Category Archives: Uncategorized

A strange thing happened today. The normally sunny, dry weather of Arizona changed. There were these dark clouds in the sky all morning, and in the afternoon those clouds started to discharge liquid. At first I wasn’t really sure what was happening, I kept thinking that maybe I was imagining it all, but no, it actually happened. We had rain. Not the Monsoon storm rain that we get in the summer months (usually, but not for the last several years as we are in a horrible drought), but just a gentle type of rain that went on for hours. It kind of put me in mind of the weather that I got used to while living in Oregon, of course without the temperature being in the low-thirties in October. Just a very strange thing to have actual, normal rain here in Arizona, it doesn’t happen that often.

The somewhat humorous result of this (both the fact that we never get rain, and the fact that we just got rain) is that no one in the entire state of Arizona ever pays a damn bit of attention to the windshield wipers on their car. When it actually does get around to raining, you often find that your wipers have melded with the windshield sometime in the 120 degree heat, and as such the first time you try to use them all you hear is the scraping of the metal bar on the glass. All that while what used to be a flexible, rubber wiper is still absolutely either melted to your windshield, or turns to powder the first time it moves. I managed to escape the windshield wiper fate as I just replaced mine, after trying to use the little window squirter and wipers to try to clean the windshield, only to find that I had wiper integrity at about 1%.

The problem with this all, and why it is not humorous, is that the people that live here (in Arizona) don’t understand how to drive in the rain. It is pretty much common knowledge that water makes the road a bit more slick than usual. What doesn’t seem to be common knowledge, at least down here, is that water also makes oil float to the surface. While people in rainy areas are used to having the roads be a bit slick, people down here just don’t get it. You can have the best tires on your SUV, be a pretty defensive driver and have the best anti-lock brakes available. All of that is not going to stop you from skidding down the street for several blocks when you lock up your brakes in a mix of water and oil.

The lack of rain on the roads in Arizona makes it so that the oil really pools up in the low spots, as well as just making a thin coat along the whole length of any stretch of road. That is exactly the time that you have to understand that the sign posts a limit to how fast you should go: In perfect conditions, 75 mph is alright. In less than perfect conditions you should go a lot slower, especially if you value your own life. Just remember, as that SUV passes you up, going 85mph+, in the rain, that there will be a frivilous lawsuit filed somewhere when it inevitably slides as it goes into a corner, then kills all of the people in it. That is, of course, driver error, but in our society we really want someone to pay us, or the family, when we do things that are monumentally stupid.

• In sports news, the Red Sox actually did come back from a 3-0 defecit to beat the almighty Yankees. That is about all I have to say about it though, since I really don’t give a damn one way or the other who actually wins the World Series. Of course my wife did bring up the fact that Boston will actually have to win it to get rid of the Curse of the Bambino. So I guess I had better root for the BoSox in order to get my Cubbies to break their own curse.

I had no intention of posting anything today, but that thing about the rain and foolish people who don’t know how to drive in it just took over my conscious.

On the up side, I really don’t think I am going to post anything tomorrow. Of course, as always, time will tell. You just never know when some jack-Ass is going to do something so stupid that you have to bitch about it.

So, have you ever worked in retail? If you have, then you will know that it is your obligation to make sure and talk with your customers about whatever it is that they are interested it, regardless of how much you happen to disapprove of it. It is mostly the simple act of seeming fascinated with the stories that the people (especially the elderly ones) tell, but it does branch off into other areas as well. If there is one thing that I am really good at, it is talking -at length- about things that I don’t know a whole lot about. I credit this directly to my ability to remember mundane facts and figures. I don’t suppose that the ability to rememer useless information will ever get me any further than just being the winner at trivial pursuit, but for some reason the trivial things do just stick in my head.

Normally I just never notice this little ability, if you can even call it that, but, sometimes I am able to talk for at least a good hour about crap that I really don’t think I know anything about. That does seem a bit vague, so I must elaborate. Much like talking to George a couple of days ago about handguns, which I used to know a lot about, but have not actively followed the progression of, I asked him what the powder load of the .50 calibur cartridge was in relation to the load of the .44 cartridge. Why did I ask this, I dunno, where if I had asked him the same question a decade ago I would have known exactly why. Honestly, I even know why today. If you increase the size of the projectile without significantly increasing the powder load, you are making a bigger projectile go much slower and less likely to go through any damn thing. I.E. if you try to shoot a cannonball with a firecracker you aren’t going to get enough velocity to make it out of the barrel, let alone do any damage. Of course, George went on with powder loads and weight issues (things that I would likely have been all over a decade ago), yet, now, I can’t even remember why I was so curious.

The prior story does not matter at all for my purposes today. It simply displays the ability to seem like I care about, and know the requisite lingo to question, whatever the customer happens to come up with. That is the very definition of customer service. If he (George) were to walk away without whatever he came in looking for, he would likely just keep walking, unless he actually wanted to talk to the ‘oh so friendly staff’ for a bit longer. Most notably the guy that just spent a good thirty minutes talking about guns to get him to buy a three dollar steak and a bottle of wine.

So this guy came into the store, I will not describe him here, as I feel I may be just a tad biased. He started talking about the food/drink consumption of your average D&D character. I am not a D&D player, really haven’t been for over a decade, but I did understand what he was talking about. Unfortunateley, for me, I do actually know how to play the game -several years of my life that I regret-. So, being friendly, I started to mention that I hate the way that the four and five sided dice just didn’t seem to roll like they should. Once again, unfortunately, this guy was a DM. He went on to explain that the horrible rolls that I was getting were based on the fact that I was not a competent D&D player. That all might be true, I don’t want to dispute his facts. What I do want to dispute is the business card that he gave to me after this brief conversation.

Not to discuss the person’s name, since it really isn’t important. The guy, the new DM, handed me a business card that said “DM John Doe”, which went on to note his address and phone number, just in case someone actually wanted to learn the game. When I was in Junior High I actualy played a couple of characters, I didn’t win (though I don’t think it is possible to win at D&D).

How far down the road to Loserville must you go before you realize that you have been to ‘Geektown’ and made Mayor there? If you don’t think that printing out your own business cards with the title ‘DM’ on them is a pretty nerdy thing to do, that might be the first clue that you really are a Geek. Not just any geek, no, the kind of geek that makes Star Wars geeks look normal by comparison -And that is saying a lot.

What I really wonder is if the guy actually hands out these business cards when he is in job interviews. That would be absolute proof of either his lunacy, or his firm base in the realm of geekdom, or both.

Thankfully, I only have an unhealthy fascination with porn. That may make me a lot of things, pervert for instance, but at least not a geek. At least not until I figure out how to hack into porn websites, at that point I will be a perverted geek, which may or may not be worse than a D&D geek… I am not sure at this point.

Well I took a few days off and went on a wilderness retreat to the barren lands of Africa. That is, I spent so damn much time playing the little game on the sidebar that I just never got around to posting. Being as the particular game is supposedly based in Africa I assume that that means I was doing some of that wildnerness therapy crap that all of the rich, SUV driving Metrosexuals get into. It is probably healthier than most other reality escapes but seems a bit less theraputic. Hell, without the aid of any foreign substances the creatures in the game just look rather plain, and not once did I feel the urge to get naked and play the bongos. I guess that is what I get when I try to take the easy way out.

• There was a pretty terrible lightning storm here in town a couple of days ago. It happened pretty early in the morning, which is unusual as we are in monsoon season and that tends to bring lightning storms in the late evening, not at 6 or 7a.m., yet that was when it happened this time. It must have been directly overhead, as this was the loudest thunder I have ever heard in my life; It sounded as though there were gunshots coming from inside my own house all morning. We lost electricity at about 8a.m. as a result of it, but had it restored by shortly before 10a.m., which isn’t a bad turn-around on that sort of thing. When I went in to work, though, everything went straight to hell.

Neither of the two coolers on the roof were working, at all, no power whatsoever. I did a quick test for continuity on each of the 30amp fuses that run to the coolers. Out of a total of six fuses, five were blown. I am not an electrician but I do know a good bit about electrical circuits, when I saw that five of the fuses were blown it did not bode well. The particular circuits that run the coolers are 240volt, that means that you have two power wires and one common wire (the common is often linked to the ground wire in residential applications). When a huge spike of electricity hits, say the store is struck by lightning for instance, it would be pretty likely to blow the fuses on the power wires but not on the common wire. One of the coolers had blown the common wire fuse as well, and I knew even before I replaced the fuses that the motor was burnt out.

As stated, I am not an electrician, I just know from experience that when you blow the fuse for the power and the common that it usually means that a hell of a lot of power went through the common. The most likely reason for this (especially in an electrical motor) is that the power wire had touched (or arced) electricity to the common wire. This would instantly burn all of the fuses in the circuit while at the same time burning a lot of the copper windings in the motor. If you were to ask me to give you a detailed explanation of why this happens, I got nothing. If you were to ask me why the surge burnt out the motor of one of the coolers on the roof while only blowing the fuses on the power wires on the other cooler, that I think I could answer.

When a bolt of lightning strikes it looks for the quickest path to the ground. Anything that is high in the air and made of metal is a really good choice. Both of the coolers on the roof fit that bill perfectly, the one that burnt out is actually a couple of inches higher than the one that didn’t, but I am pretty sure that is coincidence. These are the two highest pieces of metal for at least a good four square blocks, so it was kind of inevitable that one of them would be struck if the ligtning chose to discharge near there. The cooler that survived the ordeal had been rebuilt the previous year and I installed it personally. I mentioned to the owner that there was not a ground on the cooler and he said to just wire it up anyway, which I did, but as a precaution I went ahead and grounded the motor to a piece of metal conduit which ran across the roof and into a breaker box that is securely grounded. I did that for my safety, as I am usually the only one on the roof working on the things and if it is not grounded and gets a power surge it could easily kill me. I truly believe that grounding that cooler through the conduit was what saved it (although the conduit is NOT a good ground and should never be used as such).

When I opened up the other cooler to check on it, I found that it was indeed not grounded. Not only that but whoever installed it didn’t even bother to connect the ground wire to the body of the cooler (which in itself is absolutely wrong, but if you are going to go with no ground on a 240volt circuit you should at least connect the ground to the casing; it could save the life of someone touching it in the case of a surge). With nowhere for the electricity to go, I assume that it traveled down both of the actual power wires as well as the commone wire, which would have instantly turned the motor into a molten metal lump had all of the fuses not blown simultaneously. It is probably lucky that there was not a fire as a result of this whole ordeal.

The even more unfortunate part of the story is that I was so involved with making the cooling system for the store work, and the meat case, which had gone out a few days before for unrelated reasons, that I didn’t bother to check the other cooling systems in the store. The power had been back on for a couple of hours by the time I got to work, I assumed that someone must have checked them. ASS U ME, enough said. Thankfully, the cashier informed me that the wall freezer seemed a bit warm, a quick check of thermometers showed that it was about 30 degrees too warm (but still below freezing) so I went to have a look at that system. It also had a blown fuse, but only a 15amp (not that the amperage matters), which I immediately replaced to get that system back on-line. The only other system that operates on the same (I am going to say ‘Master circuit’ since I don’t know if there is a word for it) circuit as the cooler that burnt is the dairy walk-in, which was operating just fine. Job done, or so I thought.

The second I got home, I mean literally, since I had stopped at the circle K for a hot dog on the way, I got a call from work. It seemed that the large ice cream freezer was a bit warm also. Back to work I went. I found, once I got there, that the light bulb in the continuity tester I had been using all day had burned out. It took me a few minutes to come up with an idea but I did eventually improvise a temporary replacement bulb by using one out of a small flashlight on the shelf. None of the fuses running to that compressor were blown though, so I lifted up the service panel to see if there were more fuses inside, there weren’t, but there was a breaker. Flipped it down, then back up and the compressor started running again. I went home again, for the day this time, thinking that all was well.

Next day (yesterday) I spent my first hour of work moving ice cream to various other freezers around the store. The freezer was working, but for some reason it was not able to go below about five degrees, which is not cold enough for ice cream. A quick look through the sight glass shows that there is no air in the freon lines so I am still not quite sure why that freezer isn’t working. I did notice that as the day went on the case was getting colder and colder each time I checked the temperature, but really how many days should it take to get back to operating temperature? Of course it is about ten time larger than your average home’s chest freezer, and likely fifty times the size of the freezer connected to your refrigerator, so I certainly don’t know. Anyway, it was a bad day or two.