It’s Tuesday, February 02, 2010 and this stuff is yuck!
Which does nothing to help us escape the fact that Tuesday is the day for:
Till, We Meet Again
One of the things I always found odd during my military service was the strange logic that led commanders to believe that community service was somehow an obligation of active duty members. I would have thought that being a member of the military was the ultimate in community service, but this (among a host of others) might have been one of the reasons I never rose to the level of being a commander.
Like the rise and fall of the tide, missile security units tended to cycle through commanders on a fairly predictable schedule. Good commanders (the few that I had the pleasure of serving under) were quickly snatched up and placed in bigger, better situations. Bad commanders were likewise sent from our midst, albeit at a more glacial pace.
Our new commander was big on community service. So much so that if you didn’t have at least something involving community service in your APR (an annual performance review) he’d rate you down one full number. Even if your mission-related accomplishments were through the roof, you needed to “serve the community that supports you” or you were scum.
So it was that we found ourselves indentured to some crazy widow-woman, doing a list of chores as long as your arm. We pretty much emptied her house, painted everything, shampooed her carpets, cleaned up her yard and even re-shingled her roof. All the while, she flitted about, barking orders at us, some of which were contradictory. Yeah, this had long day written all over it in ten foot, red letters.
For all of us except Amn Destructor that is. For reasons beyond the grasp of sane people, she had some affinity for Amn Destructor and pretty much designated him as her second in command. When it came time to till her garden patch, she would allow no one but Amn Destructor access to the tiller and her garden.
Her tiller was a pretty nice one. It was powerful, rear-tined, self propelled and had “variable speed.” We quickly found out that “variable speed” meant varying only between stop and run-like-hell. The tines were nice and sharp and Amn Destructor would no doubt have the garden ready for planting in short order.
However, at some point between then and the last time the garden had been tilled, some maniac went over it with a steam roller and packed the soil down to the consistency of a parking lot. The tines on the tiller would start spinning, hit the ground and fling the tiller into the air. Amn Destructor would do his best to wrest the bucking beast into submission, but mostly appeared to be losing the battle.
So it was that Amn Destructor was bodily dragged from one end of the garden to the other while the tiller flung clods of dirt 30 feet into the air. Letting go of the throttle would bring the beast to a chugging stop. He could then wrestle it into the opposite direction and start anew.
By making several adjustments to the depth control, Amn Destructor was able to more or less break up the first couple of inches of “soil.” So he sets it for a bit deeper and makes another pass over the garden space. Every so often, the tiller would hit a spot of softer soil and attempt to bury itself, requiring Amn Destructor to heave mightily to pull it back out.
After about 5 passes over the garden and only a few inches of tilled soil to show for it, Amn Destructor decides that there has to be an easier way. He decides that the tiller would be abundantly more manageable if it had 8 or 9 sandbags stacked on it. As luck would have it, the nutcase widow had a quantity of them in her shed to be used in the event of a flood. (NOTE: She lived more than 2 miles from the river and a good 200 vertical feet above it’s highest high-water mark. Only a flood of Biblical proportions could threaten her house.) So, Amn destructor sets the tiller to it’s max depth and piles the sandbags on top of it. He fires the thing up and sets it to “haul ass.”
Remarkably, this worked. The tiller was prevented from bucking like an untamed bronco by the added weight, but it still moved ahead at a somewhat brisk pace. By making some adjustments to assorted controls, a new speed was added to the “variable speed” feature“: Snail, which slowed its forward motion to a quite leisurely pace. All the while, it would burrow down to the correct depth and chop up the soil to a decent consistency and inch along. We stood in awe of Amn Destructor’s ingenuity. The experienced among us stood in awe at a safe distance, fully expecting it to detonate or something. After a few minutes, the nut woman emerged and started yelling for us to get back to work. We scatter.
Amn Destructor decides that the throttle lever is too tight, (It really was, requiring considerable grip to keep the thing going) and rigs up a wire so he doesn’t have to hold down the lever. This turns the contraption into a “hands-free” implement, allowing Amn Destructor to simply walk behind it and this only to stop and turn it around when it reached the end of the garden.
After starting a new run, Amn Destructor needs to use the facilities. He leaves the beast unattended and scampers into the house. This is the moment the tiller has been waiting for. The instant he’s out of site, the tiller hits a rock and lurches sideways. A couple of sandbags fall off allowing it to buck the rest of them off. Free from encumbrance, the damn thing jumps around until the “variable speed” level gets nudged to the “haul ass” setting. It then sets a course for the alley.
The chicken wire fence surrounding the garden proved no match for the tiller, nor did the waist-high wooden fence between the yard and the alley. When it got across the alley, the beast encountered a well-built chain-link fence that it couldn’t penetrate. So, it glanced off but managed to grab part of the mesh with its tiller blades. This allowed the tiller to rip out a huge hole in the fence fabric. The tiller then came back across the alley, crashed through her next door neighbor’s wooden fence, smashed their (empty) doghouse and plunged into their (empty) swimming pool.
As a result, our task list was expanded to include; repairing 4 fences, rebuilding a doghouse, fetching a roto tiller out of a swimming pool and hauling said roto tiller to the shop to the tune of some $200 in repairs.
Now, despite the fact that we’d painted her house inside and out, re-shingled her roof, washed all her windows, shampooed all her carpets/rugs, raked her yard, trimmed her bushes, re-graveled her driveway, repaired her and her neighbor’s fences, rebuilt a doghouse and (more or less) tilled her garden, the old nutbag had the gall to call our commander to gripe about our tearing up her and her neighbor’s fences, their doghouse and then destroying her tiller. According to her, we’d done nothing but spend the day terrorizing her and her neighborhood.
So it was that we were once again, standing tall before the man, dressed in our best blues and made to give an account for our peripheral involvement in yet another Destructor cause celebre. The icing on this particular cake was that our commander said the crazy woman told him that Amn Destructor was the ONLY one she thought was worth a damn. The rest of us were a bunch of “Lazy, good-for-nothin’s.”
Needless to say, it was a long time before our commander (or anyone for that matter) brought up the matter of “community service” to us again.
No Chris today and of course I get stuck with a digbat dialup customer while I watch three commercial customers roll by on the display. One of them is a ninny that I’m trying to get broke of calling my direct line whenever the wind changes direction. She left a voice mail on my direct line yesterday (that I ignored) and one again today. I again asked her to call the tech support number, but it seems she only likes me.
She’ll feel differently when she’s tasked with describing Marcellus Wallace several times a day.
Speaking of Marcellus, seems that someone went and annoyed my daughters yesterday. As we all know, that is not a good thing.
I hate meetings. I think I’d rather get kicked in the groin than sit through a meeting. Especially with the people I work with. Don’t get me wrong, I love them dearly, but in a meeting, they are capable of extracting the maximum amount of minutia from any subject being discussed. The favorite tactic is when it appears that the meeting is winding down, someone will deliberately misstate something previously discussed so as to drag us all back around a thoroughly deceased equine to flog it for just a while longer.
This, combined with a propensity for some of them to ask questions specific only to their tasks (shit that doesn’t pertain to ANYONE else) it’s easy to see why I’d rather spend an hour in a dentist’s chair than in a conference room with these lovelies. But I do get some great doodling done:
And
Which means I push this up a bit early. At least I’ll get some decent doodling in.
