So I lost touch with my main girlfriend from my college years (we’ll call her Kathy so that google doesn’t connect her with this story) back in ’91 or ’92 after a sour breakup. For a while after that I would hear tales of her from mutual friends. She moved to San Fran, was hanging out with folks we went to school with, had delayed moving on to grad school, things like that. Every so often I’ve googled her to see what she’s up to but she never was much into computers and seems to be almost invisible online. Then a few years ago I noted someone with the same name had accepted a position at a notable educational software publisher. She’s got a fairly uncommon name but there were no pictures so I wasn’t really sure whether it was her or not, but the location and name matched so the chances were fair or better.

A week or so ago I’m driving home and there’s a bit on NPR about research into the use of software in education and who do they interview but…Kathy. Only a sentence or two but it made me laugh to hear it. Funny thing too, it’s been 15 years or more since we’ve spoken

…I was a fax machine killer.

I was a pretty impatient guy in my 20’s. For several years early in my career I worked for a small market media company which owned several newspapers and television stations in the northeast. For a couple of years I was helping the company develop an online strategy. This was back before the internet really existed in the public consciousness, and we were negotiating with AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and so on. I ended up having to do a ton of faxing of materials around, including numerous multipage faxes. The problem was the newspaper whose offices I was housed in had standardized on a hunk of junk fax machine brand. This was back when they cost big dollars. The thing was as large as a microwave, it was probably 10 years old by the time I encountered it, and it was utterly incapable of handling multi-sheet faxes. If you tried, it would invariably skip some of the pages and you would get a call from the recipient asking for the missing page/s. This meant you had to hand feed the thing, page by page. I was sometimes faxing 50 page contracts around, and this drove me nuts – it could take me over an hour to get a fax through on occasion. Couple this with the fact that I worked in a busy ad creation department that was constantly faxing comps around to clients, and you had a line of unhappy folks standing around the fax machine every day.

I tried reasoning with the IT department – this is hardly a cost effective use of my time, a couple of faxes taking this long would already cover the cost of a new machine – but to no avail. I pleaded with my boss – to no avail. For a while I was going to the local kinkos to send the long faxes, but my boss stopped appreciating my expense reports for that and put a stop to it.

I remembered when I had worked in NYC and a sales rep from chicago had sent a 40′ long fax to our thermal paper fax machine, and it had killed the machine and gotten her in hot water with our boss, and this set an evil plan in motion.

I waited one night until my coworkers had all gone home, and filled the paper tray in our fax machine. I

Saturday my dog Soolin and I were out hiking on farmland. I was tossing the ball to her. She came back with the ball and I noted it was fairly bloody, so I called her back and to my shock she was covered in blood down her entire front. I grabbed her and started checking her and realized when I got to her mouth that she was bleeding profusely from a deep cut to her tongue – so deep that it was gushing and she ended up covering me in blood. I was 1/3 of a mile from my house, roughly, and I panicked – how does one apply pressure to a dog’s tongue? Meanwhile, she seemed fine with it and just wanted me to throw the ball some more. I started back towards the house at a jog, constantly having to call at her to follow me since she knew we were headed back towards home and did not want to go. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do once I got back to the house, but I figured I would think of something on the way.

Fortunately by the time we got back to the house the bleeding had slowed and was no longer gushing. I washed her mouth out and cleaned off her coat with the hose and made her lie down and after a half hour or so things seemed to settle. Talk about a scare though, for maybe 10-15 minutes I was under the impression she might be bleeding to death. The wound did re-open several times over the weekend, but only mild bleeding occurred and it has not re-opened since Sunday morning over breakfast so I think she’s in the clear now.

This one’s from my youth. My cousin was a sleepwalker when he was young. When he was about 10, my aunt and uncle were at the neighbors playing cards. They had left the kids home in bed. They were literally about 20 feet away at the next door neighbors house. They had forgotten to put up the sheet of plywood they used to keep my cousin from wandering too far when he sleep walked, however, and when they came home my aunt checked the bedroom and he was not in his bed. Panic ensued and they ran through the house looking for him. They found my cousin in the kitchen, the fruit bin of the fridge pulled out, his rear perched on it, making poopy.

!!!

The doctor had told my aunt not to shock my cousin or violently awaken him if they found him sleepwalking, so they let him conclude his business then shepherded him upstairs and back into his bed. my poor uncle got stuck cleaning up the mess.

This was one of those ‘you can’t let him know you know this story!’ stories when I was a kid, so I never got to tease my poor cousin about the incident, but I laugh every time I think of it.

Another story, this one from early in my career, that was brought to mind by a recent incident at work. I worked for a media company that had founded a division to do web stuff at the dawn of the general publics’ use of the web (circa 1995). We had awful internal morale issues – lots if bickering, infighting, histrionics, thrown chairs, the works. I was not above participating in those days and was in fact known for my volatile temper, though I never threw anything or otherwise physically expressed my frustration.

(as an aside, I’m now convinced my volatile temper in those days was actually a reflection of the undiagnosed diabetes, with high blood pressure and high blood sugars – basically my system was always running at 130%)

Anyway the company decided to take steps to address these issues, and arranged with the director of HR to facilitate a set of off-site intervention meetings where we would participate in a variety of team building exercises as well as take the time to sort of expose and discuss the core issues that were causing so much tension.

Shortly before one of the first sessions, a coworker had asked me out, the latest in a series of invitations. She had been pursuing me off and on for a couple of months – mostly, at first, with hints (do you like this new movie that’s coming out? Me too!) and then ultimately with a couple of direct invitations. I had blown her off, politely but firmly, with the ‘I don’t date co-workers’ line. I wasn’t attracted to her.

One of the exercises we had to do on this day was a team building exercise that involved a large sheet of paper hung to the wall for each person, divided in half. Half was the good side, and half was the bad side. Each of us had a post-it notepad, and we had to write one good thing and one bad thing about each person in the room and stick it to the appropriate side of their sheet of paper. Once we had all done this, we had to stand before our piece of paper and pluck off the post-its, read them to the room, then discuss them.

When my turn came around, I plucked a bad post-it off and read it to the room. It said (and I can remember this almost verbatim) “David is poorly socialized, has terrible communications skills, fails to behave appropriately in professional circumstances, and should learn to be more respectful of his coworkers.’

!!!

I had to respond to that in front of ~20 people, back when I was a less confident public speaker. Ye gods! I recognized the handwriting of the culprit (of course it was she of the rejected advances) and my first thought was to simply expose her, as inappropriate as that would be (she thinks I behave inappropriately?! wait till she sees this!). But my common sense won the day. It helped that most of it was absurd. While I was known for my volatility, I’ve also always been known for my verbal communication skills, the ability to condense complex technical issues into summaries that non-technical folk can understand, and my willingness to fold to superior logic. I was also president of my frat in college, for crying out loud, and regularly hung out with a significant portion of the staff in the portland bars.

Anyway, I don’t actually think I did a very good job of responding at that time, I was too flustered, but the incident has stuck with me ever since, and instilled in me a very deep suspicion so-called team building exercises (which, as an aside, were an abject failure in this case. The core of the issues had to do with how sales interacted with the production folks. Sales had no technical acumen and we all knew they were, quite literally, stealing from the company through clever sales incentive scams and we had no respect for them professionally or personally. Most of this, of course, was not exposed in these team building exercises. What was one to do? Write ‘steals from the company and gets away with it’ on the post-it and stick it to the bad side?).

So I’m sitting at work, writing up notes for a meeting tomorrow. My office is dark – I much prefer indirect lighting to overhead lighting so I never have it on. I have a dual monitor setup and on the second monitor, I notice what appears to be a bug crawling across my web browser’s screen. I think to myself ‘evil javascript!’ figuring it is some dhtml/javascript deal, and slide the mouse over to the other screen to investigate, trying to click on it, and when that doesn’t work, loading the source code up in another tab to see what’s what. Finding nothing, I launch spybot seek and destroy, worrying that I’ve got something worse going on. As I do this, I observe the bug crawl outside the browser window and suddenly it dawns on me – it’s a real bug! A vile tick, to make matters worse, which I quickly snatch up with a post-it, then seal it to it with some tape.

It turns out that in a dark room a bug crawling on my screen is silhouetted by the back lighting, making for a perfect little optical illusion. I had a good laugh over it, though it still freaks me out that a tick randomly showed up in my office. Soolin hasn’t been with me at the office for several days because of the weather so it seems likely it came from somewhere else.

Here’s my favorite story about my Grandpa Fisher, my Mom’s dad. Through most of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I used to spend at least a week pretty much every summer out in Ohio, and usually longer than that, visiting the extended Hamilton and Fisher clans. I loved going to my Grandfather Fisher’s house. He was a hunter and gun collector and had a pool room upstairs with hundreds of guns mounted on the walls. Most were hunting rifles of one kind or another, but he also had antique weapons and a large handgun collection, and I was allowed to play with them to my heart’s content, while my sister and cousin Heidi were not. Most summers we’d also bring a few out into the back yard and practice shooting. I could almost always bring a pellet rifle down, but occasionally he would also bring down one of the muzzle loaders, or the blunderbuss, or some of the handguns. I even got to fire a .357 once with my Grandfather helping me to keep my arms steady. The girls never got to shoot unless my Aunt Sandy was around and got on my Grandfather’s case, and even then it wasn’t a sure thing. Such was the generational gap – my Grandfather had been raised in a different time and with different rules.

Anyway one summer when I was in my mid-teens I was in the yard shooting at cans with a pellet rifle and thunderstorms began to roll in. This area of Ohio (Akron-Canton , in the Portage lakes region – basically the northeastern quarter of the state) was prone to violent thunderstorms and even hail in the summers. My grandfather asked me to stop shooting and come up on the porch but I resisted, asking him if I could wait until the rain actually arrived. My Grandfather got cross and told me to come on up before I got hit by lightning, then joked about me with a lightning rod (the gun) in my hands. When I kept arguing he complained that the gun would rust what with the moisture and insisted I come up onto the porch, but allowed that I could continue shooting from the porch if I moved the targets in closer, which I then did.

The rest of the family was sitting around on the porch and I took a seat and started shooting as the thunderstorm rolled in. It was a powerful storm and pretty soon it was coming down hard and lightning was cracking, and my grandfather joked again about how I was a lightning rod and was going to get electrocuted. I said something mocking about it and kept shooting.

Suddenly as I lined up another shot a huge bang went off seemingly right at my feet, and I screamed ‘holy SHIT!’ and threw the gun out into the rain, thinking I had just been struck by lightning. My feet also felt burned. Meanwhile everyone on the porch had begun laughing and I came to realize that my grandfather had tossed a lit cherry bomb at my feet as I had been lining up the shot. I had never sworn in front of any of the Ohio relatives before and this was half the joke to them. Meanwhile the old coot had scorched my feet with the damned thing, but even so I also started to laugh. He had gotten me but good.

So I’ve been posting reminisces about my grandparents lately. Here’s one of my favorite ones about Grannie.

A couple of years ago I moved to Saratoga Springs NY, and shortly after I went to a family barbecue at my Aunt Melissa and Uncle Danny’s house, and Grannie was there. It was one of the few times I had seen her in years and years. At one point most folks went outside – I think the kids were roasting marshmallows or something – but in any case Grannie stayed inside and I sat there shooting the breeze with her, trying to get a sense of what she was doing those days. The fact that she was still driving came up, and given her age it was a little surprising, and I said so. She got a twinkle in her eye in response and said ‘yes, and I don’t use the brakes!’ I gradually got out of her that she would leave her house, head to her hairdressers, which was down a steep hill, and try not to use the brakes on her car because she enjoyed zooming as fast as gravity would take her down the hill.

!!!

I thought this was pretty funny. Picture a woman in her 80’s with a grin on her face zooming down a hill and maybe you’ll see the humor. But I also think it speaks to something I said about Grannie in one of my other stories about her – she was still enjoying life, and getting a kick out of it, at her age, something which is often not true of the very elderly.