New High Price, Same Old Crappy Service

I mentioned a few inches back that the Bloody Long Island Railroad had raised it's prices as of the first of January.

What I forgot to relate was how on the second day of this new Luxury Priced service¹ the Bloody Long Island Railroad, having a problem somewhere at the east end of the Ronkonkoma Branch and needing to reduce the traffic load² canceled the only straight-through train from Atlantic Terminal³, announcing that we would be accommodated on a train at Jamaica.

Now only someone who works⁴ for the Bloody Long Island Railroad could think that loading a trainful of people onto a train that began it's journey at Penn Station during the height of the evening rush hour was a good, or even workable, idea, and certainly only someone who works⁵ for the Bloody Long Island Railroad could be so blissfully ignorant of the fact that the train they chose was already the most overloaded train in the schedule.

So it was that we were loaded onto a train that normally doesn't stop at Jamaica and since there were already no free seats and no space to stand in the vestibules by the doors we filled the walkway space between the seats. Naturally the sensitive fellow commuters realized that we were not personally to blame for this inconvenience to them, or they did after one thick bleeper complained a little too loudly about being crowded, at which point I looked him right in the eye and snarled at volume 11 that if he thought anyone standing in the aisles was there by choice he must be suffering from brain damage, and that he might consider that he at least had a seat and hadn't been thrown off a perfectly good train for the convenience of some idiot dispatcher.

This provided some relief but as soon as people needed to get out tempers became frayed. Everyone was wearing huge down coats and most of the commuters that day were of robust size before they put the coats on. The aisles are wide enough to accommodate one person. Not a situation conducive to amity.

This hell went on forever, or at least, it seemed to. Finally I was able to disembark myself and begin the long walk to my car⁶ over inadequately cleared sidewalks.

To sum up: The Bloody Long Island Railroad managed to deliver exactly one and one-half commutes under the new Luxury Pricing before bleeping up and bleeping everyone leaving from Flatbush Avenue Atlantic Terminal where they breathe.

They even forgot to have someone call the Guinness Book of Records so they could claim the Worst Excuse For A Railroad In The World award.

1. The price is now a luxury, the service remains execrable↑
2. There is no other explanation of the bizarre nonsense I am about to reveal↑
3. nee Flatbush Avenue↑
4. A loaded term and one that implies much that may not in fact be true, but none other fits the purpose here↑
5. See the previous footnote↑
6. The evening trains and all off-peak trains stop as far from the West End of the platform as they can in order to maximize the inconvenience to passengers. Everyone on those later trains has had to park in the East end car-parks and people traveling East need to use the ticket machines at the extreme West end of the platform and in inclement weather will be sheltering in the station building, also situated at the extreme West end of the platform. Each evening the platform becomes a jam of people walking West en masse while others sprint East over the icy platforms trying to catch the train before it leaves.↑

Snow, Babylon Town and The Bloody Long Island Railroad

This miserable tale of incompetence begins at the end of last year.

On Boxing Day¹ to be precise.

In the early evening it began to snow, reasonably heavily, and the snow continued to fall into the following morning (which was a Monday, and therefore a work day). The situation was complicated no end by sustained winds estimated at 40 mph. We usually get wind gusts in this sort of weather, and strong winds, along with the thermodynamic consequences they bring, soon had the electrical wiring failing and snow drifting to ridiculous heights. The back door of Chateau Stevie was blocked by a drift that covered the door handle, which required that I actually remove the glass from the storm door and dig from the house out, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

The Stevieling grabbed her outdoor things and began digging for all she was worth, clearing a path from the front door to the gate and thence to the curb. As she dug, the wind helpfully piled up snow behind her rendering her efforts moot. I called her inside once I realized what was going on. I couldn't tell if it was still snowing or whether it was the stuff on the ground being moved about with extreme prejudice by the wind. I certainly wasn't going out in it, so Mrs Stevie was forced to stay at home being as how the driveway was unnavigable. Snow had drifted up over the door-sill of her Odyssey peoplemover anyway.

The wind dropped around 11am and I was unable to maintain the fiction of inclement weather preventing snow clearance operations, so I was dispatched outside with a shovel and the keys to the garage, where I store Troll, the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

Playtime!

The first job was to move two feet of snow from the front of the garage and get some room in which to pull the Mrs Steviemobile, essential since there wasn't enough room to drive Troll between the vehicles. Normally I would have parked my car in the side bay of the drive (our drive can accommodate 5 vehicles easily) but that has been occupied for almost a year by Mrs Stevie's old Taurus estate wagon, now used as a shed for crap. I know his because th one time I wanted to use the vehicle for the purpose envisaged by its designers I was informed that I couldn't because it needed to be cleaned out first.

That was in June.

Eventually, by a series of two-foot back and forth movements, I was able to move the vehicles apart enough to ensure safe Trollway. Once again the neighborhood rang to the mighty engine-noise of Troll as the magnificent machine made short work of the inconvenient whitestuff, hurling it into Mr Singh's garden in a twenty-foot arc of manly domination over all things snow.

Once again the neighbors shook their fists in friendly salute to my superior tool-deployment versus the elemental fallout. Many of them eyed their snow shovels and I could see the calculation being run again as to which was more desirable: the top-o-the-line Jet-ski or that summer sale snowblower they had sniffed at and walked by disdainfully.

All during the summer I had seen them hooking up their little aquatic motorbikes while sneering at the nascent figure of Troll as it sat sleeping in the garage, hugely inapposite in the heat of summer. Well the Jet-skis were under several feet of frozen water and the snow-shoe was on the other foot now! Ahahhahahaha!

I made short work of our driveway problem, taking less than half an hour to clear the entire thing. As I was finishing up, widening the access to the road, the kid from across the street came over and asked if I was managing, because he had "a better snowblower" and would do the drive for me.

Now I used to give the local kids all the snow-clearance business they could handle, but since I bought Troll clearing snow is actually fun and I look forward to it. Besides, he was way too late out of the gate.

I gently turned down his generous offer and so was spared the financial negotiation that would have followed. It also freed me from one chore: I was on the point of going across the road to dig out their drive for them since when the snow is bad and I have the time I usually try and dig out as many of the neighbors as I can.

Funny thing. As I was getting ready to go over to Mr Singh and dig out the fleet of cars he has in his driveway (he has a fleet of young adults and teens too) the same kid asked me if I would help them dig out their driveway. I could see he had amassed a gang of five or six shovel-wielding pals, but saw no sign of this monster snowblower.

Of course I said I would, and was then flabbergasted when the young man issued a set of instructions as to what needed to be done and disappeared completely out of theater with his gang!

So I did what I was intending to do anyway and cleared most of the snow from their drive and a path to their garden gate. It required shovels to finish the job but all the shovelers were nowhere to be seen ² so I left with a shrug. I could have done more but if they weren't worried about it then I wasn't either.

I did what I could for the Singhs, though their drive always causes Troll problems. Last year I busted a shear pin in the driveshaft on the Singh's driveway. This year I couldn't get traction. Don't know why.

Then down to help Pedro, who had a small snowblower that would take forever to do the job, then down to Mike's, his next-door neighbor³ and back via Crazy Joe's (who had had a plow come and shove all his snow somewhere else before I could deal with it).

That was Monday.

Tuesday dawned and I decided to go to work, there being no earthly reason why there would be a problem now. The LIRR website said trains were running (a distinct improvement over Monday when they had stopped running so abruptly people had been stranded in what passes for waiting rooms all over the system, most of which have no facilities, water supplies or heat so a human interest story was only hours away) so I fired up the Steviemobile and drove to the station.

The roads had only light traffic that day, most people deciding⁴ to stay home again.

Even so there were about the same ratio of nitwits threatening life and limb. The Town of Babylon (the civic and financial body responsible for the snowplows hereabouts) had decided on plow parsimony and the main drag to Wyandanch Station, Acorn Street, had been plowed as a single track route which made driving up it much the same in terms of excitement and anticipation as a rural Canadian logging road. All it would take is one truck ⁵ coming he other way for disaster to strike. But such did not happen that day, and I was thus set-up for the booby trap the Town of Babylon had set for me.

The car-park for the station is bisected by a V-shaped road which trucks often use to bypass an inconvenient traffic light. During the night this had happened, which led me to the mistaken conclusion that the road and the car-park had been plowed. As I turned into the road, it became apparent that the snow had not been removed so much as mashed about and the Steviemobile was soon yawing around as the snow level exceeded the ground clearance of the crankcase and sundry other underframe parts, rendering the Steviemobile like unto a boat. Thank Azathoth for the traction control, which acts to keep any wheel that slips from robbing drive thrust from the vehicle by applying the anti-lock brakes an a per-wheel basis⁶ which in turn has ensured I have been able to get where I'm going in weather that has challenged four-wheel drive vehicles.

So I tobogganed along the road, the car yawing occasionally, but surprisingly little given the circumstances past the car-park that was still a pristine field of unbroken white thanks to the lack of diligence of the Town of Babylon and their inadequate plow fleet. I realized as I went that the car I had passed that I had initially assumed was in the car park was in fact on the road and stuck in a snowbank, the driver having made the same mistake as me but having a better memory for where the road should have been had turned earlier than I had to his great inconvenience. It went very much against the grain for me to just leave someone thus mired, but there was literally nowhere to stop without getting stuck myself.

The Stevieling was not pleased to find a parent hoving into view and ruining her snow day with his presence.

It boggles the mind that 24 hours after a snowstorm has subsided, even a bad one, that what I'm told is the busiest station on the Ronkonkoma branch has a) no plowed space in the car-parks (plural) and 2) its main approach road so inadequately cleared to posed an actual hazard in and of itself.

Days later the carpark finally got plowed, sort of, but berms of snow were left everywhere that blocked otherwise completely clear spaces, rendering them inaccessible. The LIRR got into the act too by not clearing the sidewalk approaches to the station. Indeed, one day I was astounded to see that although the path to the station was icy and in need of salt application in just one unthawed place, the LIRR service crew were sweeping up cigarette buts from the platform.

I looked at the crew. I looked at the path. I turned to a newspaper seller and said "Is this a joke? Are we on camera?" He just shook his head

Two weeks later another snowstorm hit.

This one lacked the howling wind with which to drive the snow into huge drifts, so it made up for that by increasing the amount of snow precipitation. We received about 15 inches of soft, fluffy white snow all over Deer Park and its surrounding towns over the course of that Sunday evening, so Monday morning commenced with my breaking out Troll again and throwing all the snow in the driveway as far from the driveway as 8 horsepower whirly gubbins could manage.

Operations were complicated by Mrs Stevie's enormous peoplemover thing blocking the path, so I asked her to move it over a tad so I could squeeze Troll between our cars. I was then treated to a breathtaking display of ineffective backward-and-forward maneuvering that otherwise increased the Trollway between the vehicles not an inch. I bore this with my usual stoicism, limiting myself to stamping my feet in increasing frustration and waving my fists for emphasis while giving voice to level three and four Words of Encouragement, but all was in vain and eventually I had to evict the woman and get behind the wheel myself⁷ and edge the vehicle closer to the fence.

Then it was a simple matter to climb out of the passenger-siad door and recommence snow rearrangement operations, culminating in driving each car backward into the road and clearing off the foot-anna-bit of snow on every remotely horizontal surface there before reparking them in the now-clear driveway. Mrs Stevie had been wasting time digging out the back garden by hand while this important work was going on, but as soon as she had a route to the road and a vehicle that didn't look like something that would be more appropriately found sticking out of one side of the Titanic she leaped into the shower declaring her intention to depart the scene for work.

I had already showered, and the LIRR was proudly announcing train service on the local news channel on the Ronkonkoma branch so I just departed, or at least I tried to.

Nicolls Road (the one directly outside Chateau Stevie) had been plowed in the night and therefore had a few inches of snow that was already beginning to be packed hard into ice by the occasional vehicle. Deer Park Avenue, the main avenue that crosses Nicolls Road was plowed and salted, but only in one lane each way. This made for interesting driving conditions as people plowing out their business driveways spread snow over the clear road which formed icy skid-pans every few hundred yards. Acorn St, the main drag to Wyandanch Station had not been plowed, but had been traveled by a gazillion tractor-trailer rigs which had squished all he snow into a slippery white lunascape. Driving it was akin to riding a "Wild Mouse" roller-coaster, something I vowed never to do again after the Hershey Park trip in the summer.

It was at the Wyandanch station car-park that the real fun started.

I could see a bucket-loader had plowed the road into the car-park, and could also see the loader plowing part of the car-park so I pulled into the road.

A beautiful job had been done removing the snow, such a contrast to the job done in the previous storm. The car-park entrance was perfectly clear and the loader had moved to another part of the car-park so I pulled in on the wonderfully clear track it had left with a blessing for the driver.

Which turned straightway to the foulest curse in my lexicon when I discovered that the entrance to the car-park was all that had been cleared, and that the car-park itself was a fifteen-inch deep field of unbroken snow apart from the tracks left by a four wheel drive vehicle sometime in the past. That stupid bleep in the bleeping bucket loader hadn't even cleared enough room to turn around in, and so I found myself on snow, tobogganing on the floor-pan before I could stop.

Which meant I couldn't stop now come hell or high (frozen) water because the traction control wouldn't be able to get the car moving again if it bogged down. The traction control system is good, but it's not a miracle worker. My only hope was to follow the tracks and hope they ended in a flattened area wide enough to turn around in without stopping.

It was a good plan with every chance of working I told myself as I stood outside the now-bogged-down Steviemobile. It was just that there was so much unplowed snow that it had piled up in front of the front bumper and that could only end one way. The Steviemobile isn't a bulldozer.

But it does have a very good traction control system that would see me clear if I could improve the odds a little. I hadn't brought a snow-shovel as I would have had to leave it in full view and that would simply be an excuse for someone to bust a window and steal the thing, leaving me to find a cold car full of drifted snow with a flat battery when I got back at 7:30 or later that night⁸ so I was reduced to stomping the snow flat around the car and kicking away as much snow as possible behind and in front of the wheels. This in turn gave me just enough room to rock the Steviemobile until it got a grip and a mere 60 minutes later I drove triumphantly into my driveway and declared a Snow Day.

The next day the car-parks were still not plowed so I parked in a space in a side-street. This had only been half-plowed so I was forced to drive back and forth into a small snowbank until I had formed a track in which to park the front wheels of the car in order not to create a collision hazard for anyone trying to drive along the street with the rear half of The Steviemobile.

On Friday I managed to find a route through the car-park that had been plowed, but since none of the spaces had been cleared I was again reduced to making one by backing in and out of where I thought a space was. I backed in because by now the snow had gone through so many freeze and thaw cycles it was pure ice underneath a thin crust of snow and I couldn't be sure of getting out if the drive wheels weren't on clear road.

It is clear that the Town of Babylon is on its uppers. It'll be interesting to see what civic service is next to degrade past the point of usefulness. Interesting in the Chinese sense, as they say.

It has taken me a few days to knock out this post, and it's now a full week after the last snowfall. Today, Martin Luther King day, I was driving past the Wyandanch LIRR station car-park.

It still had not been plowed.

1. December 26th, a day all civilized people include in the Christmas Holiday↑
2. I never got so much as a wave of thanks either↑
3. Who it turned out had agreed to pay the Fantastic Disappearing Snowshovelers to do the same job, but if they hadn't showed in the time it took me to get there then they weren't coming at all↑
4. Wisely, as it turned out↑
5. Or, for than matter, a bubble-car↑
6. The axle of a car is not solid because a car is wide enough that when cornering the inside wheel takes a much shorter path than the outside wheel does. If the axle were solid, one wheel would have to slip. In reality, both wheels take turn, real-world physics being a democratic process, but they do so unpredictably which gives the vehicle "interesting" handling characteristics. This is gotten round by having a sandwich of gears that allow the wheels to move at different speeds while still getting power transferred to them from the engine. This is what is inside that big bulge you see in the middle of the rear axle of monster trucks. In front-wheel drive vehicles, the device is hidden inside the gearbox. There are a number of surprising things that happen as a result of this arrangement when the wheels aren't where the designer expected them to be. For example, if you jack both wheels off the ground and spin one of them by hand, the opposite wheel turns too, but in the opposite direction! Another side effect of the design is that the power goes to the wheels in direct relation to the ease that they turn, so if one wheel gets on ice or snow, it will spin like crazy but the wheel on dry ground will get no power at all. There are any number of ways to mitigate this. The Steviemobile is engineered to apply the brake to the spinning wheel, thus "tricking" the differential into sending power to the other wheel, the one capable of moving the car. Clever, no?↑
7. A lifetime childhood spent playing with Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky products have given me a keen insight into when one should be turning the steering wheel and when to apply drive in the proper direction in order to "walk" a vehicle sideways in a small maneuvering space↑
8. Why yes, I do speak from experience here↑

First Commute of the New Year

Dag-bleeping blasted bleeping bleep of a bleeper son of a bleeping bleepety-bleeper!

$299 for a monthly ticket?

On this sorry excuse for a railroad?

bleep!

The Crap Goes Ever Ever On

A Day in The Life of Yours Truly.

Awake after a grand total of three hours sleep. The rest of the time spent coughing up a lung thanks to infection spread by thoughtless clod of a colleague. Reflect that next month the LIRR ticket price will soar to a new high, as will the subway metrocard costs. Contemplate choking to death on own rage at same. Alarm goes off.

Shower. Bath plug-hole blocked again, so end up paddling in mixture consisting of own sloughed-off night sweat, soap, water, Head 'n' Shoulders shampoo and dandruff. Wonder why skin on feet so red and tender. Tread on removed bath plug bruising right sole severely.

Limp out of shower, attempt to dry off with towels rendered water-repellent by various laundry chemicals.

Dress. Discover no clean socks that fit feet, so don toe-socks bought during 70s in France.

Assemble gear for commute, including chapstick for badly chapped lips, and highly acidic wart removal stick for troublesome planar wart on thumb. Place each in its own pocket to avoid possible confusion over similar packages.

Exit house, discover car windows frozen solid.

Sit in car with engine racing using a combination of anti-freeze window washer, cold air and class two Words of Power to melt ice. Lose ten minutes in this way.

Drive to station along frozen half-plowed roads also used by idiots in SUVs. Attempt to find parking spot without ice or broken glass in it.

Buy coffee from Indian gentleman in station.

Hear announcement that train is operating "on time". This is an automated message triggered by the train not having arrived two minutes after the posted time.

Train rolls up three and a half minutes later. Board train.

Discover coffee undrinkable swill. Train picks up loud clods at Farmingdale, then Bethpage. Drink coffee to cheer self up.

Arrive in Atlantic Terminal bursting for a pee. Visit brand new washroom. Discover that after a public information promotion that cost millions on the subject of coughing into one's elbow to avoid spreading disease on the MTA, the LIRR (part of the MTA) has no soap dispensers in the men's washroom. This mirrors the situation at Jamaica. Wonder at acumen of MTA morons who think that coughing is a Public Health problem but unwashed hands after stall use aren't.

Arrive at work and deal with increasingly annoying stuff until lunchtime.

Eat lunch - typically something from one of the three places in easy reach - Chinese food, Pizza or a Kebab. Consider killing self in order to introduce element of variation to lunch.

Deal with more annoyance. At around four pm split lip. Reach for soothing chapstick and, without checking, apply generous coating of acid-laden wax to cracked, bleeding mouth, burning off both lips.

Descend to subway for train to Atlantic Terminal. Delays cause train not to arrive until LIRR train departure imminent.

Run through Atlantic Terminal and board crowded LIRR train.

Ride home in slow train rocking so hard head cracks against window while attempting to snooze.

Pick up car, windows frozen. Sit in car with engine racing using a combination of anti-freeze window washer, cold air and class four Words of Power to melt ice.

Drive home.

Eat.

Go to bed.

Dream of the cold peace of oblivion.

Repeat four times.

Ho Ho Bleeping Ho

Ho Ho Bleeping Ho

It began sometime around two weeks ago.

One of the consultants in the office began a hacking, bronchial cough¹ worthy of a Dickensian consumptive. The sounds were so bad that I was certain he would take a few days off, but he decided to soldier on and the cough has been ringing through the office now for three weeks. In only a week this thoughtless clod had given his disease to the woman in the next cube, who has just returned from maternity leave.

The woman is on the same team I am. I tried to avoid close contact with her mostly because having spent my Thanksgiving in bed sick I had no wish to have my Christmas ruined, and with each hacking roar from her next door neighbor had to restrain myself from walking over to The Clod's desk and explaining the wisdom in taking sick time, even if you have to foot the bill for same from your own consultant-level wages, at blunt instrument point. Surface. Whatever.

My boss didn't help matters. He likes to call meetings on the spur of the moment, too much of a spur to secure an official conference room in which to host it. He gets around this by ingeniously using his office as the location for these meetings. The office can comfortably hold about four people, four people who must be on very friendly terms given the proximity in which they must sit. Meetings of late have involved from seven to nine people (and in one spectacularly bizarre instance, fifteen bewildered people).

I have pointed out in so many words the wisdom of crowding the workforce, sick and well, into tight spaces and forcing them to share air and the aerosol of spittle we each of us produce as a by-product of speaking. I shall from now on be attending such meetings by phone, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

On the 23rd of December, the last work day in our operation before Christmas, the guy in the next cube to me and I began coughing almost simultaneously, suggesting that something had made its way through the A/C system to the register situated over our desks. Whatever the vector, by Christmas Eve I was so ill I had to cut my participation in the traditional Famile Mrs Stevie Xmas Eve Extravaganza very short and go to bed.

This was a bad idea, because although I was sick as a dog and getting sicker with every breath, lying down with this sort of upper respiratory tract infection only makes things worse for me, and in no time I was in for a sleepless night hacking until my throat ruptured and the post nasal drip reduced the entire back of my throat to one huge sore.

Christmas Day was canceled.

We were supposed to wander over to my In-Laws after we'd had at the prezzies under our tree, but I was so ill I begged off for an alternate plan involving lying on the sofa groaning and calculating how far I could push the dosage limits on the old Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu given that I had already redlined the limits on Vicks Dayquil and the even more warning-infested Vicks Nyquil.

The day wore on with the room rocking back and forth ever more violently while I made an attempt on the world record for facial tissue usage and snot production. The cough periodically made its presence known and by the time the afternoon had reached the point at which in the UK the Queen appears on the telly to tell everyone to buck up and stop whining I had pulled all the muscles in my chest, severely limiting my nose-clearing efforts (but not my body's ability to produce nasal mucus).

That night I decided to sleep on the recliner sofa, but I woke up once or twice an hour through the night and hence managed to get precisely no value from this "sleep".

I cannot sleep sitting up, even if that is the only option.

Now the problem with all this was that there was an awful lot of liquid involved, far more than I could comfortably consume. Every time I awoke I would take a couple of mouthfuls of ice-water (or stagger to the kitchen to refill the pint glass with ice and water, then take a couple of mouthfuls of water), and every four hours I would undertake the chemistry set nonsense of turning Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu tablets into Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine.

Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine is an almost-soluble, effervescent product I find efficacious in mitigating the downside of colds and flu-like viruses. One adds two tablets to water, they fizz for a bit and dissolve - mostly. The process can be brought to more full completement by vigorously stirring the mixture until it stops fizzing. I've found it to be a very effective treatment but it is another 4 ounces of liquid.

There was also the matter of the Metamucil fiber product I have to take at least once a day in order for my digestive system to stay in line and not mutiny with extreme prejudice. This is an orange-flavored almost-soluble powder that upon mixing with water produces a suspension of powder in faintly orange-ish tainted water. I've found better solubility can be had by placing the mixture in a Magic Bullet blender and spinning everything for a couple of seconds.

Better solubility does not mean better flavor.

I have, over the course of a few months of this torture come up with the technique of using not water, but a mixture of 50% thin orange juice and 50% water, and blending in the powder. This works, is palatable in the same way orange ice-lollies that contain no hint of real orange are palatable on a hot day when the thirst is on you, and does what it is supposed to do.

But it is another 6-8 ounces of liquid.

Years ago I could put away several pints of beer over a Saturday lunchtime, but now the sheer volume of liquid called for by that program of events is terrifying. I can't get that much through the old kidneys fast enough that I could even make the attempt today so naturally I looked for ways to reduce unnecessary fluid intake during this fluid-intense Christmas.

Back at Thanksgiving I had been in the same bind vis-a-vis liquids and colliding Metamucil and Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu schedules, and had come up with what at the time seemed like the perfect solution - I would combine the two products in one Orangey Drink of Health.

I reasoned thus: I would first produce the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine and stir until all nascent effervescence had been excised from the mixture. I would use this instead of water in my water/juice/Metamucil charge with which I would load the Magic Bullet. Simple. No downside.

I had, of course, neglected to factor in one quite major downside: that this plan was conceived in Mr Brain, and that the proof of concept mental experiments were run in that perfidious organ's grey matter. I have mentioned before that Mr Brain is demonstrably not my friend² and this was not to be an exception to that rule of thumb.

I spent a depressing amount of time stirring the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu mixture to induce all the treacherous carbon dioxide to come out of solution, then added it to the juice and Metamucil and gave the result two seconds in the Magic Bullet.

A sad mistake.

The stupid Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu solids still had some oomph in them and the vigorous swizzling they got in the blender produced enough gas to lock the blender's container onto the cutter base. Indeed, I could see it was about one more swizzle from blowing itself apart. It took a while and many, many class four Words of Power but I finally managed to rotate the base one quarter turn in the "unscrew" direction.

At which point it did blow apart.

This was foremost in what passes for my mind when I concocted the Christmas Day version. First rule was "No Blending of anything that has come into contact with Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine". I would blend the Metamucil with the juice, then add the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine, pre-dissolved and fizzless. The result would be stirred, not blended.

This plan was carried out as the kitchen reeled and span around me and there was no problem with exploding blenders. There was however a problem in that Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine is all-but immiscible with a suspension of Metamucil in orange juice. Drinking this while all visual stimuli were urging reverse peristalsis in the most strident tones was...challenging. I would go into more detail, but I'm half-convinced I hallucinated the worst parts.

Boxing day was spent feeling horrible. My headache vied with my pulled muscles for who got second billing to the throat. I was now at the point of adding a shot of Southern Comfort to both the juice/Metamucil concoction and the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine.

And then it began snowing.

It snowed all Boxing Day, all that night and all this morning. This was made infinitely more inconvenient by sustained winds of 40 mph gusting to about twice that. By morning there were over 7000 reported power outages on Long Island and the TV morning news programs were begging people to stay home.

This was made even easier for me by the LIRR, who sensibly shut down, abandoning only the bare minimum of poor bastards to the unheated facilities unequipped with so much as drinking water that pass as waiting rooms on that blighted mass transit abortion. There was an actual American Red Cross mercy mission to Hicksville in order to prevent someone proving that if no-one makes any effort to make things otherwise we live in a world still capable of killing people the same way it did in the Dark Ages - with weather.

I felt well enough to beak out Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness and clean out driveway around 11 am, once the snow had stopped and the wind had dropped. The kid from across the street offered to use "a bigger snowblower" on my drive for me, but I declined, reasoning that there were enough blocked driveways to go around. No sooner was our driveway looking clear than this same kid asked me if I could help him and his brother clear his own driveway! I would have offered anyway so I said I would and did, during which time they disappeared out of theater. Once I had cleared their drive (a little miffed that I had been left to do the job alone, I admit) I did the Singh's driveway as best I could, then nipped down the road to help Pedro and Mike with their drives³.

And so to lunch, and an all-afternoon session with my Jeeves and Wooster DVDs⁴.

1. I used to get these regularly as a side benefit of my pack-a-day cigarette habit. The sound of the tubes in the lungs abrading destructively against themselves is one of the most easily identified sounds in my sound memory bank↑
2. And hasn't been for much longer than I suspected when I began writing The Occasional Stevie. Going over all the shenanigans that that miserable brain has set me up for by denying me access to intelligence at key moments of my life has revealed a most insidious pattern. How could I, a chemistry student, have not known that adding Magnesium powder to Ammonium Dichromate would result in a rather weak but still powerful Thermite recipe? Only by having the image of the Periodic Table blanked from my consciousness during this sorry business, that's how. The relationship between Chromium, Oxygen and Magnesium is obvious just by looking at the Periodic Table (at least, the one I used to use; the new one is daft) which was, after all, designed to help spot and avoid accidental stuff like this.↑
3. Mike called to say that the same kid had offered to clear his drive for cash but had never appeared↑
4. A present↑

No Title, No Content

So I looked out of the bathroom window this morning and saw it was snowing.

It didn't stay round for long, but yesterday it was warm enough to go without a jacket and today it's brass monkey weather.

It's like the world decided to give Fall a miss and go straight from summer to winter.

Agony! Much More Painful Than Yours!

So on Thursday night I started to feel a pain in my lower right abdomen.

I assumed it was just gas, a side-effect of the Metamucil-rich diet Doc Rubberglove insists I partake of, but it didn't stop on Friday, it just got steadily worse until I called Doc Rubberglove's office and begged to be seen.

The trip back onto the island was pure hell, made infinitely worse by the LIRR calling for me to switch trains at Jamaica onto one which started at Penn Station loaded to 150% of its seating capacity. By the time I got to Wyandanch station I was almost in tears.

Doc Rubberglove took one look, gave a grunt of surprise, said "you look really ill, does it hurt when I do this?"

When his hearing had returned somewhat he yelled "It might be appendicitis!", took a quick look at his inch-thick liability insurance policy, hustled me into his own car and drove me to the Emergency Room thereby cutting through about four hours of red tape and getting me to someone with needles and blood-drawing gear in about half an hour. Mrs Stevie hove into theater during the lengthy triage process.

There a man who told me he used to be an electrician but found that people wouldn't pay him on time attempted to mount a hep-lock in the back of my hand and use it to draw blood. The pain of this process was enough to drive the pain coming from my lower bowel from my head and cause me to pass out for a few seconds. While I was out, Mrs Stevie used the opportunity to tell everyone how I'd passed out some years ago when giving blood.

This was a base calumny. I had not passed out. I had told the staff to hide from my sight the bottle steadily filling with my blood as it rocked back and forth on a small device to mix anticoagulants into it, because I thought I might faint. The two other guys I was with had laughed at my squeamishness and called me names. Then with perfect timing one of them took a good look at his rocking bottle o' blood, let out a quavering moan and passed out. Then his muscles relaxed in such a fashion that it took the staff about thirty minutes to clean up the place and he was disinvited from giving blood there ever again. While I and the other guy were waiting for him to regain enough strength to start attempting the commute from the World Trade Center to Penn Station we discussed the problems of navigating a partially disabled person with questionable control of his sphincter musculature through the public transportation system of Manhattan during rush hour. As we pondered the best course of action, a thin, wavering, reedy voice came from behind a screen: "You go on, lads. I'll be alright." I waited about a microsecond for him to request a service revolver and one round before we left, then burst into gales of helpless laughter.

That is what happened that day.

When I woke up the hep-lock agonizer said "So, I hear you fainted the last time you gave blood."

"What? No! It was the other guy who fainted!" I yelled, then screamed as the reflex to sit up to make my point had induced the original reason for my being there.

Doc Rubberglove hove into view. "Does it still hurt when I do this?" he asked, and there followed a couple of minutes of nurses, doctors and patients staggering around clutching their bleeding ears and moaning quietly.

I was made to pee in a jar, then to carry the jar around with me for an hour or so as I was moved hither and yon, ending up in a rather nice, quiet abdominal ER with three patients and about six nursing staff in it.

A very attractive nurse gave me a cup of ice and a bottle of contrast fluid, told me to drink it as quickly as I could and remarked in passing "So, you fainted when you last gave blood?"

"What? No! It was the other guy! I didn't faint!" I yelled as she injected my IV line with something that began with "Z", had four syllables and made my head feel like I'd drunk a pint of Bacardi white rum.

A doctor hove into view. "You don't want to chug that" he said. "Drink it slowly so it spreads out. So, I hear you faint when you give blood."

"Whu? Nnnw. Wuz ovva guy whut fainted." I was having trouble getting my eyes to point in the same direction by then.

"He doesn't give blood anyway" sniffed Mrs Stevie. "He has Mad Cow disease."

"D'n't! Tha's lie! 've g't Prius. Mebbe!" now the stuff that began with "Z" had reduced the pain in my bowels to tolerable levels, everyone around me was attempting to induce a pain a bit lower down. It was all very trying.

"Have you finished that drink yet?" asked the nice nurse who had given me the stuff that started with "Z".

"Doc told me to slow down" I replied.

"Well, the faster you finish the faster we get you into the cat scan and figure out what the hell is wrong with you" she said.

So I chugged it down

Meanwhile, Doc Rubberglove (who has privileges at this hospital) was dictating his notes on my case into a small recording device. I only caught part of it. The part that went "...fainted when giving blood some years before".

Damn that woman!

Another nurse, this one a male biker with a mohawk and tattoos hove into view and demanded more blood. As he was inserting the needle in my arm (the hep-lock was in use) he said "You're the fainter, yeah?"

"B'g p'dun?" I mumbled, attempting to make sense of the world through stuff-that-starts-with-Z-addled senses.

"You faint when you give blood. Everyone says so"

"Whut? No! Wuz other guy!"

"Nope, it was you. I was there" said the ex-electrician as he walked by.

"No! Other time! Not me!"

"I think he's having a reaction to the stuff that starts with "Z"" opined the biker, drawing the thirteenth test-tube full of blood.

Eventually, just as the stuff that begins with "Z" was wearing off I was wheeled down to two guys dressed in black who ran the Cat Scanner. They made me pull down my trousers and lie on a table with my hands on my head, then, just as they were about to start the machine one said "So, I hear you fainted when you gave blood"

"Which time?" I demanded. "Yes I fainted this evening because of all the agony I'm experiencing but no I didn't when I gave blood. That was the other guy!"

The noise of the cat scanner's recorded voice drowned out the last part of my outraged cries but not the unseemly sniggers of the two goths in the control room.

I'd been back in the ER about ten minutes when the nice nurse who gave me the stuff that starts with "Z" told me I was going home because I didn't have appendicitis. This she relayed as "good news". No, what I had was something called "Epiploic Appendagitis" which feels as bad as appendicitis but instead of being susceptible to surgery and quick pain relief it is what doctors call "self-limiting", which is a fifty dollar phrase for "gets better on its own" over an indeterminate number of days but so far longer than four.

Good news indeed, just not for me.

Extreme Weather As Enjoyed While Attempting To Commute On The Bloody Long Island Rail Road

About two weeks ago or so I was getting ready to leave for my train when foul weather on steroids blew into Brooklyn.

It was quite a sight from the 15th floor. The windows suddenly turned opaque as fog engulfed us followed by a hailstorm, which tapered off to torrential rain that kept me pinned inside long enough to miss my 6:04 pm train from Atlantic Terminal¹, now the only straight through train from Brooklyn to Ronkonkoma².

"No problem" I thought to myself. "I'll wait til this lot lets up a bit, then sprint for the A train to Penn Station and commute from there."

Which is what I did, or tried to do. When I got to Penn Station it was a scene out of some apocalypse movie³ with people packed shoulder to shoulder in every available space. There must've been at least two thousand heads I could see and that was just the in main concourse. And more people were pouring in at a rate of about two hundred ever minute or so as the subway cars emptied out.

The announcement that was being fed to everyone went as follows: "Due to a tree coming down on the tracks east of the tunnels all service out of Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal has been suspended". Periodically they added Jamaica to the list of places trains were not running from. The announcer went on to suggest everyone use the E train, but since the only point to that would be to go to Jamaica and she had told us there were no trains running out of that god-forsaken place no-one was eager to try it as an option.

The irony here is that what the LIRR announcer wasn't telling us was the most useful piece of information: that it wasn't "a" tree but about half the trees in Brooklyn that had been uprooted by tornadoes and flung onto the permanent⁴ way. Had that been said we would have been able to properly assess the commute situation and react accordingly, but we were dealing with the bloody Long Island Rail Road here and they have a policy of not passing on timely, accurate information⁵.

I have no idea why the bloody LIRR cannot get a bleeping grip when it comes to giving their customers information that will help them draw informed conclusions about their commute. Derailments that will take hours to rectify are called "Disabled Trains" which I'll grant is accurate as far as it goes but since they class every involuntarily motionless train as a "Disabled Train" is too broad a category to be actually useful to someone who wants to know whether they should plan on getting home or getting a hotel room. Describing the total devastation the trackbed had suffered that day as "a tree" was about as much use as a ham sandwich at a Jewish wedding.

Back to the scene of the crime.

I stood for an hour or so, wondering to myself how hard it would have been to spread the word across the MTA as a whole and, for example, start marshaling the subway trains so they didn't dump hundreds of people every minute into the mix. I mean, they are all supposed to be the same organization for bleeps sake. The incompetence in this lack of preparation alone is staggering. MTA bigwigs stand around spouting about the advisability of increasing the technology in stations by deploying cameras but they haven't fully realized the potential of the phone network and the PA systems they already have and have had for decades. We'll see how this stupidity was to spread the fallout to as many people as possible (presumably the MTA was working on the principle that if everyone was inconvenienced, when the average reaction of the public to their "solutions" was worked out it would be spread so thin it would actually make them look good.

Stupid bleepers.

I walked onto the E train platform and was confronted by a crowd even more dense, if that is possible, than was clogging Penn Station in a fire marshal's nightmare. It didn't help that the uptown E platform opens onto Penn in a chicane that is about two people wide. If people had panicked there would have been a people fall of bodies onto the trackbed. It was terrifying to see, let alone attempt to get past.

Once I managed to board a train to Jamaica along with several hundred others, packing the car shoulder to shoulder with literally no space between us, we set off and I started to observe through the windows the effect that the lack of any sort of integrated problem resolution was having.

You see, most of the people in the stations downstream from Penn Station, places like Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, are simply trying to get from one part of metro New York (where they work) to another (where they live). Imagine their surprise when their train pulls up, the doors open and there is no way anyone can board because people seem to be making some sort of attempt to get into the Guinness book of records. Imagine how their surprise turns first to puzzlement, then annoyance, then outright rage as train after train after train pulls this stupid trick.

It was obvious no-one waiting at the stations knew what was going on because they were beginning to shout to the crushed, sweating and extremely grumpy people in the trains, asking what the bleep was going on? Naturally, these requests were answered with irony most of the time - usually "Who the bleep knows?"

Now some of those travelers made very determined attempts to board, and fights were only an open door away most of the trip.

I'll break here to suggest that it might have made sense for the Subway part of the MTA to coordinate with the bloody LIRR part and inform everyone at the stations along the path what the hell was going on, along with advice on how to go about mitigating the lesser hell of the stranded subway commuter. Furthermore, it might have made sense to run trains that did not stop at Penn Station on the downtown side so that there would at least be a chance that the local commuters got some sort of service.

It beggars my imagination that for all the bleeping talk the movers and shakers spout about preparedness in New York, a basic plan for moving people in the event the subway was pressed into service in this fashion is still, obviously not in place. I mean, what would happen in the event of a terrorist attack⁶ removed Penn Station as a commuting option? It boggles the mind to think how empty the talk of preparedness is as demonstrated that day.

Back to the scene of the crime.

We eventually got to Sutphin Boulevard, the E train stop at Jamaica. It is a voluminous station with cathedral ceilings and wide, long platforms. What it doesn't have is an adequate number of stairways and escalators to evacuate the occupants of those platforms to the upper station before the next train disgorges another few hundred into the mix.

Or tries to.

Luckily I was let out right by a staircase and so was able to ascend straight away at the shuffling pace of the crowd. As I did, I looked back. The people at the rear of the platform were standing still, and judging by their expressions had been doing so for some time. A riot in the making right there.

Once in the upper station it became apparent that the same design criteria for the stairwells from he platform had been used for the street exit, to which two policemen were inexpertly directing people to use by shouting at them.

I have found over the last 26 years that when it comes to the bloody LIRR there is no situation so bleeped-up that the NYC police cannot make infinitely worse by the attitude they bring to the stranded, uninformed commuters simply trying to get home despite the bloody LIRR.

Better yet, no police had been posted at the top of the stairs to tell people not to try pushing their way down the jam-packed staircases (you have to tell New Yorkers this even if the evidence of their own eyes is that doing so would be a monumental waste of time and moreover a threat to their lives because here in what is reportedly the most cosmopolitan city in the world people are dumber than the stuff that comes out of a cow's rear end). This meant that the cops were screaming in both directions. The upshot of this was that no-one was paying attention to them at all.

Which made them shout louder

I finally got to the street and ran along the face of Jamaica LIRR station looking on the nice new video boards that adorn the staircases up to the platforms for a likely train East, and found a Huntington train was boarding from one side of a platform and a Babylon train from the other. Either would get me out of this hell to somewhere I could apply money to get me back to my car in Wyandanch.

The Huntington train was packed so full that there was literally no room to board any of the cars, and the Babylon train was almost at that stage, so I jumped aboard the latter and found a place in the plenum up against a wall so I could at least lean against it. It was by then about 8:15 pm and the train was posted to leave at 8:10 pm ⁷ but as I looked at the new-fangled train destination display hanging from the station canopy the time changed to 8:20 pm.

More people got on, until at 8:20 the doors closed. We were, by then, packed nose-to-nose.

Five minutes later the time on the board changed to 8:40 pm and the doors opened again.

more people pushed their way aboard and some inside pushed back. Arguments began in each doorway. Because the train was on a single track, there were platforms on both sides of the train and the doors on each side were opening in order to double the chances of violence breaking out. There were, of course, no police officers to be seen.

At a few minutes before 9 pm a man in a suit began remonstrating with everyone that he could see a gap in the trains crowd and if everyone would just move he could get in. Some pointed out that the "gap" he could see was in fact merely a gap in the sea of heads caused by three women who had decided to sit on the floor⁸ but he didn't believe them. Then he forced his way into the train despite being told there was no room, with the result that he was squashed into the corner formed by the closing door and a bulkhead.

The train finally moved.

The seemingly endless trip to Babylon was spiced up for me by the agonizing pains in my legs (my sciatica had kicked in about 15 minutes before the troublesome man got on) and the repeated plaints from the troublesome man that we could all move back and give him more room. By now everyone was telling him to please be quiet. As we were leaving Jamaica (finally) a train pulled into the station from the West. Somehow he got the idea trains had been running from Penn Station, the clear implication being that all these people were being idiots by coming to Jamaica for no reason and crowding him out of a seat. The announcements that could clearly be heard contradicting this view had no impact on his stream of whining. Soon the idea seemed to morph into one in which this train had started life at Penn Station. Why this made any difference was lost on me, but it annoyed the living crap out of everyone.

The train gradually emptied out as we made local stop after local stop until I could, with thee stops to go before journey's end, get a seat. Already sitting was The Whiner who was still asking everyone who would acknowledge him whether or not they had boarded at Penn Station. Every single person who responded did so with some variation of "Of course not! There aren't any trains coming out of Penn tonight", but he seemed to believe everyone had formed a conspiracy to conceal the truth from him.

As I say, a night for madness.

Eventually I got to Babylon where Mrs Stevie would pick me up, but she got a minor dose of the same idiocy I had been subject to: it took her three times longer than usual to make the journey because some idiot was giving someone else a tow, would not exceed 20 mph and would not pull over to let the mile-long jam of traffic behind him subside a bit.

I took Friday off.

1. or Flatbush Avenue as it used to be called before they spent a fortune in granite wall panels for it↑
2. Yes, no sooner had they spent all that cash on the station than they canceled most of the useful trains running in and out of the damn thing. This is probably, in the convoluted thinking of the bloody Long Island Rail Road, a great way to save money on station maintenance↑
3. I am not kidding: I saw the same scene in "2012" when people were futilely attempting to get onto the arks↑
4. Ha↑
5. Unless Amtrack equipment is to blame. Then you get encyclopedic updates every four and a half seconds↑
6. The catch-all disaster role-playing scenario of choice for NY emergency services these days↑
7. This makes sense when you calculate the times by the secret formula used by the bloody LIRR dispatchers. To decode it you need imaginary numbers in order to schedule imaginary trains↑
8. Madness, but it was a night made for the mad↑

Good Grief, Look At All These Cobwebs!

Things have been a bit hectic around Chateau Stevie of late and this has precluded my posting for a while. Sorry. I know here are tens of thousands to whom The Occasional Stevie is nothing if not nothing. Then there's the three people who read it.

To them I offer this promise: That the incompetence of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road, which reached epic proportions last month, shall not go undocumented in my usual neutral style, nor shall they be spared a single drop of my righteous vitriol.

The Tediousness of the Tedious Tedium

So having moved my entire electronic life onto this laptop, I now have to move it off again so it can go back to Dell to have the cracked casing element replaced.

I haven't had time until now to actually start the process (I got the mailer box to send the computer to Texas in over four weeks ago) but now have begun checking all the various websites that will have to be used in order to re-establish the things I'll have to clean off the hard drive before I return the computer (Dell staff now having a name for trustworthiness second only to the KGB after a handful of very public breaches of trust).

Then, of course, three weeks ago the tower unit that will become once again my digital home blew one of its hard drives (for which it transpired we had no proper backup) so it is limping with broken registry references and shortcuts to nowhere. Spiffy. Let's hope the "factory reset" process is relatively painless.

Ha.

Just When It Can't Get Any Worse, It Does

Just when I am at a low point, with the damage to my left shoulder proving unsusceptible to physiotherapy and a cough I caught last weekend ripping my throat apart, life deals me a joker.

Again.

For the last two nights, at around 2am, I have been woken up from my agonised dreams of being pursued by gangs of crazed football referees with whistle-mania by an insistent chirping.

A cricket has moved into my bedroom heating baseboard.

Tapping Into My Inner Rage

I decided on Friday evening that I would have to do something about the leaky bath taps in our upstairs bathroom, since the steady drip I had grown to loathe had now turned into a most healthy (and costly ) dribble.

I couldn't remember how the taps came apart even though I could vaguely recall replacing the hot tap mechanism some years ago. The taps in question are decades-old "Delta" type remote faucets, an interesting design that puts the actual internal workings of the taps inside the wall, typically just out of reach of the typical human finger. I was also concerned, for reasons I won't go into now, about mould forming in the walls and so I though I'd remove one wall tile by cutting the wallboard behind it with my Dremel Tool configured as a rotary saw, and e-acquaint myself with the wheres and whyfores of the taps mechanism with a quick eyeballing. I was confident that I would be able to replace this tile-shaped section of wall with reasonable ease.

Since this would be a relatively quick job¹ I turned off the water to the whole house using my Stevie-installed nifty ball-valve shut-offs. Then I removed the tap handles, the little square lead adapter blocks that allow one to fit taps handles with splines to faucet stems with a flat key, unscrewed the chromed cylinders that encase the remote faucet internal mechanism, pulled out the remote extender spindles and grabbed the Dremel for some quick and easy wall segment removal.

Naturally the Dremel tool bit was wider than the inter-tile gap and thus couldn't be used.

Nor could I find my large razor saw, my backup tool of choice² and so I came up with the Other Other Plan, in which I would employ my scroll-saw to do the job.

It turns out that a scroll saw is manifestly unsuited to the job of removing a section of tile-encrusted wall without damaging the tile, and it cracked in two places and chipped in two more before I had the thing in my left hand while I swore into the hole in the wall.

It was then a simple matter to divine the tap-innard removal technique: Re-insert the 3 inch screw that holds the tap handles to the mechanism and pull.

I went out to Arse Hardware and got a "replacement" fitting that looked similar³ for both the hot and cold taps and returned home for the final fitting.

I pushed the new fitting into place but it wouldn't seat. I removed it and compared the length, diameter and outline with the old fitting, and re-fit the old fitting just to check I wasn't going mad. The old one slipped in easily. The new one couldn't be persuaded to seat down no matter how hard or with what I belted it.

I felt around inside the bronze fitting, which was when a little cap of rubber and a small spring fell out. Here was another piece of the puzzle, a spring-loaded seat for the faucet mechanism I was unaware of, but for which I had replacement parts for in the new mechanism's packaging. Bonus!

I carefully assembled the little spring and rubber cap from the new pieces I had, and attempted to fit them into the tiny hole set into the back of the bronze fitting. It turned out to be nigh-impossible to do without some fourth-level Words of Power delivered in a loud, high-pitched shriek of rage. Extinguishing the small fires my language had started in the wall insulation - some sort of asbestos-wool/sheep's hide composite from the look of it that probably dated from around the time plains apes were belting each other round the head with antelope thigh bones in front of a giant oblong monolith - I again attempted to fit the mechanism into the housing, but it would not cooperate.

Realising that Mrs Stevie was about to reappear in theater, I dashed downstairs and attempted to isolate the upstairs plumbing from the rest of the house using two pre-Stevie installed handwheels. If Mrs Stevie came home to no water there would be hell to pay.

The reason I didn't use these handwheels to shut off only the upstairs water is that they are situated in an awkward place and are difficult to activate. The cold one is easily reached by entering the two-foot space between the laundry room and the basement wall and reaching up and around some piping - the handwheel is in an access space in the laundry room wall itself. The hot line is controlled by a handwheel that is situated right over the laundry room wall in that same access space, but due to some bizarre design ethic employed by the original plumber, points directly towards a large iron wastepipe and is thus most difficult to turn in any way, shape or form without a Stillson's pipewrench. Not only that, the pipewrench is needed to cinch down the wheels of both taps because they don't make good seals (and I don't have the room to take them apart and make them work properly) and the pipewrench is quite difficult to maneuver in that tight space. It is all very tiresome.

However, I did get the wheels cinched closed and turned the water back on just as Mrs Stevie came home.

Pausing only to drink twice my weight in orange juice and ginger ale I then removed another section of wall over the hot tap since if I was going to replace the little spring and cap in that tap I would need to be able to get my finger down inside the fitting and I couldn't do that with the wall in the way. This naturally cracked another tile, and the struggle to get the replacement bits in the tiny hole they were "designed" for was, if anything, even more protracted than with the cold tap. Just for giggles I tried to fit the mechanism that would not go into the cold tap fitting into the hot side.

It fit perfectly.

This caused me to waste another 15 minutes attempting to fit the second replacement mechanism into the cold fitting, but to no avail. I pulled it out and carefully catalogued the differences between it and the one that came out earlier that day. There were some, but nothing I could see that would cause the thing to not fit at all.

So I hurtled off in the Steviemobile in an attempt to find a real plumbing supply place that was a) in existence and 2) open at 4:30 pm on a Saturday. In this there were two factors working against me: The almost complete absence of plumbing supply stores in the aftermath of Home Despot and Blowes and what few there were left close typically at 1pm or 2pm on a Saturday (which is part of the reason they are almost all gone of course).

I found Vic's Plumbing Supply and Taxidermy on Sunrise Highway was still in business, but not at 4pm, Vic being of the 2pm school of Saturday closing thought.

So I stopped off at the nearby Blowes and half-heartedly took a look at what they had to offer. And they had an almost identical "drop in replacement" for my fitting, so I bought it and made my way home to the accompaniment of the low-gas light flashing on and off on the Steviemobile's dashboard. "It doesn't get any better than this" I thought.

The fitting did fit, didn't leak and worked as expected when I turned the water back on. The new fitting, however, had a bizarre operational mode. When I turned it on a little, it poured out hot water. When I opened it full, the water delivery rate dropped to about half. I looked at my watch and declared myself finished for the day, blanked off the hole in the wall with plastic taped to the tiles, had a shower and refused to talk to anyone for the rest of the evening.

On Sunday I went back to Blowes and bought another of the "drop in" replacement fittings, returned home and swapped it for the one I put in the day before. It worked, but the tap was working backwards.

This is an annoying feature of the design - you can use the same fitting to install regular capstan-type handles which you crank anti-clockwise to operate, or to install the L-shaped handles that you twist inward (usually) to get water, which involves one faucet opening anti-clockwise and the other opening clockwise. It is all in how you put in the mechanism, which can be installed with the cam on the right or the cam on the left.

I can never remember which way is which and the result of that had been 15 years of weird taps in the upstairs bathroom⁴ that had to be rotated in opposite directions to get water out of them. I had vowed to correct this lamentable state of affairs with this job and so had to descend two flights of stairs, turn off the water, ascend two flights of stairs, dismantle the faucet, rotate the mechanism 180 degrees, reassemble the faucet, descend two flights of stairs, turn the water on again, ascend two flights of stairs and re-test the whole thing. It worked.

So it was then a "simple" matter of replacing the bits of wall. this was achieved with the aid of some lengths of wood glued across the hole with five minute epoxy to which the tile-bearing wall sections were in turn glued. Once that had set up, I re-grouted and went downstairs for dinner.

Another weekend I'll never get back.

1. Hah!↑
2. It reappeared in theater five minutes after I had finished the job, as expected↑
3. but not absolutely identical it turned out↑
4. The last time I had done this job the Stevieling was still in a car-seat. We still speak of the time I had driven everyone around trying to get a replacement fitting for the one that had been fired across the bathroom in a spectacular failure during Mrs Stevie's shower. Failing to secure one all morning I had taken them all to lunch. On the way home, driving down Sunrise Highway I saw another Home Despot and pulled into the lot. The Stevieling, who was too young to read at that time, saw the distinctive orange sign, and in a tone of disbelief and disgust thundered "This again?!! I responded in placating tones, saying "Honey, I have to find the part for the faucet". She, with almost prescient perspicacity said "You know they're not gonna have it!", and she was absolutely right. They didn't↑

More Madness, LIRR-Style

So this morning I get to my station and, unsure as to the scheduling situation vis-a-vis rail-mounted public transport-wise, I looked to the electronic announcement displays installed last year at a cost of Azathoth-Nose to see what the LIRR can tell me with regard to train times.

All I could see was "Wyandanch" blinking on and off about once a second.

Call me Susan but if you are standing on a station platform of a morning and don't know which one despite the big tin signs riveted to the handrails every 100 feet or so, then you should just give it up.

More money poured into the Pit O' Waste there, then.

Another Round To The Bloody Long Island Rail Road

Stop me if you've heard this one

It seems there was this signalbox that had somehow, in the welter of moneyspending that had gone on in the last 25 years had not been modernized much. It still used some sort of comical pneumatic system installed during Warren Gamaliel Harding's administration¹ to work the points and signals and other froofaraw that a railway needs to direct trains through complicated junctions, and they don't come much more complicated than Jamaica (not the good one) where eight lines enter, eight lines leave and in between they can all be cross connected in about 14 bajillion different configurations. Want to send that train that normally stops on track eight to track one? Pushpushpresstwiddle, hishisshissphut! Job done, 23 Skiddoo!².

There was plenty of wiring in there too, connected in some arcane way to the Magnificent Air-Organ of Train Steerage, but I'm not sure what role it played other a demonstrably important one. Some of his wiring was of the hand-extruded, lizard-hide insulated kind fitted personally by Thomas Edison, but at least one was of the newer, "better" machine made plastic coated stuff all we Electrical Savants know and love.

Perplexingly, one Monday, it came to pass that it was this newer, "better" wire that caught fire.

The fire was extinguished in a matter of minutes, but by then the stalwart damage Crews of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road had gotten stuck in and declared a state of emergency, shutting down the entire network. Management than went into crisis mode as they had done so many times before and began sequestering information so that the commuters who were against all reason cramming into Penn Station trying to get home would be able to swelter shoulder to shoulder with like minded free-thinkers in an atmosphere of ignorance for hours.

Well, luck wasn't with the LIRR that day because those same commuters, who should have fallen on bended knee and thanked their various Gods, both benevolent and squamous, for this their gift of a chance to stew for hours in the damp air breathed before by about two thousand people, instead began speaking to the press, opining that in their view said railroad personnel could not for the life of them find their own rear ends with both hands, a map and a top of the line GPS navigation system.

So enraged were the LIRR at this lack of proper fawning that they sent in a spokesman of their own, who stood in front of a camera, "explained" the problem ("the railroad is broken" is a rough paraphrase of his statement) then dodged all questions about why there is no backup system, why the equipment was so easily damaged as to cripple the entire railroad³ and why no-one felt moved to instigate railroad-to-paying⁵-passengers lines of communication, that last a constant feature of all LIRR problems-in-progress. Why the idiots in charge of the LIRR can't get a bleeping clue on this one is beyond me. Any problem on the railroad is made infinitely worse by them not uttering a single sound as to what is wrong and, more importantly, how long it will take them to get one home.

Now your humble scribe dodged this particular bullet by virtue of the fact that he spent the weekend running role-playing games at a local Gaming Convention and had taken Monday off to recuperate, the old manly juices not running so wild as they once did and stuff like this taking a toll on the old constitution⁶.

On Tuesday I attempted a commute, but gave up when most of my morning trains failed to show up. It seemed that the LIRR wasn't done with this particular silliness. Luckily I was not needed at work, so I took the day off and went back to bed in disgust.

Today the LIRR is still in turmoil, and failed totally to move me from A to B successfully, which wouldn't have been so bad if someone hadn't boarded the train at Hicksville who sat opposite me, announced he was a member of the "tea party"⁷ and spent the trip between there and Merillon Avenue trying to get me to agree that everything he was yelling about was right.

Before this event I was tollerant of the (to me delusional) views of this mostly right wing conservative action group, but now I feel they must be stamped on out.

This man knew everything. Socialized medicine was bad and I was an idiot if I didn't see that (no point pointing out that as I had lived both with and without socialized medicine and he demonstrably had not he was in no position to be lecturing me as to it's utility or workability). Canadians were swarming over the border to use up all the healthcare in America. I asked him to explain to me how that worked, and before he could launch into his set speech (derived from Pa Bush's counter-Clinton election soundbites) I pointed out the obvious absurdity of a people who had perfectly good healthcare paid for out of their taxes crossing a border to use an overpriced healthcare system they'd have to pay for out of pocket. He responded by yowling that he'd never mentioned Canadians and called me a "Liberal".

Presumably he would have started in on Mexicans if I hadn't waved my hands and said firmly that I was done talking with him. He tried several times to re-engage but I repulsed all his advances. I don't mind being called "liberal", but when someone in this country calls anyone "a Liberal" all further discussion is futile as they have put their opponent in a box that contains everything that person personally believes is Wrong With America.

When I meet people like this I like to draw them into discussions of the economy (Obama's Fault for not fixing same, of course) and then point out that the last time my investments made any sort of real money was under Clinton, and that under G.W.B.'s stewardship my savings would have been safer if I had put them in a shoebox under my bed and then set fire to my house. The kicker is that the figures can't be argued with, and it drives conservatives, most of whom are Republican voters, up the wall.

To point out that it only takes a second to smash up a car but it takes hours to fix it again is lost on such people who refuse to accept that the country was mismanaged for years and badly mismanaged for the last six of the Bush administration.

I arrived at work to find a gajillion nagging e-mails from various people wondering why I wasn't answering their previous e-mail. Since I had had a particularly aggressive session with a physical therapist that morning I was in no mood to coddle whiners and dealt with them accordingly. Amongst those e-mails was a demand for a status report on a project it is almost impossible to work on owing to the pressures of other stuff.

Next I was summoned to a meeting that made toothache look interesting. This had the usual effect on my bowels so I ran to the gentlemen's rest room and public trash heap. Some days just entering this room is enough to persuade me never to shake hands again. I raced to a stall, grabbed a paper seat-cover and tugged it to release it from its cardboard dispensing box. It tore in half, the box shifted inside the in-wall metal box container and it dropped out of sight into the depths of the wall cavity with a hollow "bong!". I could see it was going to be a good day.

I didn't get lunch on account of whiners taking up all my time. I did manage to deliver a rush job to a developer, who thanked me by asking about two items I had been specifically told not to discuss with him by my ultraboss. This put me in a hard place since I had already engaged with this developer on the items in question before the ultraboss had decided to intervene, and was also doing other sanctioned stuff the ultraboss had demanded be given Top Priority for him. It was impossible to play dead on the other two issues so I simply replied to everyone in the world with a terse statement that the issues were under review.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this will please no-one and result in a shirtstorm from both sides aimed at my desk, so I have only one course of action tomorrow.

Take another day off.

1. 1920 for those too bone-idle to look it up↑
2. Which raises the question as to why simple train breakdowns bring the entire shooting match to a standstill time after time. No man knoweth the reason↑
3. A lie of the most blatant stripe. the Port Washington line was unaffected. On account of it not going anywhere near Jamaica (NTGO⁴)↑
4. Not The Good One↑
5. Through the nose↑
6. Though strength, wisdom, dexterity, intelligence and charisma were unaffected. Ahahahahaha↑
7. A so-called "grass-roots" movement that sprang up in the aftermath of the Obama election win and which has a few good points to bring up hidden amongst a pile of trash-talk that obscures the real issues under anti-Obama rhetoric so virulent I have to wonder if this country has gone anywhere towards racial acceptance in the last fifty years↑

Laptop Annoyance Rant Number 1

When I got my new lappy, it had what looked like a crease in the thin plastic veneer that surrounds the screen.

Not a big deal, cosmetic, not noticeable. Last night the corner of the screen applique fell off in my hand. So, a crack, not a crease, then.

I attempted first to use the manufacturers website to initiate the warranty service for this obvious manufacturing defect. Lest you suspect me of throwing the machine around and chipping bits off it, an examination of the case will show even the most suspicious person that this machine has been coddled, carried everywhere in a padded briefcase purpose made for the business of not damaging laptops, and that it hasn't been dropped or had something dropped on it.

I wasn't concerned I could be held culpable.

The website had many links. What it didn't have was a "Warranty Replacement" link, so I attempted to email the problem to them using a link it took only ten minutes to find. The link didn't launch any sort of email client or page, but did pop up a JavaScript-driven window to collect the service tag number, which was duly filled in. However, on clicking "next", nothing happened.

A quick examination showed the dreaded "JavaScript error on page" message in the status bar, so I attempted to re-do it all using FireFox just in case it was an IE flavor of JavaScript issue.

Imagine my joy when a message informing me that the JavaScript "applet" would "only run properly" in IE. More ammunition for my grass-roots web experience improvement movement GROUJN¹ right there then.

So it was off to the tech support chat page, which wanted to download an active X control and we all know that is a path to three hours you never get back, so I bit the bullet and called the phone number listed.

And dealt with the ultra annoying "helpful" recorded messages telling me I could probably fix my problem faster by using the webpage to email or chat it away. And waited. And waited. And got through only to have the call dropped the moment a human being spoke.

So I called again, was annoyed by bots again only to be told there were extended delays due to call volumes. So I gave up.

This morning I went through it all again, with the added frisson that the infuriating phonebot couldn't understand my "rapid response number" and so directed me into a five minute maze of irrelevant Q&A before connecting me to the recorded advice about webpages and emailing again.

And Got through, and was redirected to another recorded voice telling me to reboot the computer and see if that would fix the problem (unlikely, but I was getting to the point it almost made sense to try).

And got through to a "technician" who insisted I run a hidden low-level diagnostic that showed me colored bars and asked me if I could see them, and then made some loud beeps so that everyone would know what I was doing, and finally ran a twelve minute memory test.

I asked, bewildered, why we were going through this. The technician said "Believe me, it's necessary".

The test completed with a query as to whether I wanted to run 35 minutes more of memory tests just as he came back on the line and told me he had spoken to his supervisor and I was to return the computer. I asked again why the tests on the memory and disks had been "necessary", and inquired if it was because they thought I had dropped the computer. The technician said that it wouldn't matter if I had since I had paid for a warranty that was good for damage due to dropping.

So the necessity of the test was to give me something to watch while he did whatever he was doing.

And now I won't have my computer just in time for an event for which I would probably be using the computer more in those three days than in the three months since it was delivered.

This reminds me of the Jeep I once owned; whenever the weather was of the sort that four wheel drive was actually necessary as opposed to merely being extra weight to be lugged around at 12 miles to the gallon, the damned thing was in for repairs.

1. Get Rid Of Useless² JavaScript Now!↑
2. I realize putting "useless" and "JavaScript" in the same phrase is redundant↑

Now That's A Pretty Song

"Daddy's Here" from the album Spiral Staircase by Ralph McTell.

This early McTell album has a number of good tracks on it, but is usually noted for kicking-off with the original, unorchestrated version of "Street of London". His voice isn't as strong as it would later become and falters on a couple of tracks, but that doesn't detract from the genrally high quality of the work.

Nestled in the middle of side two¹ is this little gem about the experience of a young boy and, tangentially, his brother during the evening that an obviously estranged father visits his mother.

Spiral Staircase was the second album I ever bought and was replaced with a CD fairly late in my collection, so there was a period of redescovery undergone with the aid of headphones and portable players of various types² and not a hearing goes by that I don't find something new in the recording, possibly due to the remastering process.

Either way, "Daddy's Home" has been a favorite of mine for 38 years.

1. Ask your grandfather about "sides"↑
2. I recently switched this album into my iPod↑

Happy Birthday To Me etc etc etc

Another ring around the trunk.

Woke with a ferocious pain in my lower right leg, so I lay there screaming until the muscle pulled, then was visited by The Stevieling bearing a very clever card she'd made for me themed around my fanatical love for the game The Call of Cthulhu¹ which included four suitably robed paper-doll cultists for me to array on my wall, one of whom seems to be carrying a staff bearing a likeness of Cthulhu's head. Cthulhu seems to share many of my facial characteristics in this rendering, a message I'm still trying to decode.

And so to work.

1. Look it up, dammit!↑

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

Nothing much changes no matter what I do to change things.

Case in point: Back in April I decided to equip everyone with their own laptop because I was getting pretty tired of trying to use our communal tower unit. A typical attempt would involve me signing on perhaps to print a couple of pages of some document, only to be confronted by some situation that would involve me sitting in a tiny room with the computer in pieces while I attempted to put right whatever had happened during the last person's session. The least annoying thing that would happen would be that I'd sit for five minutes listening to the disk clicking while - I presume - gigabytes of cached yootoob video were thrown away. The worst could involve a registry error of some kind.

It was always after one of the women had used the damn thing too. I never had it throw a wobbly after I'd used it once, then used it a second time with no female-themed uptime squeezed in between. Amazingly, whenever I asked "what did you do with this last time you used it?" I would get back one of two answers: a) "Nothing" or 2) "I don't know".

Now call me pedantic, but if you either have nothing to do on a computer or you don't know what you want to do with it, switching it on is not job one on your list of Things To Do that day.

Of course these answers were synonyms for "I can't be bothered to remember what I did because even if I remember word for word the big warning message that popped up before I impatiently stabbed the 'off' switch you'll only get mad and what's the point of that?"

So I finally wised-up and got everyone their own computer on the theory that the kid could virus herself to Chechnya and back without taking me out of the water and the missus could do whatever it is she does to zap the bloody thing into brickdom without impacting my ability to write my world-shattering blog posts. They would be happy as they could brick their own systems in peace. Win-win-win.

So on Saturday I wanted to print something. I haven't been able (trans: can't be bothered to spend hours trying) to get network access to the printer attached to the tower unit, so I just unplugged the printer and attached it to my laptop. I only needed 6 pages.

I got five before the printer ran out of paper.

Now this is something that makes me mad as hell. Whenever I need to use that bleeping printer, there is always and I mean always some problem left for me by the bloody women of the house. Usually just not enough paper, as in this case, but often some stupid coloured paper left over from some greeting card production epic and not replaced afterward with normal paper. I've had documents printed in blue ink on blue paper, images rendered on virulent pink paper and in one memorable bleep-up a word document printed on 3x5 glossy photo paper all because the bloody women can't be arsed to put things back the way they were when they're done making girly-stuff.

This time things were made worse by the fact that I was in a hurry and they'd used up all he damn paper in the house, not a sheet to be had for luvner money, which made the printer sit there beeping at me like it was my fault instead of printing the last page so I could leave the house.

I finally found a single sheet that they had somehow neglected to wrinkle, toss out or cover in felt-pen drawings and was able to complete this Agrosean Struggle in a World Gone Mad.

Why is it that when I use the last sheet I load a fistful of paper even if I only need a couple of sheets, but that everyone else can’t give me the same courtesy? As I pointed out with some heat at the time, I have to put up with that sort of horseshirt at work because I work with bone-idle bleep-holes who were it not for certain nanny-state laws would get a slap round the head with a toner cartridge as a performance-art demonstration of my dissatisfaction with their lack of respect for their co-workers¹. I see no reason whatsoever to put up with it at home.

That night, Mrs Stevie used the tower unit to retrieve and print (she'd bought more paper by then I guess) a Google Map for her mother.

The next day, Sunday, I got up and, thinking to use the tower myself, powered it up and went out to put the kettle on. When I thought to look in at the wretched thing I saw the light blue screen of disk problems, which was busy scrolling up a gargantuan list of unreadable sectors on its "D" drive. The entire disk turned out to be unreadable, suggesting that something pretty horrible had gone down in the last session.

I knew it was pointless, but ritual demanded I ask Mrs Stevie what she'd seen while doing the Google Maps thing when she returned from religious indoctrination. The answer was, of course "nothing". She then asked me where the pictures she'd transferred from her digital camera were kept on that computer.

"The D drive" I told her. "I have everything up to just before last Christmas on another drive. Everything else is toast."

The irony here is that I bought Mrs Stevie a digital picture frame at Christmas and an SD card to store the pictures it would display in a continuous slide show. Had she done as I suggested and moved a few pictures each week to the card she likely wouldn't have lost anything at all. But she didn't, so I'm now looking to see if I can read the disk by booting he tower as a Linux machine since XP won't touch it.

I doubt it'll work.

1. A piquant protest indeed. Toner now requires a personal note to the office manager to obtain. Someone on the night shift (a group of no more than about thirty people that comprises some of the most lazy gits on the face of the planet) decided that this was too much bother and simply removed the toner cartridge from one of my team’s laserjets. Didn’t even leave the empty one, which complicated matters even further. I finally managed to get a replacement after three weeks, but made out a big sign “NO TONER” and stuck it on the printer. This subterfuge wouldn’t fool anyone but the brain-dead thieving idiots on the night shift, of course, but it has worked so far. Of course, someone on my team didn’t have a clue and so loudly cried out to the world that the printer did have toner – apparently he thought I’d forgotten loading the cartridge some thirty seconds before – but fortunately none of the night shift were on hand to hear him and the rest of us punched him until he figured it out↑

Now That's A Pretty Song

How Can I? from the 1977 Steve Hackett album Please Don't Touch. Found on a pre-recorded cassette tape I got in a remainder bin in Woolworth's in The Precinct, Coventry sometime around 1980 and probably never listened to in all honesty, and had sat in my basement through I don't know how many floods.

It took me a very long time to figure out that one phrase had been "borrowed" from Across the Universe, and that Richie Havens was doing the vocals.