Stories

Each of these posts tells a story or two. Most, sadly, are pretty dull, since my life is also pretty dull. But if you think about it, most people’s lives are similarly boring, even in the absence of a global pandemic and the corresponding reduction in activities. Humanity has progressed from needing to spend every day actively searching for food to something much less arduous for most of us. And that’s a good thing. If you have time to worry about nonsense then your life is not all that stressful on the level of eating and avoiding being eaten.

I say this to point out that real life isn’t as glamorous as fiction, at least not in most cases. Sure, celebrities, politicians and sports stars probably have a few more exciting episodes in their day-to-day lives than you and me, but they also struggle to get up in the morning, eat meals alone, shop for groceries, stay up too late watching TV, and generally do all the same things the rest of us do. Yes, they might have an exciting event or two in a given day that you and I don’t, but by the time you get good at being on camera, or negotiating with an adversary, or can play a sport at a professional level, it’s probably old hat. You might not be bored, but you know how it goes because it is what you do. Viewed that way, even those we think lead exciting lives probably find themselves bored just as often as the rest of us. Their stories aren’t all that different from mine. Or yours.

So, in these posts I tell stories. Small stories — to be sure — but stories nonetheless, and this week I have four to share.

Last time, I mentioned that I’d lost a couple of days to a medical procedure that I left unnamed for reasons of decorum. This time, the same thing happened once again, but it was my wife that was the sufferer, not me. Once again everything went well and all is fine. Being of a certain age means we get to deal with these things, and for some reason we’re in sync on the timing. And we will be again in approximately five years, it seems.

As a result of needing to be both readily available and sensitive to her needs as she prepared for this event, I lost some time again this week. Less than last week — anaesthesia does weird things to your brain — but I do try to be helpful in these cases, and I am a professional worrier, which also eats time.

At this point it’s possible you’ve guessed what we were doing. Good for you. It’s not a big secret. It’s just not fun to go through or talk about.

I realized last week — immediately after hitting the “Publish” button, of course — that I had forgotten to mention something else. That’s the way it always works, isn’t it? You finish a task and only then discover something you completely forgot to deal with?

Here’s what I failed to mention: I submitted a job application.

Why would that take a lot of time? In truth, the actual submission was quick, but the preparation of a resume and cover letter was another matter.

My previous resume was very much out of date, and was built around an entirely different career path. As many of you know, I used to program computers for companies in Silicon Valley. I spent a long time doing that and related things like managing people and projects for those same companies.

Some years ago after retiring (again) I got a job at an auto repair shop just for fun. They wanted a resume on file, but I didn’t bother to completely rework my old one for them. We already knew each other and the resume was irrelevant at any real level, but I dusted it off, revised the dates of my previous employment, and give the shop owner a copy.

Now I find myself applying for yet another radically different job, but this time the resume matters. I can’t give them my programming resume. Instead I had to prepare an all new version that highlights my experience that is relevant to the gig in question.

And what is that, you ask?

I’ve applied to be an assistant in the Fine Arts workshop at Langara college, covering for the shop coordinator when he cannot be there. That’s an extremely part time job — just a couple of days a semester unless something goes very wrong — but I am OK with that. In truth I don’t need a job, but I really enjoyed going back to school and being around all those young people. I’d love to do it again, even if only on occasion.

And should I get this job, perhaps other opportunities will come up. I know I’m never going to teach classes. I’m not qualified for that, and by the time I got the required MFA degree and found a teaching position, I’d probably be well past any formal retirement age.

Anyway, I spent quite a while fashioning a resume and cover letter that emphasize my shop skills and teaching background. With luck, I will wind up back on campus occasionally, helping students with their shop projects.

I have no idea what happens next or what the time line is. Like all schools, Langara is a big organization, and everything takes longer than you expect. And to be honest, the longer it takes the more likely I am to be vaccinated against Covid before I need to show up, and that would be good.

Also, there might be dozens of applicants, all of whom are more qualified than me. As a result I might not get the job at all. I actually expect that. And since I don’t need the job that might be a good thing. If someone else needs the job, they should get it. But who knows. Maybe I was the only one to apply.

Any developments on this front will be interesting, at least to me. I’ll share what I can when I can.

Here’s an update to a previous story: the table saw is cutting square again. The parts arrived (I think I mentioned that last week) and I spent a couple of hours working with the fence on the saw, adjusting it and trying to get it to stay square.

So far it seems to be working properly. And that is a good thing because the only third party fence I have found that would fit this saw costs more than double the price of the saw itself. It is, however, incredibly accurate. I might consider it someday, but not yet. Instead I will continue with the fence I have and see how it does.

And just in case anyone wondered how you check a fence for being square, here’s a photo of the tool I built for doing that:

That’s a 1" dial caliper (which displays 0.001" changes in distance) attached to a block of wood and a miter slot guide. As I slide that up and down the miter slot the dial shows exactly how far out of alignment the fence is.

When I last checked it, it was out by only 0.005", which is well below the 1/64" tolerance I was told I could expect.

I will keep an eye on this and see how it goes. With luck it will be fine for a long time to come.

And finally, I want to share the Tale Of The Neurotic Dog.

Which is not to be confused with the Tail Of The Neurotic Dog, aka this:

To get started, you should probably understand that nearly all dogs — like nearly all people — are neurotic at some level. We have three dogs, and each has their own quirks.

Tinkerbelle makes a big show of hating other dogs. Her barking at every one walking down the street can be heard for quite a distance, even from inside the house with all the windows and doors closed. Whether she actually hates all those dogs is anyone’s guess. She might not, but we don’t risk it.

Skookie has a pathological desire to change sides of a door. Doors have only one side: the wrong side. Given a chance, she will change sides almost without hesitation.

In comparison, the depth of Cruzer’s neurotic tendencies is hard to fathom. He’s a nut job, and keeping him calm and happy can be a challenge. And just so you know who we’re talking about, here he is this morning:

To start to appreciate the scale of his weirdness, let’s talk about last night.

We went to bed at about the usual time. He happened to get to the bedroom first and selected the dog bed by the door to the room, which is the one he usually wants (at least at first) assuming Tinkerbelle didn’t beat him to it. Tink settled in the middle of the floor, creating the usual, huge tripping hazard. It should be mentioned that there are three dog beds in the room and only two dogs come upstairs to sleep at night. (Skookie hates stairs and has only ventured up once. She’s always been a more independent creature anyway, so sleeping downstairs is just fine with her. And besides, she has important patrolling to do.)

Once all the teeth are brushed, clothes changed, and so on, we get into bed. At this point Cruzer chooses from this highly limited set of options:

1. He could decide he’s unhappy in his current location and move to the dog bed on the floor next to me. This can be challenging because he has to walk past Tinkerbelle, who is scary. Should he be unable to work up the courage to pass Tink, he moves on to the next option. As a rule, he can only get past Tinkerbelle on his own 10% of the time or so.
2. He might decide that he’s unhappy in his current location and start to squeak about it. These squeaks may start immediately, or they could be delayed by anything up to fifteen minutes. They are pathetic noises, though, designed to get attention. This is by far the most common thing that happens, and perhaps 75% of the time we wind up dealing with it. Anne swears that if we just ignore him he will stop squeaking, but I have yet to see that happen.
3. The only other choice is that he will fall asleep where he is without complaint. But this is relatively rare, happening only about 15% of the time, at a guess.

Already you can tell that Cruzer is a weirdo, but it gets worse.

Sometimes we have to escort him past Tinkerbelle to a different bed. And sometimes he will stay there and sometimes not. Should that second bed be deemed inferior he might move back to the first bed (either alone or accompanied by a human, usually me) or he might (very rarely) move to the third bed in the room. And he can resort to squeaking pathetically at almost any point for no obvious reason.

As I say, he’s a particularly neurotic dog.

I can kind of appreciate why he doesn’t want to walk past Tinkerbelle. She’s huge, and when she plays she can bite his whole head. If he’s not in the mood, I imagine it is terrifying.

Anyway, last night things got even stranger thanks to this particularly evil device:

As it happens, none of our dogs like things that beep.

On occasion we have come home to find that the battery in a smoke alarm is nearly dead and it is beeping to announce the fact. When that happens all the dogs retreat to the room farthest from the beeping and skulk around with their tails between their legs until the battery is removed and the beeping stops. (Those 10 year smoke alarms are worth every penny!)

And a UPS beeping to announce the power has gone off? That is the end of the canine world. All UPS units must be set to silent mode immediately after being turned on.

And the phone in the photo? Well, somewhere at Panasonic is an engineer with too much time on his or her hands and a very poor understanding of human (and canine) interface design.

First of all, the stand you see is only there to charge the battery. The phone is cordless. When you set it into the charger, two things will happen if the phone thinks it needs charging:

1. A bright yellow LED turns on for the entire duration of the charging cycle, which can take a while.
2. A single beep is emitted, apparently to announce that charging has commenced.

Before we consider the canine implications of those design choices, let’s think about what they mean for humans.

Why do I need an LED to tell me the phone is charging? Is it there to tell me not to pick up the device? Clearly not. I can interrupt the charge cycle at any point to answer the phone or make a call. So it seems the LED only tells me that the device is not fully charged and/or that it is being charged.

But, if I take a call and set the phone down on a table rather than in the charging stand, the LED remains off. Some of the battery charge has been used — it’s not fully charged anymore — but no LED comes on to tell me that. I can answer another call without setting it back on the charger, of course, so again we can eliminate the “not fully charged” meaning of the LED. It is only there to tell me that it is being charged.

if I want to know how much charge is in the battery I must look at the LCD display on the phone where a simple battery charge level indicator is present in the upper right corner. That provides actual data I can use. The LED doesn’t tell me if the phone has 1% of the battery remaining or 97%, only that it is being charged. Clearly from that LED alone I have no useful information about whether or not to use the handset.

And as for the beep, why do I need to know that the charge has started? There is no corresponding beep when the charge is complete, and I just put it down in the charger, so I expect it is charging, right? The beep is completely superfluous. It provides no information of any kind, as compared with the LED, which tells me that the phone is charging, which is — technically — information, even if it is useless.

Next, consider that these cordless phone handsets are designed to be scattered around the home. This handset sits on a shelf next to the bed, so the LED and beep can be encountered there, in the middle of the night, which is not exactly a great thing.

Particularly when you learn another behaviour of these devices: they don’t charge constantly. In the photo above you can see the words “Fully charged” on the display, and the LED is off. It is not charging the battery, but it is using power as it waits for a call to arrive or to be picked up and used to make a call. That means that over time the battery is being drained. At some point the phone will decide it needs to charge itself back up.

And you know what happens in that case? Exactly! The LED turns on and it beeps.

And again, that can happen at any time, including in the middle of the night. Most importantly, it can happen without anyone touching or using the phone. If the battery gets to the point where it is deemed that recharging is needed, light up and beep!

From the perspective of a particular canine that is awful. Assuming he’s sleeping next to me (and thus near the phone) that beep means he must get up and flee to the other side of the room, even if Tinkerbelle is in the way. Once there he must start squeaking because this is obviously the most awful thing his little doggy mind can envision.

And it gets worse!

The charger is connected to the plug in the wall, obviously, and that means it is at the whim of the power company. Any kind of power glitch while it sits on the charger causes the handset to reassess its battery status, just as it does when you set it back down in the charger after making a call. It might or might not decide it needs charging, but if it does it will — you guessed it — light up (at least briefly) and beep.

With all that as background, here’s what happened last night:

1. Cruzer lays down by the door.
2. Tinkerbelle lays down in the middle of the floor at the foot of the bed.
3. Humans go to bed.
4. Cruzer decided his bed was inadequate. He walked past Tinkerbelle (all by himself!) to take the bed by me.
5. Fifteen minutes later there was a power glitch. The phone lit up, beeped, and then the LED turned back off a few seconds later.
6. In response to the beep, Cruzer fled to the other side of the bed, by Anne.
7. Where he began squeaking.
8. Ten minutes of attempting to calm him and get him to lay down over there — on the floor or in either of the empty dog beds — accomplished nothing.
9. I got up and escorted him (past Tinkerbelle) back to the bed near the phone, where he did actually manage to lay down again.
10. Tinkerbelle moved to the bed by the door.
11. We all went to sleep. Amazingly, Cruzer stayed asleep.

Some variation on this happens regularly, though thankfully the power glitch is rare. In the most amusing version, Cruzer will fall asleep in the bed by the door to the room and sometime later Tinkerbelle will decide she wants that bed. She stands up, walks over to it, and stares at him until he moves to one of the other beds. This doesn’t cause squeaking, though. He’s lowest in the hierarchy, and simply has to put up with it.

I love my dogs dearly, and we put up with this strange behaviour without too much complaint. We’ve even taken to calling Cruzer’s unexplained squeaking episodes his “existential crises,” because what else can you do?

As I say, somewhere there is (or was) an engineer at Panasonic who needs to be taught better design principles. Should you ever be in the position of designing a product, please consider — carefully! — what it does and why. And think of the impact it will have on everyone nearby. This phone has no business making any spontaneous noise or light unless there is an incoming call. It could silently manage its battery charge and only display battery status in the LCD display. In fact, removing the charge indicator LED and the beeper would have saved a few pennies per phone being built.

And Cruzer would be a bit less crazy.