A Commonplace Life

For a couple of miserable years I lived in the suburbs of Detritus, Michigan. It was the Motor City with a vengeance. The Ford kids beat up the Chevy kids. Both of these gangs beat up the few miserable Chrysler kids in the school. My father didn't work for any of the car companies, so everyone beat me up.

I have often said I'm glad I have forgotten the names of everyone I knew at that school. It means I don't feel guilty for failing to make the world a better place by hunting them all down and killing them. Did I mention that these were not happy times for me?

Be that as it may, being shackled to the Auto Industry had some interesting side effects too. For example, our games of marbles involved a lot of "steelies." These were large ball bearings that shop rats had brought home as toys for their kids. I never did find out whether the name came from what they were made of or from how they were obtained.

We also had some balls, in varying marble-like sizes, made of some brown-streaked material that looked more or less like limestone. I forget what we called them. Someone told me his dad got them for him out of one of the tumbler vats at the shop, where they were used to clean materials before assembly or something like that. I shudder now wondering what they might have been made of.

We heard all the shop legends too, of how bored shop rats might hide ball bearings inside the door panel of a Cadillac going down the line, along with a note that said "you finally found the rattle, you rich bastard." Or how if one of the assembly line workers ordered a new car, in a basic version, by the time it got to the end of the assembly line it would have every deluxe option in the book. Or how, on the other hand, some poor schmuck once ordered a Chevrolet bone stock, with no options at all- and crashed the inventory computer system for the entire plant. Nobody EVER ordered a car with no options at all. Nobody had thought to program the computers to allow such a possibility.

Option-buying couldn't have been any more different from today. Today even the most basic version of most cars will have a good radio, power windows, air conditioning, and a dozen other things which were expensive options or not available at all back in the day. The auto industry has twigged that it is cheap and easy to equip base models well, as long as they're all equipped the same way, and to offer upgrades as packages. When I bought my most recent car I could have had any number of individual appearance gadgets added at the dealership, but for individual items offered as factory options I think the only two available were a moonroof and a navigation package.

Back then options were individual items, except perhaps for a "power package" which might be power steering and brakes, or other such basic packages. And you really couldn't have a decent car without buying at least a few options. An engine big enough to actually move the car, an automatic transmission, a radio (AM only), power steering, power brakes, hubcaps, all were optional. At first, even the OIL FILTER was an optional extra on Chevrolets.

Air conditioning in cars was almost unheard-of. When I saw it, it was an after market add-on unit that occupied most of the space under the dashboard. When I first became aware of power windows they were an item of disgust, since who would be so lazy they couldn't be bothered to crank down a window?

In this era where you can hardly buy a toaster or a flashlight that doesn't have a clock built in, it may seem incredible that a car clock was a very expensive optional extra. Nobody I knew got them. There was always a flat plate in the dash, surrounded by a bezel of some kind, where the clock should go, but not a clock in there. Car clocks had a bad reputation, and well they might. They would have been a battery-driven mechanical clock, and you can only imagine the reliability problems of a mechanical clock subject to the heat, cold, shock, vibration, and dust inherent in an automotive installation. All the more so because the clocks were, supposedly, more complicated than most. Mechanical clocks are inaccurate, so you had to keep resetting the one in your car. Supposedly, if you set it ahead, that would make the clock run a little faster; if you set it back, a little slower, until you zeroed in on the right speed. Clever, but crazy complicated.

By the time I was driving myself a lot of this nonsense had gone away. The only really stripped down cars on the road were Government Specials. For a while, after certain luxuries became standard equipment, the State sent their cars to a special shop to have radios and such removed. Because the generous Taxpayers would get bent out of shape thinking of state employees driving around in their AMC Hornets with air conditioning and a tinny single-speaker AM-FM radio. We had to be denied such luxuries, even if they cost nothing more; even, in fact, if the State had to pay extra to have them removed.

These days it's hard to buy a car that doesn't have a pretty good suite of luxury and comfort features as standard. These days, if the car comes standard with power windows, air conditioning, and a radio, even we public employees are allowed to use them. That's one way today is better than the Good Old Days.

I'd guess there are still many places where the fire siren blows to mark noon and 6:00 PM. That's handy for those who don't wear watches, which is more of us than it used to be. It was even handier back in the old days where many people didn't wear watches because they didn't have one.

When I was a kid it was handy even if you did wear a watch. As they all were, mine was mechanical. As many were, it was accurate to about five minutes a day-- which is close enough for any practical purpose, if you stop and think about it. In any case it was inaccurate enough that regular time signals, to allow me to correct it, were convenient.

Of course blowing the horn at noon was a bit obsolete even then because we had electric clocks. Every so often I still hear some guy on an antiques show marveling that the electric clock he got from his grandmother still keeps perfect time. Well, all a classic electric clock does is turn at a rate exactly synchronized to the cycles in line current. (The new analog electric clocks seem to be battery quartz movements hitched to a plug in electric transformer; this is cheaper than a synchronous electric motor, I suppose, and can keep running in a power failure if it has a backup battery. But it's not smooth like the old synchronous motor electric clocks are.) A classic electric clock will keep perfect time, if it runs at all, because the folks at the power company take great care to make sure their current cycles at the exact correct rate. They're talking about not doing that any more, because so few people depend on the classic synchronous-motor electric clocks, and a little bit off on the cycle speed here causes no problems otherwise. But for now the current in your wall outlets is perfectly synchronized, and your grandmother's electric clock works just fine.

People value what they don't have. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the world of watch geekery. Anybody can go down to Wal-Mart and, for well under $20, buy a quartz watch that is so accurate that resetting it twice a year for daylight savings time would keep you on time for all your appointments year round. Do watch geeks love these marvels, these true marvels, of mass market technical brilliance? They do not. They want a Rolex or an even more costly self-winding mechanical watch, a watch that costs hundreds of dollars JUST TO SERVICE, which your'e supposed to do every year, and which exhibits a level of inaccuracy which wouldn't be acceptable in a quartz watch you got free in a box of Cap'n Crunch. But the second hand moves smoothly instead of in one second jerks. Also, unlike the brilliantly accurate quartz watches, not everybody can afford a handmade Swiss automatic watch. (And most of those who could have better sense.)

Of course the first electronic watch I can remember, the Bulova Accurtron, was advertised on TV as "Accurate to a minute a month." They gave close-up views of its second hand moving in one second ticks, touted as evidence of its unparalleled precision and accuracy. Back then not everybody could afford a watch whose second hand moved in one second ticks, so they were rare and desirable and worth the higher price.

Today any bozo can have a hyper-accurate wrist watch, assuming (s)he doesn't just rely on cell phones for time. We can also have a pocket GPS device that shows us where we are on a map, any time we need it, a technology which itself depends on accurate timekeeping. We need never know what it is to miss an appointment because our watch was off or because we didn't know where we were. (We do, but it doesn't need to happen.) It's easy to go about your business casually accepting these marvels of technology, never stopping to think that as recently as the years of my childhood a slow or stopped clock could cause a navigation error that might kill people, or might put trains or planes on collision courses-- and sometimes did.

One of the little towns I grew up in had a Detroit Edison office. You'd go in there and hand the man behind the counter your busted toaster; a week or two later you'd go and pick it up again, perfectly repaired. You'd go in and hand him your burned-out light bulbs; he'd hand you new ones, right on the spot. The charge for all of this was exactly nothing.

Oh, you paid all right, on your electric bill. But repairs or replacements on small electric items was included at no extra charge, no pun intended.

I suppose the practice of repairing small appliances for free went away in the 70s, when appliances became cheap in price and construction, too cheap to be worth fixing, and most of them were stamped or glued together to be maintenance-proof anyway. I do remember that free light bulbs went on for a while until an Honest Businessman sued Edison for anti-competitive practices because he couldn't make his penny of profit on a light bulb when Edison gave them away for free. I suppose he has a point- it's hard to compete with free. Too bad he had to spoil it for everyone else so he could get his penny, though. Honest Businessman!

Even then it struck me as strange that Edison would have an office in that little town just to fix toasters and hand out free light bulbs. But thinking back, I realize the main reason they had an office was to collect electric bill payments, in cash.

My family was on the cutting edge of technology. Dad paid our bills with a household checkbook. I grew up thinking that was the nature of the world. You paid things The Check is In the Mail way, and people always had. Not so.

Apparently the household checkbook wasn't all that common until the 1960s. Even when I was a kid, a lot folks, old-timers mainly, did everything in cash. They would go to the gas company or electric company office in town. Or if there was no office, they could pay at some of the banks; I remember seeing signs in the banks that they accepted payments for this or the other utility, loan company, and so on.

I was thinking about that today when I was writing some checks to pay my property taxes on the vacant lots next to the house. I am almost up to Check Number 4000. I've written a lot of checks in my career here. But now I write probably one or two a month, no more than that. Instead, I pay via my bank online. They will transfer the funds electronically or, for the real hold-outs, print a check and mail it for me. But there are some people I only pay once, or once in a great while. It's not worth it to me to enter their information into the system. For these people, I still write a check and send it Snail Mail.

With the death spiral of the Post Office, I may soon not be sending anyone any checks at all. I daresay many, perhaps even most, of the people around this country today never wrote a check and never will.

It's surprising, when I think of it, that something that seems to have been an eternal and indispensable feature of the universe was just a blink in history's eye.

The IBM PC was beneath "Greg." The mapping software would only work properly on a serious machine, like the DEC minicumputer or the Sparc Stations. Still, we had to try to get part of the software to run on the wretched PC because the customers, the users, kept asking for it.

Greg didn't have much use for users. That included me, the sole survivor of the original branch of the company, the one that had used our software to make maps for the industry rather than trying to sell the software itself. Still, I was useful enough. I could try some damfool user move like crashing the system by using a contour interval of 0.00001. ("It was a triple integral of the vertical component of the magnetic field, and the whole data range was only plus or minus 0.003! How could I know it was gonna crash the system?") Annoying, but better that I do it than that one of the paying customers did.

I rose a bit in his estimation, though, when one of the PCs-- one of the GOOD ones, the PC-AT, with the faster processor and the big hard disc-- ate itself. It needed a new hard drive. I told Greg I thought I could replace it for less than the $600 that IBM was going to charge us. Not only that, I pulled it off.

And not only THAT, but by paying $300 for a new drive and a RLL controller card to operate it (IDE, with the drive electronics on the disc drive itself, was still years away) gave us a hard drive of 40 MB, twice the original capacity. We had no idea what we were going to do with all that space. I was a hero. I actually knew something about computers.

Then, two days later, I shot myself down again.

I was rummaging around for a calculator. "You know, they ought to build calculators into these desktop computers."

"What, build a calculator into the keyboard?" Which was not such a bad idea, actually. A year or so later those showed up on the market, and you could buy them for several years. Maybe you still can.

"No, as software. With a calculator display right on the monitor. I'm sitting here looking for a calculator and I've got an IBM PC-AT that can do twelve thousand arithmetic calculations per second, and I can't get it to divide three by seventeen. It's frustrating. They should have a calculator program that just pops up when you need it. Multitasking on the desktop computer, or something like that."

Greg snorted. "Do you have any idea how hard that would be to do? And for what? To use a five thousand dollar computer to take the place of a fifty buck calculator."

"I don't care. They should do it."

"No, they shouldn't, and they never will. That's just a silly idea." And Greg walked away, shaking his head and chuckling about how naive I was.

Some time ago I was visiting a friend, elsewhere in a drier part of the country. I took a sip of the tapwater. "It tastes like it's chlorinated," I said.

"It is. Community water system."

Which kind of boggled me, because this was something like six miles from the nearest town. I figured most people in this country, who are urban, wouldn't know the joys of private home water systems, but if public water is reaching miles and miles from town maybe private home water systems are even rarer than I had thought.

Not here, in the State that Squishes Wherever you Step On It. Public systems go by the name of City Water, and we have laws banning private wells within the reach of such a system. But outside the city limits, pretty much all the houses have private wells. Usually these only go down forty or fifty feet; in many places, ten would be enough, if you weren't worried about that other feature of rural life, the Septic Tank.

Of course the wells come with associated water systems. Over the years I've become acquainted with four such systems. (And there's never a GOOD reason to become acquainted with one.)

There are other kinds, but the ones I've worked with all work in this wise: You have an electric centrifugal pump, which is Hardware Store for "Overwhelming amounts of electricity will move water, no matter how crudely that electricity is applied." Next to the pump is a pressure tank that contains water oh, about halfway up, air above that. Pump forces water into the bottom of the tank. Remember, liquids don't compress, but the air does. The compressed air above the water provides the "spring power" to push the water out again, and around the house wherever you need it.

Since the 1970s most of these have been bladder tanks, where the air is contained in a heavy-duty rubber balloon. Unfortunately, Ugly House is just old enough that they didn't have bladder tanks when it was built. It's got a plain old galvanized steel tank, which means that every couple years I have to pump air back into it. As the air goes away, that compressed air "spring" gets smaller and smaller, until eventually the pump is cycling off two or three times providing the amount of water you need to fill a coffee pot. You have to get more air into that tank, to return the pump to normal, longer cycles, or you're gonna be crawling under the house to pump more air into the tank AND to install the shiny new water pump you bought because you were idiot enough to burn up the old one.

So unfortunately, I have to pump air into my pressure tank every now and then. Doubly unfortunately, it is in the crawlspace under the far back corner of the house. Through the hole in the one concrete foundation wall that is small enough it almost pins me when I crawl through, around the corner, and then through the smaller hole that DOES pin me. At least I didn't wedge this time, like I did the last time I did this, when I weighed a hundred pounds more.

Triply unfortunately, creatures that crawl have taken the word "crawlspace" as a hint. I don't mind the garter snake I encountered down there once; go forth, multiply, eat lots of bugs and mice, and more power to you. I didn't get the snake fear when they passed out my instinct kit. Unfortunately I DID get the Spider Fear in double measure.

So let's do a checklist here; confined spaces, claustrophobia, heavy exertion in poor ventilation, loose fiberglass insulation everywhere, an electric air pump in direct confrontation with a water tank attached to a well that's the best earth ground in the world. And when things seemed to be pretty much under control... of course...

SPIDERS.

Well, OK, it was just a symbolic spider, one of the little tiny jumping spiders that are almost cute. But at that point I decided that yes, I can't tell how much air I got into the tank but it is ENOUGH, dammit, and I'm going home.

I am out now, and washing the fiberglass dust out of the jeans and jacket I wore down there. It will probably be two or three years before I have to do this again, by which time I will probably have forgotten enough about what that crawlspace is like to be willing to go down into it again.

For those who have never done it, here is how to operate a 1970 car radio.

It has a horizontal dial with one knob to the left, another to the right, and five buttons in a row beneath. Turn the left knob for on, off, and volume. Turn the right to tune. Push one of the five buttons to go to a preset station.

Done. Whatever you could say against an AM-only car radio (and there is a LOT) there's never been a "sound system" with better ergonomics. Notably, it's dead easy to run the thing without even looking at it. That's a nice safety feature. I wish those who make car radios today would give more thought to the fact that when you're listening to the thing you're DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD and if you take your eyes off the road for too long YOU WILL DIE.

What brought this to mind is my latest portable radio, which has something like six different ways to tune. That's four more than I will ever use.

There's the standard tuning knob.

Their is their "Easy Tuning System," which I admit is pretty cool; it scans the entire band and registers all listenable signals. Through some digital signal processing magic, it is even pretty good at recognizing what is a signal and what isn't. Then when you turn the tuning knob, it goes directly station to station, skipping the dead space between.

This is somehow different from the auto memory storage, which does much the same thing but into banks of preset memories accessible via pushbutton. There's an alternate version of this, active on the shortwave bands, which scans for new signals and stores them without erasing the ones you have stored previously.

Or you can enter frequencies into memory manually. You can use the keyboard to enter a frequency directly. You can set the radio to scanning the band and playing a few seconds of each station it encounters, and at any point you can stop it, add it to your "ETS" register, or enter it into one of the pushbutton memories.

Whichever way you do it, though, you still have more the illusion of choice than real choice.

I call this the Wal-Mart Effect because that's where I first noticed it. Our Wal-Mart has, for example, a whole wall of yogurt. That seems to give you a lot of choice. But look at it and you start to realize that you have 20 brands of strawberry, 20 of blueberry, and 20 of vanilla. Kind of like politics; same crap, different label.

Up here Out in the Pickers, as we are, we're in radio relay country. So we get a lot of stations, but it's three repeaters of the rock station, three of the country station, six of the insipid right-wing JAYZUSS!!! station (although those might actually be different stations; it's really hard to tell them apart), four Bob and Tom, a Howard Stern or two, and a couple dozen Rush Limbaugh. That is one way in which 1970 radio actually was better. It still followed Stugeon's Law- 90% of everything is crap- but at least it wasn't the exact same crap, synchronized on every station you could hear.

But let it pass.

I was amused, though, that my little pocket AM-FM-shortwave set has as many memories as it does. It has 100 memories for AM alone.

Think on that. 100 memories in a band that has only 120 channels to begin with. If they'd only included a few more, I could tune through every single frequency in the band by going memory to memory to memory-- which, I'm sure you'll agree, has to be far more efficient than doing the same thing by, oh, twisting a big knob or something.

A performance car should roar. It may growl or rumble. If expensive enough, a purrrrr and quiet self-assurance are acceptable.

It should not rattle. It should not buzz. And under NO circumstances should it make a high-pitched tooting noise reminiscent of a goose with diarrhea.

That is all.

As I understand it, the sound of a car's turn signals is that of an electomechanical relay. Current flows through, heats a coil, metal expands, TICK, a leaf switch pops off its contact. The coil cooks, metal contracts, TOCK, the leaf switch snaps back down where it was, and the light comes on again.

So why do car manufacturers use such a piece of vacuum tube cleverness in modern cars? The answer is, at least usually they don't. Turn signals tick-tock because people expect that noise when the turn signal is operating. The sound no more signifies the presence of an actual electric relay than the kaKLICK-whirrr..rrRRRrrr..rrrriCK! sound a cell phone makes when it takes a picture signifies the presence of a folding mirror, focal plane shutter, and automatic winder for 35mm film. But people expect those sounds when you activate the machine, so the manufacturers provide an electronic noisemaker to make them.

Esmerelda, the Mustang (Esmerelda was beloved by Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, so calling her that tells you what I think of my physical beauty) is about as retro a car as has been made in the past ten years, but even she has the electronic noisemaker instead of the real thing. I found this out by practical experiment.

You see, Esperelda also has the nag chimes typical of all American cars (dagnappit). She bong bong bongs at me to fasten my seat belt. I believe in seat belts, but I don't wear one when I'm backing out of something, because it's too hard to turn around and look behind me with the seat belt on.

I'm also in the habit of having the turn signal that's on the car's outermost rear corner blinking away as I back out of a parking space. That way I have a flashing light out there, and if I didn't see some other car, maybe its driver will see me. An easy precaution to take, right?

Well, when I'm backing out of a parking space with my seat belt unbuckled and the turn signal going, Esmerelda is faced with a dilemma. She needs to tick-tock at me for the turn signal and Bong bong bong at me to nag me about the seat belt. But her noisemaker is single channel-- it can, apparently, only make one of those sounds at a time.

So she bongs at me for about ten seconds, as the turn signal flashes silently, and only then starts in with the turn signal noise. Busted!