Sometime in the nineteen seventies or eighties when I worked for a living, my job involved making cable ties. These devices are often referred to as Zip-ties. The difference between a cable tie and a zip tie is like that between a Mercedes and a Yugo, they both perform the same function but there is a world of difference between them.
One thing that fell into my realm was determining the root cause problem of cable ties that failed in a customer’s hands. I-was lucky if I had a single specimen returned, and it was a miracle if the customer could provide the QC number. The number traced the date of manufacture, the molding machine that made it, and the batch of material that we used. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the time that information was lost.
I spent a lot of time examining the broken sample under a high power microscope. After a number of years of performing this visual autopsy I learned a lot about failure analysis. In other words I got pretty good at recognizing failure modes. The majority of fails resulted from sharp corners that became stress risers in certain environmental conditions, namely a very dry atmosphere that would dry out the nylon material. Most of these mechanical defects could be fixed by softening the sharp edge of steel in the mold cavity that produced the stress riser.
Failure analysis didn’t always point at an edge or corner. Very often the fracture point was from inside the plastic itself. Very often the fracture plane pointed toward a pin-point, like the “eye of the tiger”. About once every hundred samples I detected a black spot tinier than a spec of dust much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
During this same time period there were news reports on the sighting of unidentified flying objects which we all called UFO’s. It was a natural to name this cable tie failure mode as a, get ready for it, “UMO” or “unidentified molded object.”
A few times I sent the broken sample to duPont for analysis using their electron beam microscope. They would send me photos which showed the pin-point spec looking like a planet in a galaxy. They couldn’t identify the spec either.
At the beginning, using UMO to describe this specific failure mode, I had to do a lot of explaining of what it meant. The search for this critter went on beyond my days at the company. It wasn’t until the powers to be decided to totally instrument our process that we began to actually identify the conditions that existed during the formation of a UMO.
I retired in 2003 and by that time everyone in the company used the UMO term daily. All of our nylon suppliers also used the term. It took thirty years for acronym to become recognized. If you Google UMO or unidentified molded object you will find nothing like the UMO in the molding sense, and probably never will either.
Just as I never really identified the UMO’s in my universe neither have the residents of the planet Earth come even close to understanding what a UFO is, but this month the USA shot down four of them.
Today is a glorious sunny and cold December day, and we are making electricity. We just passed three days of gloom. How gloomy? Let me tell you how gloomy. Gloomy is when all of your light activated night lites turn on in the middle of the day. No joke that’s how dark it was. Then, to make my life more interesting I am living through the after effects of a minimally invasive procedure. Which involves a catheter and an unknown unheard of phenomenon called spasms. I’ve lived through some tough health problems in my lifetime but these spasms are the worst. I never know how to answer a medical person’s question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, where one is no pain, and ten is unbearable-excruciating pain, what level are you experiencing?” This time, my answer is that when a spasm occurs it is a bonafide 10. Thankfully, a spasm probably doesn’t last longer than 10-20 seconds, but it feels like a day. I think I have come close to child bearing pain. It is amazing that there are nine billion people in the world if the women have to bear that level of hardship.
If I had to choose between a month of gloomy days and three days of spasms, I’d choose the gloom. Over the last four score and four years I’ve experienced as many gloomy November and December days as God gave us, and I’m still here to talk about it. The only thing I will remember about these last three days are the spasms. The funny thing about my brain is that it likes to instantly remember the lousy things that happen, and push the happy, joyful things deeper into the abyss of memories. When I think about my two wives I never think about how we fell in love, or all the beautiful places we saw and the friends we made, I think about how much they suffered during their final years. Why is that? I have to consciously raise a memory of a particular trip or event to have happy thoughts, but gloomy, sad events immediately come to mind.
Happiness and sadness are very similar to positivity and negativity. We are programmed from birth to go negative automatically with our parents always telling us “no.” How many times did you hear something positive about your actions? The ratio is 100 negative to one positive. I was raised like that. As an adult I had to learn the benefits of positive thinking, and then train myself to become positive. At this age I feel I am very positive, but I often find myself reverting to the negative side of the situation. Just like these past days with the minimally invasive procedure, I should be thinking of all the easy times I will have during urination, but all I can focus on is bearing up to the “spasmodic TEN.”
My urologist has hinted that this healing process may take as long as three months. That is how long I have to continue the medication that did the job for the past ten years. I believe that if I did a payback analysis on this personal improvement it will come back with “not worth it.”
I sit here wondering what I will write about as Lovely and I just returned from a late morning walk and are tuckered out. The wind is out of the south and very strong. Yahoo weather claims it to be between 19-21 mph. Yes, that is strong. I remember the days when I still rode a bicycle to commute and on the way home from work I faced a south wind that often stopped me dead. Even though I have granny gears to climb steep hills they sometimes aren’t enough to ride head first into a stiff wind. God forbid I have to restart when the wind is that strong. Starting into the wind becomes downright impossible, and many times I turned around to start with the wind at my back and then made a U-turn to return to the direction I needed to go. Balancing a bike when riding into that strong wind is a lot like walking a tight rope, progress is slow and wildly unsteady.
The gusts this morning hit hard enough to stop us from moving forward. I told Lovely to walk behind me so I would break the wind for her. Thank goodness it is only three blocks to the Old Plank Road Trail which is flanked by trees and the wind is cut off. We finished our 1.5 mile walk in thirty-five minutes and were glad to enter into the quiet stillness of our home.
Lovely always complains about the wind. This morning the only conversation she braved was to ask me to move to a place where there is no wind. “It doesn’t exist” I told her. Even in places that are warm during the winter months there is always wind. I remember once coming out of a movie house in Peoria, Arizona during early afternoon, and the sky was beige. It kind of looked like fog, but it was sand. Visibility was limited and there was stinging in our eyes. It wasn’t pretty.
As a ten year old kid, my cousin Joe, who was a lot older than me, and who had kids that were the same age as me, telling us a story of one of his cross country driving trips to California. He described traveling in a desert sand storm so violent that the visibility was only a few feet. There were no places to stop to rest, he had to keep moving. When the storm finally finished the paint on his car was gone and the engine needed an overhaul. I couldn’t imagine such a fury. Dad didn’t drive further than Michigan. That afternoon coming out of the theater I recalled Joe’s story and finally believed every word.
“Oh, and what might that be?” Then she handed me a cute little jewelry box clad in white open to reveal a pendant meant to hang around the neck. There chain was gone, but the lacey looking silver pendant of an antique design with a cluster of emerald green stones moved around loosely among three loose stones. It was apparent that the three stones belonged in the center of the metal frame. I had immediately suspected I would have to reset the stones using tweezers and a eye loop. “Just glue them back in,” she said.
“I can do that,” I replied. That is when my new found career as an amateur jeweler came into being.
In my job I regularly used a microscope to look for product defects. Using a scope is not foreign to me and moving things around under the scope with tweezers is something I have developed dexterity to do. The real question is could I make a living doing jewelry repair?
The view from my office window is simple, a beautiful sunny day, with an azure blue sky and a few wispy clouds. The temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit which requires a light jacket to endure. The trees around the neighborhood are holding their leaves and providing us with an array of yellows, reds, orange and some green. It is a beautiful fall day, one to behold and cherish. In the year 1961 this was the eve of my wedding. The actual wedding day was a carbon copy of today. The milestone matched the day, beautiful, exciting, refreshing, and eventful.
I kept busy on this day, washing and waxing my Volkswagen Bug in readiness for the great escape following our wedding. I hid the bug in my Mother-in-law’s garage so my groomsmen wouldn’t get any ideas about bedecking the little runt of a car with tails of dangling tin cans and white ‘Just Married’ signs painted on the windows. These acts of love were often carried out by friends of the groom in a show of endearment and jocularity. Our plan was to be chauffeured all day by Gene, my wife’s cousin, in his massive Cadillac. All I had to do was show up at the church which I did in plenty of time. Amazingly, I do not remember how I got there.
Barbara was of Polish heritage and I of Hungarian we decided to get married in her church which was heavily attended by Polish people. To appease my mother, I asked father Joe Adams, a priest from my parish Our Lady Of Hungary to officiate. To this day, I never understood my mother’s animosity towards any nationality not Hungarian. Mother never accepted Barbara until after our first child was born. At that point she must have figured that if she can’t beat her she would join her. We had a very happy family for the entirety of our years together.
Our wedding party was held at the American Legion hall in the town of Summit at 57th and Harlem. Chicago was on the east side of Harlem and the Legion hall on the west. This location was but a couple of miles from Barb’s home. It was ten miles from my family and friends. We hired Bill Kenny, the brother of Barb’s Aunt Frances to play for us. His repertoire was all Polish music. Needless to say we danced the Polka all evening. The food was cooked by a Polish lady, a friend of my mother-in-law, it was Polish faire. Right there are two reasons my Mother didn’t like me to marry outside my ethnicity. She survived, as did all the other Hungarian friends that attended. A few years earlier when my brother Bill married, Mom got to be the ultimate Hungarian hostess, so she was batting 500 between the two of us. Bill married a girl he met while serving in the army in Germany. She came to America to get married. After they were married here, they returned to Germany and married there too. Both mothers got to deliver their best.
I had called a motel in Chicago to book a room for our wedding night. The reservationist insisted that I was booking Saturday, and I persisted that we were arriving on early Sunday morning. That was my first lesson in booking hotel rooms. We got to the motel at three a.m. to learn that we did not have a room. They played my game and booked me for Sunday which in their world is includes Sunday night. I was wrong and they were right, I should have booked a room for Saturday which would have included Saturday night. After a considerable amount of time arguing who was right and who was wrong they relented and gave us their honeymoon suite for the night with our promise that we would move into a regular room the next day. I’ll skip the boring details of our activities of the next couple of days.
On Monday we fired up the Bug and headed for Miami, Florida. We landed in Indianapolis, Indiana in time for dinner. Barb used her iron to freshen her dress and that is how I learned that many hotels have only DC current. She burned out her iron, but her dress was wrinkle free that evening.
Along the way we stopped to tour a cavern along the Tennessee-Georgia border. It was another first for the both of us. We enjoyed seeing stalactites and stalagmites although we took a lot of shit from the tour guide once we let on that we were honeymooning. Eventually, we crossed the border into Florida and stopped at St. Augustine for a couple of days. We lived the uniqueness of the city. Old by US standards having been established in the 1600’s. There is a competition between St Augustine, Florida and Santa Fe, New Mexico for the title of first city in North America. I don’t think there are too many people that visit both towns since they are so far apart so the guides in each town make the claim and people go along thinking they know the truth. The truth is that the Spanish established Santa Fe first.
Eventually we landed in Fort Lauderdale. After a couple of days looking around we found a flyer advertising a three day trip to Nassau, Bahamas. We bit, and booked the tour. Another first for the trip, a flight in a DC3. It was noisy as hell but the trip only took 45 minutes. We fell in love with Nassau immediately. This was long before I knew what a passport was and didn’t know for many years after, as none were required. The unique thing about Nassau was that everyone spoke the King’s English. Coming from Chicago we were familiar with blacks and seeing blacks was not strange, what was strange was to hear them speak perfect English with a British accent. Twenty-five years later we returned to Nassau to find that the blacks had dropped the British accent and English in favor of Ebonics.
Our time in Nassau was unforgettable and a topic for another post. When our plane landed in Fort Lauderdale we found our car packed and ready to leave for home. I made a big mistake in navigation and instead of back tracking the way we came I routed our trip westward toward the Gulf of Mexico. I wanted to visit New Orleans. On the map it looked doable, but it is clearly five hundred miles longer going that way. We crossed Alligator Alley toward Fort Meyers and turned north along the Gulf coast. The drive could best be described as driving through jungle. Lots of tall palm trees and dense foliage along both sides of the road. Small town dotted the road sides and gave us views of the gulf. Occasionally, we stopped at a white sand beach to take pictures.
By the time we rolled into New Orleans I was tired of driving. It was dark and busy with traffic on very old and narrow streets. I got lost making four circles around the city until I finally found a corner that was the key to exit. I have never returned to New Orleans since. We found a motel north of town, and collapsed. The next morning we got a good start, and drove straight through to Chicago, my second mistake of the return. The drive took twenty-nine hours. I’ve never done anything so stupid again. Thank God we arrived home safely in time to go to work the next day.
