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After a wonderfully busy Saturday that made me want to spend Sunday being comatose, Michael (my six year old) came up to me, with far more energy than children should be allowed to have on a Sunday afternoon, and said, “I want to go treasure hunting.”
“…and just where do you want to do this?” said I (trying to maintain my important job of holding one end of the couch down)
“In the back yard. You draw the map.”
— Now let’s see if we can follow the logic here…
“I draw the map, put an “x-marks” on it somewhere, and we dig there and we find treasure?”
“Yes, we find treasure there.”
“So what if I put an “x-marks” over here?, will we find treasure?”
“Uh huh.”
“So if I draw a bunch of maps, each with an “x-marks” in a different place, we’ll find treasure all over the place, right?”
“Right.”
I could feel my hold on the couch slipping…
“So even without a map, there would be treasure anywhere we dig under the back yard…”
I drew a map.
I had him go out and measure off paces, from the gate, to the sandbox, to the slide, to the fence, and as he came back each time, we made one more measurement on the map.
We went out, got our digging tools, and started pacing. We ended up in the shade by the fence in the back yard, in a spot where he’d dug many times before, and started digging.
He dug a bit, then I dug, and we chatted about life, how things were going, the boat ride we’d taken Saturday (where he’d actually driven the boat). Since it was hot, we decided to put some water into the hole, so many trips with buckets later, we had it full.
I asked him if he wanted to take his shoes off.
He knew what that meant, and with a big smile he took his shoes and socks off and stuck his little feet into the muddy water.
I joined him a couple of minutes later (having gotten a couple more buckets of water in the meantime)
So we sat there, our feet invisible under the surface, talking, giggling about how icky our feet were, what mom would say if she saw us, why there were pine needles growing out of our toes, stuff like that…
And I realized something…the time we were spending together on a warm, lazy, sunny Sunday afternoon, was wonderful.
Michael was right.
There was treasure in our back yard, anywhere we dug.
Because the treasure wasn’t gold or silver…
…it was time.
Plumbing.
The bane of the homeowner.
A few years ago, I learned that you can’t call the landlord, or the property manager, or your folks. Unless you want to pay the price of a plumber, the job’s yours.
We learned in our house that very small things can cause very large problems.
It all started with the kitchen sink, which has one of those little screens to keep the crud from going down the drain.
Well sometimes it’s easier to flush the crud down the drain than it is to try to pick it out of the screen thing, so I’ve learned that jabbing it with a fork and then giving a good twist means the screen will pop up, the crud will go down, and there will be peace in the world.
There is, naturally, a warning to go along with this, that being that you don’t want things to go down the drain that the screen was meant to trap… So you have to be careful. Twice I had to take the drain apart when a fork or a spoon went down there.
But forks and spoons have built in safety features. They’re straight, and the trap under the sink isn’t, so they stay.
Now imagine, if you will, that you’re running low on dish washing liquid, and to do the dishes you’ve taken the top off the bottle to pour water in and get all the dishwashing liquid out.
Imagine, if you will, that after the dishes were done, the drain seemed to drain a lot slower…
So I figure, hey, there’s something stuck in there… So I pull out the plunger and go at it like I was trying to win a butter churning contest.
No luck.
I pull the drain apart.
Can’t find anything.
I run the snake down.
Nothing.
I put the sink back together and try it again.
Still slow. I mean, if you left it there overnight, it would drain out, but otherwise it would start off fine and then act like it had hit a brick wall, well, more like a rubber wall, because it would go down, stop, and then start slowly coming back up again, almost like an echo.
Hmmmm…
Then the bathroom sink started draining really slow.
So I took that apart…
…and ran the snake down…
— and nothing…
Okay, I’d spent about 8 hours of a weekend under kitchen and bathroom sinks, ripping plumbing out and getting absolutely nowhere.
So I did the ever popular male thing, if it doesn’t work, get a bigger hammer.
I attached a hose to the sink downstairs.
I ran it up to the kitchen sink, and had my 7 year old son Michael go downstairs, with the instructions, “Turn it on when I thump once on the floor, turn it off when I thump twice.”
So Michael the Helper trotted downstairs, all full of pride that he was helping solve this Major Household Problem.
I wrapped a towel around the end of the hose to make a seal, rammed it down the kitchen drain, and then thumped on the floor.
The hose gurgled, and hissed, and burped, and wiggled around as the water came up, and then like a cannon blasted water down
the drain.
I didn’t hear or feel anything give way, I didn’t hear or feel any kind of a plug, or for that matter resistance…
So I thought I’d fixed it.
I thumped twice, and the water stopped.
I pulled the hose out and water started coming back up, like that echo I’d seen earlier, only this time it was much bigger…
Hmmm…
I rammed the hose down again, and thumped…
… and the water started again…
And I kept at it until I heard this little voice from downstairs, “Papa-a-a-a-a? How come the ceiling is dripping?”
Uh – oh…
It was at this point that I instinctively knew what had happened.
The pipes were set up like a T, with the kitchen on the right side and the bathroom on the left side. Whatever was plugging things up was down on the vertical part of the T, and in essence, that one thing was plugging both drains.
You will see this material again.
I ran downstairs, and yes indeed, the ceiling was dripping, right from where the bathroom was.
I ran upstairs, and into the bathroom.
Or what had been the bathroom…
See, when I’d blasted the water down the kitchen sink and it couldn’t go anywhere, Mount Vesuvius erupted in the bathroom sink, cleaning all the crud in the drain on the way out and distributing it evenly all over the bathroom, and of course what didn’t stay in the bathroom went downstairs.
Oh good…
So now the bathroom sink’s full of brown crud, that echo effect has the kitchen sink in the same condition, and I obviously haven’t come anywhere near solving the problem, I’ve only made it worse…
But at least this time I know where the problem is, right?
Right.
So I go downstairs where Michael was, stepped around where the ceiling was still dripping, looked up and saw that there was a cleanout plug on the pipe that had to have the problem.
So I got this huge wrench and reefed on it.
No dice.
Bigger hammer time. (I’m a guy, remember?)
So I put a pipe on the end of the wrench and tried to do a chinup on it.
Of course that’s when it broke loose.
So I got back up on the chair, carefully, and started loosening it to take it all the way off to see where the problem was. Just to be safe, I got a bucket to catch any water that might dribble out.
While I was loosening it, Michael, who’d gone upstairs, came down, and Alyssa, 12, came over to see what was going on.
The next part happened in slow motion.
As I was unscrewing the last little bit, the water (and black, unmentionable, icky crud) from the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, and all the pipes in between finally found a place to go.
My face happened to be about 4 inches from that spot.
My eyes, ears, nose, and throat were filled with water so black it was opaque. In the background, through the gurgling, I heard the the sound of two children laughing like only children can laugh.
They still talk about it, and the stains in the shirt are still there.
Oh, and I found the lid to the dishwashing liquid.
I’ve got my ‘every six months’ checkup going on to see if the cancer they killed in me a few years back is still dead. I had it twice – between two of the checkups it came back – so I don’t – shall we say, ‘count my chickens before they hatch’.
As a result, these checkups are generally preceded by two weeks of anxiety that builds and builds and builds until I get the results back.
I mentioned to a fellow at work that it was happening, and he said, “So, you must be used to it by now.”
I thought about that for a moment, and then realized that it’s not something you “get” used to…
I tried to find a way to explain it – and finally told him this:
“It’s like every six months, someone holds a gun to your head, and they slowly squeeze the trigger. You can hear the springs in the gun compressing, you feel the muzzle shake a little as their muscles quiver, and you tense up, anticipating the explosion. Adrenaline pours through your body. You try to keep from shaking, from crying, because the gun exploded twice before, and you don’t want to go through that again.
This time, there’s a loud “click” of the hammer slamming down on an empty chamber. Just that sound explodes in your ears. Every muscle in your body jolts tight as the sound echoes – then rings away.
No bullet this time.
Good.
But it takes awhile to recover.
And no… you don’t ever get used to it.
A number of years ago, in my first job in IT, I worked for a local health care cooperative automating the data gathering of an outbound call center.
That sounds nice and sophisticated. What really happened was that I worked in a group with a bunch of little old ladies –meant in the dearest sense you could mean it – they were little, and old, and ladies. Imagine working with your mom or grandma to get the picture. They made calls to new members in the various regions to inform them of the possibilities they could expect with their new membership. My job was to automate the data gathering of the department. Each telephone call was logged, categorized, and eventually summarized so the region could be billed for the work done on their behalf.
How this was done was simple: Paper, pencil, and a bunch of little hash marks: IIIII IIIII IIIII. Each hash mark represented one telephone call – which could take place in seconds, or many minutes. They were valuable hash marks.
My job – summarize it so those hash marks could be turned into money at the end of the quarter.
I was given the process, and as I sat there with a solar powered calculator adding hash marks for weeks every quarter while a $2000.00 computer sitting on my desk burned electrons, I had this strange idea that “there’s GOT to be a better way than this.” This is where the automation came in. But automating it so a bunch of little old ladies could use it – correction – would use it – was key.
I’d been told that for this data gathering project, I would not be allowed to use a database, I would have to use Microsoft’s Excel. (that’s another story for another time) And so, technically, I had to make Excel look and act like a database, but more importantly, I had to get these little old ladies (who can be mighty stubborn, I might add) to go from things they could see and feel (pencil and paper) to things they couldn’t (electrons).
One of the little old ladies was named Georgiana. She had been diagnosed with ADD, and was quite aware of it, so she worked hard, with stacks of post-it notes all over to help keep herself on track. She also was an absolute delight to work with, and would tell me any time some code I wrote didn’t make sense. Conversely, if it did make sense, and she understood it, she would let me know – and then I knew everyone else would understand it as well.
So Georgiana became my canary in the coal mine. She would not only tell me when she didn’t understand how some functionality was supposed to work, she would also tell me when the others had trouble.
And as a result, that trouble, whatever it was, would get fixed. In human terms, they’d understand it better. In business terms, their productivity would go up. In human terms, they’d have less frustration. In business terms, there’d be fewer impediments to them doing their jobs.
All because the code was written with the customer in mind.
I wrote thousands of lines of code for that project. It eventually became a distributed data repository, on two separate, totally incompatible networks, that could quite literally only communicate via email, so the calculations happened via Excel formulas, daily reporting happened via distributed Excel and Outlook macros and Novell Groupwise automation, and summarization and reporting at the end of the quarter was done with Excel macros and linking and embedding the results into Word. This took the generation of the report down from weeks to two hours, which I thought was a bit of an accomplishment – but it became very clear to me that no matter how wonderful, how exciting, how shiny, sparkly or technically brilliant the code was, if I didn’t listen to my customers – if my code didn’t solve the problems they were facing on a daily basis, then they wouldn’t use it. If it didn’t do what the customer wanted, then all the effort I put into it was a complete and utter waste of time, both mine and the user’s. I’ll tell that story some other time – but over time, I realized that more and more, the code I wrote was written with one little old lady in mind.
It’s been 15 years now, but in every line of code I write now is a little bit written for Georgiana.
(c) Tom Roush 2009
Sometimes, trouble is harder to get out of than it is to get into, and sometimes, getting out of it can be a little more painful than staying out of it would have been.
Of course, I have a story about this.
It started, as these things often do, with an innocuous question from my son, who’d just come back from a class trip to France.
“Pop, is it possible for the memory of something to be better than the event itself?”
That kind of question had me listening with all ears, and brain set fully on “record”.
“Um… Yeah, why?”
“Well, when we were in Paris, – well – did you know that they sell beer in vending machines in France?”
“No, I didn’t…”
Unspoken was the fact that not only had he noticed that they sell beer in vending machines, but also noted the sounds that coins make going in, and the sounds that cans make coming out, and how cold they feel once they get into your hand..
Sometimes it’s better to just let the story tell itself, so I waited. He’d gotten a tattoo before he’d gone, a fairly sizable one. He figured he was 18 and could do that with or without my permission, so he did. He’d told the fellow who did the tattoo that he’d bring some French Cigarettes back for him, so he found some Gitaines, or Gauloises, I forget which. These are cigarettes that would make the Marlboro man look like an absolute wuss, just before he started hacking up rugged pieces of lung.
Part of the trip to France involved a stop in Paris, and the free time they had involved them walking… Everywhere. Late one evening, after one of these long days of walking, he and his roommate were standing on a balcony of their hotel room, relaxing, leaning on the railing, looking out over Paris.
In springtime.
I’ll pause here, while the image gets burned into your mind…
Understand, it’s the wrong image, but still…
So they’re standing there on the balcony, when that image tried to assert herself. I mean, there they are, overlooking one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and the image that kept calling to them had a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and was so-o-o-o cool.
The pieces were all there, all they had to do was answer the call of that oh-so-cool image.
That’s when one of them decided he wanted to try the French beer.
Just a note: two words that have never, ever gone together in the same sentence: French and Beer.
French and Wine: Totally different story.
German and Beer: Definitely a different story.
French and beer? Not a chance.
But, they were in Paris, and chances like this don’t come up very often, so they tried the French beer.
“Have you ever had French beer? It tastes like cat piss!”
This was not a comparison I felt qualified to make, nor am I sure he was, but we’ll let that one go.
After gagging and spewing a bit on the cat – er beer, they decided to try the cigarettes.
“Pop, what do they put INTO those things? I mean, it was like sucking on asphalt.
It was GROSS! “How do people smoke those things?”
Sometimes a single whiff of asphalt is more effective than the most strident parent’s words. I smiled.
“And we had to – just HAD to get that taste out of our mouths and the only thing we had was that French beer….”
Ahh…
Paris…
Springtime…
A balcony… a drink, a friend, and smoke, drifting lazily from the end of a cigarette…
That’s the memory.
The reality is a little different.
© Tom Roush 2009
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