In which ACW channels Dave Barry, with mixed success
My assiduous reader has gathered, by now, that I am going through a lot of old papers, trying to throw out most of them. I am pleased to discover that, with a little practice, pitching worthless non-memorabilia is becoming easier. So far I have only been tempted to blog an entire pamphlet of board games whose unifying principle is that they have been played at most thrice. But let that be.
I have stumbled upon another bit of my old writing that I am reluctant to commit to the recycling bin without digitizing. Apparently I had been reading too much Dave Barry, and I produced the following account. It's dated the 11th of June, 1985. And it's a bit long, so to save your Friends page, I'll put the thing itself behind a cut. Never say I never did anything for you.
Why I Don't Like Home Repairs
by [ACW]
We were going to repaint our front porch. The people who owned our house before us must have been very nautical people, because they painted the front porch with gray deck paint of the kind you often find on ships. If you have ever taken a cruise, you have had some experience with this kind of paint. It has remarkable properties that defy the ordinary laws of friction. One moment you are standing at the rail, looking at the waves and wondering whether it's worth the effort to be sick, and the next moment a gust of wind is blowing you across the deck. They design it like that for the benefit of passengers who like to play shuffleboard. If the deck were not slippery, the shuffleboard puck would not slide. These maritime engineers know their priorities.
Our unique porch paint was especially enjoyable in winter, with slush on it.
"You can't just paint over it," said our next door neighbor, who is always telling us what to do. "That's Glasstech Mumblecoat. The new paint'll peel right off. You have to sand off the old paint first."
"Sand it off? With sandpaper?" We were beginning to see advantages in leaving things as they were.
"No, no," said the neighbor. "Use a belt sander."
When we said we didn't own a belt sander, the neighbor explained to us that nobody actually owns a belt sander. By act of Congress, certain tools may not be owned by individuals but must be rented from hardware stores. Wallpaper steamers and belt sanders are both in this category.
We left our car at the hardware store as a deposit, and carried the belt sander two miles back to the house. On the way we learned certain things about belt sanders. First, they are very heavy. Second, as you move them away from their home hardware store, a clever arrangement of weights, pulleys, springs, and radar ranging equipment causes them to become heavier slowly. This is a security measure to prevent dishonest people from simply leaving their car at the hardware store and skipping off to Mexico with the far more valuable belt sander. After one gets more than fifteen miles from the hardware store, the sander weighs more than a ton, and one can no longer move it. The hardware store dispatches a work crew to go and pick it up.
Luckily, our house is only two miles from the hardware store, so that when we got it home, it weighed only about a hundred pounds. We lugged it up onto the porch, and got ready to begin sanding the deck paint off. Immediately we encountered a problem: electrical power. The hardware store did not have a two-mile extension cord, so we were forced to plug it in at home.
Unfortunately, our house is wired for 115 volts alternating current at 60 cycles per second, with gusts up to 80. We tried to plug the sander in to one of our outlets, but the sander refused to even look at our electricity. A shiny plate screwed to the case explained the problem. The sander would only consume 167 volts reciprocating current at 48 cycles per second, with a slice of lemon.
The man at the hardware store rented us an adapter which would convert our house current to 141 volts vacillating current at 54 cycles per second, and said that if we were diplomatic about it, the sander would meet us halfway. We left our bicycle at the hardware store and walked the adapter home, which was difficult because it had to stop at every tree and fire hydrant.
After an extremely trying time negotiating with our seventeen extension cords (they all wanted to be the one to plug into the wall, and nobody wanted to connect to the adapter) we were ready to turn the sander on. It took us a while to locate the switch. The engineers hid it under the handle. The switch is spring-loaded, and arranged so that the sander cannot run unless you are holding it in a fashion that reminded us of certain fraternity handshakes we had learned in college. The trick is that you have to nudge the switch away from you with your ring finger. It was at this point that we began to suspect the sander of being of extraterrestrial manufacture.
Suddenly a lot of things made sense. The machine's power requirements were probably normal for its home planet. The odd grip and peculiar switch would have been just right if one had eleven fingers on one hand, the middle three of which were jointed backwards. Having seen a creature with just this sort of hand in the barroom scene in "Star Wars", the assumption seemed reasonable. It all fit together.
We were stuck, though. There probably wasn't another belt sander to be had in the entire state. So we made do with duct tape, possible the world's most versatile material. We once owned a television made entirely of duct tape, but that's another story. This time, we used the tape to hold the switch on so that we could operate the sander for more than ten seconds without our arms becoming paralyzed with cramps that measured 7.4 on the Richter scale.
We could still turn the sander on and off by plugging and unplugging the adapter. When we got it going, it made a very satisfying zuzzing noise that reminded me of the Indianapolis 500. The belt spun around and around and we knew it was working because when we touched the moving belt we screamed in pain. This is an infallible indicator of correctly functioning power tools.
When applied to the porch the belt tended to pull the sander in one direction, and the sander tended to pull us. We tried to get traction by planting our shoes firmly on the porch, but as the assiduous reader has already realized, this was completely impossible. It was necessary to rig an arrangement of clotheslines about the porch to hold on to with one hand while controlling the sander with the other. Perhaps "controlling" is an exaggeration here.
The sander kept trying to get away. We would let go for a second to scratch or brush gray paint dust off our clothes, and the sander would scoot off down the front steps and make for the street. But it would soon get to the end of its cord, and one of the seventeen extensions would give way, unplugging the poor thing and depriving it of power before it could do more than threaten a couple of neighborhood kids.
Finally, things started to go more smoothly. We sanded away for about fifteen minutes, when suddenly we received an enormous electrical shock. The assiduous reader will have known that this was coming. In retrospect, it is all quite obvious. The sander wanted only 48 cycles per second, and the adapter was feeding it 54 cycles per second. The extra six cycles per second may not seem like much, but over the course of fifteen minutes this adds up to more than five thousand excess cycles. All of these cycles were building up in the sander, and finally it let loose all at once. We let go, howling not so much from pain as from embarrassment that we hadn't seen it in advance. Well, also from pain.
At that moment we had the bad luck to have the sander pointed toward the house. The sander barrelled into the front door. We chased it about the ground floor for ten minutes before it climbed the stairs and tried to drown itself in the toilet. I don't remember how we got it back to the hardware store, but I am told that it is still in therapy, although it is making progress. We removed the front porch entirely and put in tulips, which don't need to be sanded as often.
[Note: this story is fiction. In actuality, we haven't gotten around to sanding the porch yet.]
I have stumbled upon another bit of my old writing that I am reluctant to commit to the recycling bin without digitizing. Apparently I had been reading too much Dave Barry, and I produced the following account. It's dated the 11th of June, 1985. And it's a bit long, so to save your Friends page, I'll put the thing itself behind a cut. Never say I never did anything for you.
Why I Don't Like Home Repairs
by [ACW]
We were going to repaint our front porch. The people who owned our house before us must have been very nautical people, because they painted the front porch with gray deck paint of the kind you often find on ships. If you have ever taken a cruise, you have had some experience with this kind of paint. It has remarkable properties that defy the ordinary laws of friction. One moment you are standing at the rail, looking at the waves and wondering whether it's worth the effort to be sick, and the next moment a gust of wind is blowing you across the deck. They design it like that for the benefit of passengers who like to play shuffleboard. If the deck were not slippery, the shuffleboard puck would not slide. These maritime engineers know their priorities.
Our unique porch paint was especially enjoyable in winter, with slush on it.
"You can't just paint over it," said our next door neighbor, who is always telling us what to do. "That's Glasstech Mumblecoat. The new paint'll peel right off. You have to sand off the old paint first."
"Sand it off? With sandpaper?" We were beginning to see advantages in leaving things as they were.
"No, no," said the neighbor. "Use a belt sander."
When we said we didn't own a belt sander, the neighbor explained to us that nobody actually owns a belt sander. By act of Congress, certain tools may not be owned by individuals but must be rented from hardware stores. Wallpaper steamers and belt sanders are both in this category.
We left our car at the hardware store as a deposit, and carried the belt sander two miles back to the house. On the way we learned certain things about belt sanders. First, they are very heavy. Second, as you move them away from their home hardware store, a clever arrangement of weights, pulleys, springs, and radar ranging equipment causes them to become heavier slowly. This is a security measure to prevent dishonest people from simply leaving their car at the hardware store and skipping off to Mexico with the far more valuable belt sander. After one gets more than fifteen miles from the hardware store, the sander weighs more than a ton, and one can no longer move it. The hardware store dispatches a work crew to go and pick it up.
Luckily, our house is only two miles from the hardware store, so that when we got it home, it weighed only about a hundred pounds. We lugged it up onto the porch, and got ready to begin sanding the deck paint off. Immediately we encountered a problem: electrical power. The hardware store did not have a two-mile extension cord, so we were forced to plug it in at home.
Unfortunately, our house is wired for 115 volts alternating current at 60 cycles per second, with gusts up to 80. We tried to plug the sander in to one of our outlets, but the sander refused to even look at our electricity. A shiny plate screwed to the case explained the problem. The sander would only consume 167 volts reciprocating current at 48 cycles per second, with a slice of lemon.
The man at the hardware store rented us an adapter which would convert our house current to 141 volts vacillating current at 54 cycles per second, and said that if we were diplomatic about it, the sander would meet us halfway. We left our bicycle at the hardware store and walked the adapter home, which was difficult because it had to stop at every tree and fire hydrant.
After an extremely trying time negotiating with our seventeen extension cords (they all wanted to be the one to plug into the wall, and nobody wanted to connect to the adapter) we were ready to turn the sander on. It took us a while to locate the switch. The engineers hid it under the handle. The switch is spring-loaded, and arranged so that the sander cannot run unless you are holding it in a fashion that reminded us of certain fraternity handshakes we had learned in college. The trick is that you have to nudge the switch away from you with your ring finger. It was at this point that we began to suspect the sander of being of extraterrestrial manufacture.
Suddenly a lot of things made sense. The machine's power requirements were probably normal for its home planet. The odd grip and peculiar switch would have been just right if one had eleven fingers on one hand, the middle three of which were jointed backwards. Having seen a creature with just this sort of hand in the barroom scene in "Star Wars", the assumption seemed reasonable. It all fit together.
We were stuck, though. There probably wasn't another belt sander to be had in the entire state. So we made do with duct tape, possible the world's most versatile material. We once owned a television made entirely of duct tape, but that's another story. This time, we used the tape to hold the switch on so that we could operate the sander for more than ten seconds without our arms becoming paralyzed with cramps that measured 7.4 on the Richter scale.
We could still turn the sander on and off by plugging and unplugging the adapter. When we got it going, it made a very satisfying zuzzing noise that reminded me of the Indianapolis 500. The belt spun around and around and we knew it was working because when we touched the moving belt we screamed in pain. This is an infallible indicator of correctly functioning power tools.
When applied to the porch the belt tended to pull the sander in one direction, and the sander tended to pull us. We tried to get traction by planting our shoes firmly on the porch, but as the assiduous reader has already realized, this was completely impossible. It was necessary to rig an arrangement of clotheslines about the porch to hold on to with one hand while controlling the sander with the other. Perhaps "controlling" is an exaggeration here.
The sander kept trying to get away. We would let go for a second to scratch or brush gray paint dust off our clothes, and the sander would scoot off down the front steps and make for the street. But it would soon get to the end of its cord, and one of the seventeen extensions would give way, unplugging the poor thing and depriving it of power before it could do more than threaten a couple of neighborhood kids.
Finally, things started to go more smoothly. We sanded away for about fifteen minutes, when suddenly we received an enormous electrical shock. The assiduous reader will have known that this was coming. In retrospect, it is all quite obvious. The sander wanted only 48 cycles per second, and the adapter was feeding it 54 cycles per second. The extra six cycles per second may not seem like much, but over the course of fifteen minutes this adds up to more than five thousand excess cycles. All of these cycles were building up in the sander, and finally it let loose all at once. We let go, howling not so much from pain as from embarrassment that we hadn't seen it in advance. Well, also from pain.
At that moment we had the bad luck to have the sander pointed toward the house. The sander barrelled into the front door. We chased it about the ground floor for ten minutes before it climbed the stairs and tried to drown itself in the toilet. I don't remember how we got it back to the hardware store, but I am told that it is still in therapy, although it is making progress. We removed the front porch entirely and put in tulips, which don't need to be sanded as often.
[Note: this story is fiction. In actuality, we haven't gotten around to sanding the porch yet.]