Installment # 51

We received 30 days leave per year, which was quite a lot, I found out, compared to corporate America.  I was able to visit several places in Europe, travelling usually with one other guy and sometimes a small posse.  We visited Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam a few times, and several beautiful places along the Rheine River in Germany.  In Barcelona we had one big room with 4 or 5 beds for a bunch of us.  We always woke up with hangovers but one morning that sticks out was when we awoke to find one of the guys with cuts, scrapes and bruises, sound asleep wearing what could best be described as “shredded underwear.”  When we finally got the story out of him, he remembered riding one of the motorized scooters that we had rented.  It was dark; he was driving as fast as the thing would go between two sets of light rail tracks.  People seemed to be waving to him from the sidewalk, so he was waving back, grinning and laughing.  

At the end of the block the tracks crossed each other and there was a hole a few feet across and a foot or two deep that the people were evidently trying to warn him about.  He just thought they were being friendly and never saw it coming.  He said that the scooter landed on top of him with the motor still running and one of the handles in his groin. The bike kept going around in circles over him, twisting and grinding up his underwear in the process.  He wasn’t sure what happened after that.  I remember that we took it back to the rental place, expecting a very costly situation, but in French Francs in those days, the damages did not come to very many U.S. dollars.

The electric razor incident I mentioned earlier reminds me of the first time I used an electric hedge trimmer, which I borrowed from a neighbor (Why would I have one of those?)  I did have my own extension cord.  When the trimmer suddenly stopped working, I tried a few things to see what was wrong, including making sure that the extension cord was plugged in to both the outlet and the trimmer cord.  I finally returned it to the owner, telling him that for some reason it had stopped working.  He took one look and pointed out that I had cut the trimmer cord.  Awkward!  I don’t recall ever reimbursing him for ruining his electric trimmer.

That was the same neighbor who showed me how a microwave oven worked.  I was flabbergasted that it could heat up the food without harming the container, and in many cases not even make the container more than a little warm.  He said that you had to experiment with things to find out how many minutes or seconds you should set it for, and that there were some materials, like aluminum and tin foil that you should never use in the microwave unit, or you might actually blow it up and destroy it; maybe start a fire.  I figured microwave ovens in the home would never catch on.  Too dangerous; too difficult; we already had stoves, ovens, toasters; what did we need this for?  And the first ones were huge, taking up too much precious counter space.

That reminds me of the time I was trying to fix or replace the screen door on the first house we owned.  I asked my neighbor if he had any little screws I could use, and he asked, “Metal screws?”  I said, “I don’t know; whatever they make screws out of.”  He of course meant screws that you would screw into wood versus screws that you would screw into metal or aluminum (like a screen door).  I can still see his facial expression of disbelief, amusement and the struggle not to laugh in my face.

I remember buying my first ladder: The aluminum ones cost several times more that the wooden ones.  I couldn’t imagine what idiot would pay so much for an aluminum one when a wooden one cost so much less and did the same thing.  Guess what – aluminum ones last indefinitely and are a lot lighter and easier to carry and maneuver in awkward places.  I twisted my ankle on a wooden ladder a few weeks before my first marathon (1982), because a wooden step loosened and turned on me as I placed my full weight on it.  That would not have happened with an aluminum ladder.  Also, despite how strong you might be, do you want your wife or child trying to handle a wooden ladder?

I remember, before I was married, buying a comb.  I saw that the hair brushes were a lot more expensive than the combs, and I asked the clerk, “Why would anyone pay that much for a brush, when a ten-cent comb does essentially the same thing?”  This was before the days of long hair on men; and women were a complete mystery, so I never thought of their needs.  The clerk did not know what to say without calling me an idiot.

I learned to avoid going to the hardware store without an exact replica of what I wanted, either the old one I was trying to replace or a picture of it, or a complete written description.  Otherwise, the guy behind the counter would invariably have a question that I did not have the answer to.  Is it top mounting or side mounting?  Inside diameter or outside diameter? Male or female adaptor?  What is the thread count? In planning my time for any simple project I learned to expect to make at least two trips to the hardware store to get one thing.

I have ruined so many things at Michelle’s house over the years that my son-in-law, Kevin, has said he may require a security deposit whenever I visit.  In September 2012 he delegated to Ryan and me the task of assembling two outdoor heater towers – the kind where the tower is made of glass and you can watch the flames shooting up inside the tower.  It is quite spectacular to watch, though I don’t find they give off much heat.  Well, Ryan and I opened the boxes and saw an incredible array of parts and instructions.  We agreed that this was way too confusing, and the risks were too great.  We would be working with breakable glass and flammable gas.  Evidently, when Kevin returned and found nothing done, I explained that Ryan and I had decided we would rather have him think that we were lazy, instead of stupid, so we just left the project alone. I had forgotten about that, but Kevin reminded me a few months later during our December visit.  He had been chuckling about that for months.

During a winter visit, I gathered up kindling to start a fire and spotted several pieces of wood on a table by the back door that looked ideal.  It was a long walk in the snow to the wood supply, so I figured someone left them by the door for convenience in building a fire.  A few days later, Kevin asked about those “slats.”  Turns out they were for the hot tub cabana, and not easy to replace.  Oops!  One night I was the last one out of the hot tub and volunteered to put the cover back in place (in the dark; no flashlight).  I felt some resistance but just pulled a little harder.  Turns out there is a safety mechanism that needs to be released before you lower the cover down over the hot tub.  Who knew? Totally bent it, rendering the hot tub inoperable until after the holidays.  During earlier visits I misjudged an object (that shouldn’t have been in the driveway) and scraped the paint off the passenger side of one of their trucks; and I pulled too far forward with an SUV, bursting a bag of something, spilling its contents into the flower garden.  The contents turned out to be a fairly expensive chemical used in the winter time for melting the ice near the walkways…burnt the hell out of the plants and wasted the product.  But what was it doing there in summertime, anyway?

In helping with the 2013 flood we were digging out and uncovering a variety of strange-looking objects - full of mud - that I couldn’t possibly identify.  I was to pile “throw-aways” in one area and “keepers” in another area where they would be power washed and reclaimed.  I referred to them as Kevin’s “tools and toys” because it is never clear to me which of his farm and household activities is really work versus fun.  I don’t know whether he is using something as a tool or as a toy.  Anyway, it was really laughable how unable I was to determine the keepers versus the throw-aways.  I tended to err on the side of “throw-away,” and Kevin would look at me like I was crazy and retrieve things for power washing and saving.  I couldn’t tell what the heck they were, but they looked like mud ball junk to me.

I remember our first telephone message recorder.  I was so intimidated about creating a greeting!  I would write it out, practice, ask Sandy how it sounded, break into a sweat while making the recording, listen and try again.  It helped when I heard my neighbor’s greeting.  His was so bad I knew what to avoid.  He gave complete, detailed instructions in a slow monotone on how to leave a message, repeated the instructions, in case you had never done this before, and ended with AND REMEMBER (pause for affect): WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR THE BEEP BEFORE SPEAKING!  That helped me realize that people weren’t morons and just needed to know that you were not picking up, and could leave a message if they wanted.

Kids adapt to technology so easily!  One time during the period when I was still struggling with recording a greeting, Amy and her friend decided to have fun and replace my greeting with one of their own.  It came to my attention after a business associate commented on what he had heard when he dialed my number.  It was a rhyming jingle in young girls voices, something like, “The Zades’ are not home; to answer the phone; so you know what to do …” (I don’t remember what rhymed with ‘do’).  The words ‘home’ and ‘phone’ were stretched out to two syllables each; so was the word ‘do’.  They thought I was going to be so mad, because it was a business associate that heard it.  But I just didn’t take things that seriously.  I thought it was hilarious, plus it helped me get over the trauma of creating a greeting.

Young people reading this (if any!) may be interested to know that telephones were stationary for many, many years, either attached to a wall out of reach of sticky little fingers, or sitting on a counter top.  The great innovation was getting a longer extension cord, normally so ‘mom’ could have more mobility while talking on the phone.  It seemed like feelings of neglect and need would come over children as soon as ‘mom’ got on the phone.  It was almost universal: mom is tethered to the phone…child needs to act up and demand her undivided attention.  If I recall, Michelle was still tethered to a phone when Ryan, Alex and Justin were little.  Kevin found a way for her to use the house phone hands free as she moved about the house.  By the time cell phones were common her kids were old enough to not start acting up when mom was on the phone. 

Recently I used the term “cell phone” around Brianna and her friend, and Brianna felt obliged to inform me that people don’t say “cell phone” anymore; they just say “phone.”  Good point.  We dropped our home phone (now known as a “land line”) a few years ago, and so have most people, so it goes without saying that a reference to a phone means a cell phone.  Why be redundant?

I think it was in the early 1990s that a client of mine was trying to develop electronic components for use in the early mobile phones.  There must be some movies out from that period that show someone using a large, cumbersome phone while driving in a car.  The device was almost the size and shape of a shoe box.  They were actually called car phones, not mobile phones.  I remember a speaker saying that his first sales job was selling these things to businesses for about $750 each.   Anyway, my client explained that there were going to be cell towers strategically placed along highways, and as a motorist passed out of the range of one tower, he would be within the range of the next, and the electronic device under development would enable the car phone to transition smoothly and pick up the new, stronger signal with no interruption in service.  As usual, I thought this was a harebrained idea that would never work.  Who was going to erect all these towers?  Who needed to make phone calls from their cars?  Doh!

Telephone poles were so ugly!  And growing up they were everywhere, along with TV antennas.   When we moved to San Jose in 1975 we found that our development, built in 1972, had banned telephone poles.  I guess it was the phone company that had run the trenches and installed the phone lines underground.  I don’t remember.  A few years later a hot topic at the annual homeowners’ association meeting was banning TV antennas.  We had gone to cable when we moved in, but there were some homes within our 152-home development that still had the ugly antennas sticking up, and some of the neighbors didn’t like it.  For years thereafter I would notice homes that still had their antennas.  At this writing, I would need to go outside and look around, maybe drive around, to know for sure whether there were any TV antennas still in evidence.  That is probably an example of my “live and let live” attitude.  If I don’t like how something looks, I don’t have to look at it!