lucas was a fool, a cheap trickster at best. Even Empire had left me a little flat. I thought perhaps I’d finally reached the point where I could have some Lucas socially, you know, with friends, without diving into a weekend of Lucas bingeing.

But in the spring of 1999, I’d starting hoping again. I began to entertain the fantasy that Jedi had been a fluke, an aberration in the genius that was Lucas. Here was his chance to redeem himself to us, to show us the fateful tale of the fall of the Republic and of Annakin’s painful journey to the dark side. Surely, this was a tale as heart-rending and tragic as Hamlet or Oedipus Rex. What we had seen before was just the coda of that tale. Here we would see the real story.

And so I took my place in line to buy tickets. Now, I was at least sane enough not to camp out for days. I was satisfied to merely purchase tickets for the first morning showing, not the 12:01am showings. But I did stand there for three hours with my fellow addicts, taking turns at an overfull port-a-potty, and sharing drinks and snacks. It was 1980 all over again, hanging out with my hardcore Star Wars friends, reveling over the majesty of Lucas’ storytelling abilities.

The lowest point was when they actually starting selling the tickets. They had been counting down the ticket-sale time for the previous hour, and the line was slowly compressing forward as the zero-hour approached. And then it happened. The word came rippling down the line that the booth was open, and one solitary figure came running back down the length of the line, his bounty held high – a strip of twelve tickets flapping in the air. We were in the ice station of Hoth, and central control had just made the announcement: “The first transport is away! The first transport is away!” That emotional core was still there, burning hot, and for that moment, I believed, I really believed that Lucas had done it, that it was going to be a beautiful experience.

Fortunately, I have the support of family and friends, and they organized an intervention before I was able to get back to see Phantom Menace for the fourth time. They got me back into the program, and I’ve been doing pretty well since. My sponsor did let me go see Attack of the Clones, but I had a chaperone both for buying the ticket and for the showing itself. (Two different chaperones, of course, lest we both fall off the wagon.) I got through that pretty well. I’ve had twins since then, a boy and a girl, and I succeeded in not naming them Luke and Leia.

Of course, we all know that some rough times are ahead. The special edition is out on DVD now, so Christmas is going to be especially hard this year, and I don’t need to remind you what’s coming next spring. Just remember, if we’re strong for each other, we can make it through this next year Lucas-free.

May the Force be

Sorry. Good luck, and may Peter Jackson protect you.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (5)

October 10, 2004

Personal reflections on Stand By Me

I tried to go see Stand By Me tonight down at the Alamo Drafthouse, but they had sold out before I got there. I had intended to buy tickets in advance, but it just didn’t happen. I had to work Friday night and Saturday morning, and then Saturday afternoon I was watching Sam and Catherine while MAW went to Linucon with Tommy. I had more childcare duties this morning and spent some of the rest of the day dealing with a fire at work. I suspect that by noon today it was already too late. When I asked at the ticket booth, the guy glanced up from his book and gave me that you-must-be-kidding look, but he was nice enough to merely say, “Sorry, it’s sold out.”

I looked around to see if Andrew (or any other familiar faces) had arrived yet, but I didn’t see anyone — it was still an hour before show time. So, I tucked my copy of Just A Geek under my arm and called MAW to tell her. She gave me an order for McDonalds to pick up on the way home, and then I was pulling back out onto Anderson. On the way home, I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Stand By Me, but I couldn’t. For that matter, I couldn’t remember the first time I’d seen it either. In fact, I could only remember one time, though I know I’ve seen it much more. Long before I got to McDonald’s I realized why that was.

It was a Saturday night in November, 1987, a week or two before Thanksgiving. In the dorm, we’d started a mini-tradition of dragging a TV and VCR to the big study lounge on our floor and watching one or two movies. I was playing a fairly big role in this because I had some of the hardware and a large collection of movies taped from cable at home in the summers. (I was still young enough to program a VCR in those days.) I don’t remember now what movies I’d been considering that night, but I do recall that the other films we watched in that study lounge ran the gamut from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando to Gilliam’s Brazil. (Someone may be about to correct me that we watched Brazil in my room, but that’s just because D&D was running late that day.) Still, you get the idea — this was not chick-flick central. But that night I chose Stand By Me.

Why? Well, there was this girl I’d been hanging around with for the last two or three weeks. She was cute, and while I had been chasing other skirts all semester, I was starting to think of her in that way. I didn’t realize how much, just that she was attractive, and I’d been having a lot of fun hanging out and talking with her. Two things were putting on the brakes though. First, she already had a boyfriend. Her high school sweetheart was at another university a couple of hours away. Actually, it was only an hour away the way he drove, but you get the picture. Second, her father had just died suddenly a few weeks before, and she was taking it pretty hard. She’d gone home for the whole hospital drama and the funeral, and to his credit, her boyfriend had gone as well, just missing her flight by a few minutes. Anyway, I figured she could use a softer film instead of one filled with explosions, and Stand By Me had enough guy stuff to satisfy the rest of the audience.

Her boyfriend was in town for the weekend, so I hadn’t seen much of her that day, but she did show up after dinner for movie night. I’d staked out the good sofa spot for us — yes, including her boyfriend — and we got underway with about twenty of us packed in there. I’d already seen the movie before, so I knew what to expect, but as things moved on, I began to wonder if this had been such a good idea. Here was young Gordie Lachance coming to grips with the recent death of his older brother, and sitting next to me was this girl just coming to grips with the death of her father. Ok, rack one up in the stupidity column for Dan, but it was still a great film. By the end of it, she was in tears, sobbing into her boyfriend’s shoulder. Yep, I sure made his weekend.

There was little I could do but help empty the room and keep the two of them stocked with Kleenex. Eventually, she fell asleep on that sofa, and I brought her a pillow and blanket while her boyfriend maintained a vigil. I didn’t sleep much that night, mostly walking the halls between bouts of staring at the dark ceiling. It was then that I realized how hard I’d fallen for her, but I couldn’t do anything for her. More likely I could only make things worse. She was in a new city, trying to make a long-distance relationship work, and she’d just lost her father. The last thing she needed was some new guy trying to find the angle to take over for that distant boyfriend. (She’d already attracted a few of those.)

About the only thing I could do was be a friend, just a friend, so I resolved to do just that. I might have entertained a notion that I was being pure or noble, but mostly I figured I was being less stupid than I’d been before. These are things you’re just supposed to do — a down payment on karma, if nothing else. It was one of the longest nights of my life, but I grew up a lot. Now, this all has very little to do with Stand By Me, but I doubt any of it would have happened if I’d chosen Commando instead. So I became her friend. We ate dinner together, walked to classes, even watched some more movies. It turns out, she liked explosions. It was a time of fun and simple pleasures.

But you know, karma is a funny thing. Eventually, the boyfriend showed up less and less, and she sent signals that she was open to more than friendship. The content of those signals is another story, one which will require alcohol to extract from me, but it was hard to mistake them. I mostly let her set the pace, and she did break up with her boyfriend. Pity, though, because he really was a good guy. Ultimately, we did date, but by then I’d already learned a valuable lesson. When things aren’t working out for you, help someone else first.

I didn’t get to see Stand By Me tonight, so I picked up dinner for MAW and spent the evening with her and the kids. Tommy has a stomach bug, but Sammy, Catherine and I played a lot before bed. By the end, I was feeling pretty good, not even disappointed. After all, this is the good stuff.

I suppose I still remember that night so clearly because after almost seventeen years, that girl is still my friend. In fact, she is My Amazing Wife. I think the next time I watch Stand By Me, it will be with her.

Narrative by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

Town Hall Geek Debate

I didn’t get to see this most recent presidential debate, but I read an interesting article about it beforehand. Apparently, the only qualification for these “undecided voters” was to have told Gallup that yes, they might still vote for the other guy. That seems like a pretty flimsy qualification. After all, even I might still vote for the other guy. I might have a seizure in the voting booth and fill in the wrong circle. So, it would have been quite possible to pack the debate with extremely biased questions, one way or the other. But then I thought, why go to all that trouble of infiltrating a debate and waste it on a partisan exercise, especially when you could use it to ask some questions that really matter?

So I present, the Town Hall Geek Debate.

Question: Senator Kerry, in Star Trek (original series) episode 39, Kirk and Uhura take the turbolift to Sickbay, and it’s clear from the light panel that they have gone to deck 12, but it has been well established that Sickbay was on deck 7. How do you explain this discrepancy?

Kerry: Well, that can easily be explained by the fact that this was the alternate-reality version of the Enterprise, the I.S.S. Enterprise, and it’s clearly a sign of such imperialism to push the priority of health care to the lower decks.

Bush: While the Senator believes he can massage this away with political rhetoric, he has overlooked the point that the ships were supposed to be virtually identical. How else could Scotty have redirected the transporter power so easily on a ship with such radical redesigns? Clearly, he doesn’t have his facts straight.

Kerry: Well, if he wants to get radical, the truth to it is that there was actually a scene using one of the inter-deck ladders that got cut because it showed a little too much of Uhura’s leg, thus explaining the deck discrepancy. So soon after television’s first interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura, NBC couldn’t afford to show a black woman in such a sexual way – all because of the close-mindedness of some folks down where the President hails from.

Bush: I’d point out that your own running mate comes from the South as well, Senator, but that’s beside the point. Your memory is faulty. That kiss was in episode 67, a full year after the airing of “Mirror, Mirror”. Who’s living in an alternate reality now, Senator?

Question: Mr. President, what is the last digit of pi? And don’t wait for the answer in the earpiece!

Bush: Seven.

Kerry: That’s the wrong digit, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Bush: I stand by my answer. You have to have conviction in these matters.

Kerry: I just don’t think it’s fair that 90% of the work in this world is being done by only two digits, 1 and 0. When I’m president, I’ll convince some of those other digits to chip in their fair share too, maybe even getting some of those Roman numerals to carry the burden.

Question: Mr. President, Vorlon or Shadow?

Bush: Voluron, most definitely. As one of the older, more advanced nations, it’s our responsibility to take a proactive role in helping others nations evolute.

Kerry: It’s not as simple as a choice between the Vorlons and the Shadows. It’s far more nuanced, but I do have a plan for guiding us through these challenges.

Bush: You’re waffling again. Two years ago it was Voluron, and then you voted for the Shadows, and then you were all pro-Voluron again in the primaries. Then, for purely political reasons, you’re back with the Shadows again. Make up your mind, Senator. The American people have a right to know.

Kerry: I have not flip-flopped on this issue. I have staked out my position here very carefully over the months. I have not been wandering over the galactic map as you suggest. I have always been here.

Question: Senator Kerry, you have criticized this administration for spending so much research money on an orbital defense against the Goa’uld. Do you not perceive them to be a threat?

Kerry: The greatest threat today is naquadah proliferation. That’s right naquadah proliferation. As much as we may fear the Goa’uld or the Replicators, the truth is that over 95% of all gate traffic goes unscreened. All it takes is one backpack naq-bomb, and it’s goodbye Cheyenne.

Bush: That’s why we have to go after both the terrorists and the system lords that sponsor them. Terrorists don’t have the resources to refine naquadah on their own, so we have to clamp down on those who could.

Kerry: Then does that apply to our so-called allies, the Tok’Ra? They’re little more than a terrorist network themselves, but your administration has elevated them to the status of a key ally, even while they shield numerous Goa’uld symbiotes from our intelligence organizations.

Bush: You cannot tar an entire culture because of the acts of a few. It’s radical Goa’uldism that is our enemy, not the broader Goa’uld people. To say otherwise is to suggest that Goa’uld are incapable of peaceful democracies.

Question: Mr. President, under your administration, computer generated characters continue to struggle in the workplace. Do you plan to do anything about CGIC rights?

Bush: First of all, I dispute your assertion. CGI characters are up 57% since 2000, even appearing in Acadamy award films. Second, I’ve made a commitment in my cabinet to support CGI characters and other minorities. I already have three animatronics and a muppet in very top positions within my administration.

Kerry: While I applaud your support of these individuals, a token muppet doesn’t make up for four years of stagnation on CGI rights. Even these Uncle Yoda’s of yours are critical of your policies in this area.

Bush: This is clearly an important issue, but progress will only come with time and education. We’ve been trying to address this, but I should point out that my Jar-Jar Binks Facial Training bill was killed in the Senate by your own party’s filibuster. You claim you want to help, but you really just want to keep this as an election issue.

Kerry: That bill was nothing more than a wink and smile to help a few CGI’s that don’t really need it. Until a CGI can sue for discrimination, they will continue to be passed over in favor of the likes of Reagan and his cronies.

Question: Senator Kerry, you have stated that our military is currently stretched to its limits. If the Trade Federation intensifies its hostility, would you support the drafting of a clone army?

Kerry: Yes, I would. When the rich have to send their clones off to die on Geonosia or Naboo, they’ll think differently about supporting such follies.

Bush: I am opposed to both the draft and the clone army. We have the best army in the galaxy, equipped with the best equipment and droids that credits can buy. Besides, I think it’s in the Bible somewhere. “And thou shalt not use a zygotic process in defense of thy lands.”

Kerry: You’re clearly just supporting your friends in the battle-droid industrial complex.

Bush: And you’re violating child labor laws with your growth accelerators.

Any other questions you’d like to see answered?

Narrative /Politics by Dan | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 11, 2004

Psychic Lady vs. My Butt

Recently, I was stuck in a waiting room with a psychic demonstrating her talent. After considering her performance with a critical eye, I can only conclude that my butt has more psychic powers than she does.

She wasn’t actually in the same room as me. In truth, she was on the television as I waited in Wal-Mart’s service bay for my car to get an oil change. It was a talk show, perhaps “The View” as I recall, and they did two segments interviewing this psychic and allowing her to demonstrate her powers. I’ll have to grant her this: she gave a good spiel and her showmanship was first-rate, but her performance itself was low-grade chicanery at best.

I’ve included several segments below that I transcribed thirty minutes later when I arrived home. Her basic deal was that she was trying to pass on psychic messages from someone in the subject’s life, so a good deal of each interaction was spent on identifying just who the message was from. She would identify the gender she was seeking and then try to spell/guess the name with just a little prompting from the subject. The subject was not choosing the name, but just responding if the name matched someone in their life. She started with the male host of the show, with a message from a woman in his life. My real-time criticism is interspersed through the transcript.

Psychic: I’m thinking the name begins with an M or an A.
Male Host: There’s an M.

Say, I have some women in my life with names like that…

P: Is it an M-A?
MH: Yes.

Yeah, me too.

P: M-A-R? I’m thinking of a Mary or a Margaret?
MH: Yes, a Mary.

Wow, I actually had both!

P: Is this family?
MH: Yes.

Yeah, my mother-in-law.

P: Your mother… or a sister?
MH: My grandmother.
P: I knew there was something motherly there.

But… but… you were wrong. You guessed mother or sister. Why is your subject giving you credit for this one?

After delivering the message, she moved on to the female host. This time, the message was from a man in her life.

P: I’m thinking of a J or an M.
Female Host: It’s a J.

Oooo, I had both again. She’s really on my wavelength.

P: I’m thinking a J-O… a John or a Joseph?
FH: Joseph.

John for me. Also several instances of James.

P: Is this family?
FH: Yes.
P: Your father, an uncle?
FH: My brother.

Huh? She got it wrong again – aren’t we going to call her on this?

P: Is he considering a move or some kind of life change?
FH: Yes, he’s thinking about moving.

Whoa… a move or a life change? In today’s chaotic world, we spend upwards of 80% of our time considering a move or a life change. Maybe it’s a new job, a new romance, a child, or just a nicer house now that mortgage rates are hovering at 30-year lows!!

P: Is he moving close or far?
FH: He doesn’t know. He’s still deciding where he’s going to move.
P: Is he living here now?
FH: No, he’s living far away, but we grew up here.

Come on, hurry up and get to the psychic powers. This is just interviewing.

P: Hmmm, I don’t think he’s going to here to Washington. I think he’s too worried about the terrorist attacks. Of course, everything is going to be OK, just that he’s not going to move here.
FH: Wow, that’s amazing.

Yes, truly amazing, and totally untestable in the setting of the show. Coincidence?

P: Now I’m picking up some good news for you, a new opportunity.
FH: Yes?
P: You’re working on a new show, trying out for something?

Yeah, like who isn’t? Unless you’re Oprah, Regis, or maybe Dr. Phil, these morning talk shows are the pit of the entertainment world. You’re just treading water, tying to keep your name out there while waiting for that big break that gets you all the way up to the B-list.

FH: Yes, I am looking at another project.
P: It’s very promising, and it’s going to turn out very well.

Again, completely untestable in the setting. At least use your vaunted powers to tell us about the project. It’s not like you’re under NDA!

After the commercial break, she moved on to the audience members, just to prove that it wasn’t all staged. For the first audience member, she was looking for a man in her life.

P: I’m thinking of a J or T.
Audience 1: It’s a J.
P: Is it a John or a Joseph?

Wait a minute… John or Joseph again? Is this just a really psychoactive day for all the Johns and Josephs in the spirit world, or could it be, just perhaps, that John and Joe and their variations are some of the most common male names in the country?!!

A1: It’s a John.
P: Is this family?
A1: Yes.
P: Your father or brother?
A1: My grandfather.

Man, she’s not doing too well on family members here. Am I the only one seeing this?

P: Is he dead now?
A1: Yes.

Well, I’d grant her a bit of good logic here. The woman in the audience looked to be in her thirties or later, so it would be a good bet that her grandfather would be dead. Except that she didn’t say he was dead. She just asked if he was dead.

P: What was it he smoked… cigars?

Ah, another good bet. After all, going back two generations from someone in their thirties puts much of the grandfather’s adult life from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. Add to the fact that he’s dead, and I’d put money on it. Turns out though, it almost gets her trouble.

A1: No, he didn’t smoke.

Ouch. Backpedal, try to recover.

P: Nothing at all?
A1: Well, he did smoke cigarettes a long time ago.

Whew! Now quick, deliver the message and move on.

P: Ok, well, he’s trying to tell you that when it’s your time to cross over to the other side, when you see him, don’t run from him.
A1: Oh, I’d never do that.

Well, maybe it was her other grandfather John.

The next subject was another woman, and we were looking for a woman in her life.

P: I’m thinking of an A or a K.
Audience 2: No, I can’t think of anyone.

Oops, we’re in trouble now, though this seems unlikely for letters like A and K. I mean, it’s not like we’re fishing for Q’s and Z’s.

P: You need to be open about who this could be. Anyone in your life.

Come on, work with me. You’re making me look bad.

A2: Well, there’s my friend Kathy.
P: Ok then…

Nice save!

She finished off with another woman, and this time it’s a man in her life.

P: I’m thinking of an A or a G.
Audience 3: I’