The Single Coolest Tribute Band EVER

Saying Goodbye to My Hands

For more than fifty years
My hands have been my life
My fingers have made my living
My hands have fed my family
My hands have built our home
My fingers played the music,
Said the things my heart could not.

Now, old man’s disease, arthritis
Is putting an end to all of that.
With hands that are becoming claws
With fingers that jerk and stall
I can’t hold a handkerchief to my nose
I can’t swing a hammer, hold a guitar pick,
Wield a soldering iron, squeeze my wife’s hand.

The fingers that I broke years ago
Now twist and deform like wilting flowers.
The bones that were smashed by work
and careless disregard for the future
are getting their revenge on the brain
that said “Keep going, keep working.
Play through it. Ignore the pain.”
 
Today, I can’t.
They won’t perform on command.
My hands are dying.
My fingers are putting an end
To any dreams I might have
Of a future as a builder, a maker,
A musician, a lover, a man.
Goodbye my old abused and tortured friends.

I woke up at 3AM a few nights ago couldn't close my right hand, even a bit. My left was slightly less impaired, but certainly not useful or strong enough to make up for the loss of the right. At that moment, I realized that this might be my last year for a lot of things, like playing guitar or construction projects or typing. There was no chance that I’d sleep more that night. I got up and worked on a Tom Waits song I've fooled with for the last year: “Shiver Me Timbers.” I wrote a half-dozen essays. For the first time since I was a teenager in love, I wrote something the Pressure Press folks call "a poem" That was the bit that opened this essay.

The "poetry" is exaggerated. But I have known way, way too many people younger and older than me who have lost a lot of their ability to be themselves due to arthritis. Some even decided they’d lost enough of themselves to give up on life. A friend of my grandmother--a woman who had been a musician and an artist and a gardener and an inspiration to everyone who knew her—was reduced to wandering around her backyard looking at the weeds overtaking her once-beautiful gardens and staring at her crabbed hands. She managed to turn the gas on her oven, stuck her head into the stove, and smothered herself. No one wondered why. A cousin--a man who is a decade younger than me and was once one of the most active people I’ve known—can’t write his name, drive a car, hold his wife’s hand, or help one of his kids into the car thanks to arthritis.

Personally, I hate this disease more than cancer. Cancer is, usually, terminal and often fairly quick. Arthritis is endless torture.

I have hammered these poor appendages into submission for 67 years, but they are starting to fight back. It does remind me of something I've said for decades, though. "If I'd have known I would live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

Seriously, I'm in pretty good shape. The whole prose thing came from the "inspiration" of waking up unable to use my right hand and thinking that someday could be the last day I can do the things I take for granted. The next day, I met a young lady who has been dealing with this pain and incapacity since she was a young teenager. Forty years ago, the girlfriend of the keyboard player for a band I was in was so stricken with degenerative arthritis that she was unable to receive a hip transplant because her pelvis was so wreaked. I'm not whining, feeling sorry for myself, or asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I’m just shouting at the night.

I'm 67 and have broken bones in my hands (and other places) so many times I couldn't begin to get a straight count. I quit hitting the heavy bag in 2013 because my hands were so messed up the next day. This isn't a sudden change but the obvious disability feels sudden.

I'm sort of inspired that the pain aimed me at doing a breed of writing I haven't attempted in 40 years. I'm humbled that I have so many friends who were moved by that inspiration.

Making Your Own Pace of Change

I attended a discussion group at the Unitarian Universalist Society of River Falls last weekend on the topic of “The Pace of Change”: “The culture around us is evolving technologically and this affects the way we live as familiar ways of doing things become outdated. As the pace quickens how do you feel and what do you think about that? Choose an example that affects you directly and share your thoughts and feelings.”

A lot of the group’s feelings were centered around disgust and/or paranoia about “planned obsolescence.” Some of that conversation was pretty much outside of my own experience with product design and manufacturing. Assuming that engineers are capable of good design is often a gross miscalculation. I saw unintentional fatal errors like placing temperature sensitive components next to parts that run hot by design, seriously underestimating the need for component selection safety margins, and completely idiotic part placement in vibration-prone products in at least five different industries and a dozen companies; four of which were highly reliability-sensitive industries. Another common and valid complaint was regarding unrepairable products. This isn’t planned obsolescence, this is terrible design. Design Magazine has a column titled “Designed by Monkeys” that highlights stupid stuff like this and it’s always refreshing to hear an engineer ridicule his fellow monkeys in this format.

In audio, lots of people resort to buying “old school” products to avoid the unrepairable issue: vintage microphones, analog tape recorders, etc. Another, more practical approach, is to hunt down and support those companies whose products are known for reliability and whose customer service is known for providing a quality response. In practically every area, we all know who the low quality vendors are, but figuring out who the good guys are is much harder.

One obvious clue for the good guys is available service information. In my own recent consumer experience, Volkswagen is the most customer-hostile car company I can imagine. They make service information difficult and expensive for independent service centers and even more impossible for customers who want to service their own vehicles. Volkswagen’s dealer service is nationally notorious for incompetence and high cost. Nissan, on the other hand, makes service manuals available (for free) in PDF format on the NissanUSA website. Nissan is extremely helpful to independent service centers. Parts and service information is as available to independents and customers as those commodities are to their own dealer network.

As for doing the work yourself, I recommend it. In fact, I really recommend either carefully researching the products you buy for available service information or when a particular product’s service information is absolutely not available from any vendor in the market, pay the least possible for the product. Paying a premium for Apple’s iCrap is idiotic, now that the company has embraced the “Retina” design philosophy. I don’t have a problem with “throw-away” products as long as they sell for throw-away prices. An iPad sells for $600 and, for the most part, can’t be repaired in any practical sense. There are a large number of Android-OS pads that are well under $70 and they do every useful thing the iPad can manage. The things the iPad does that can’t be done on an Android pad would quickly be available on the cheaper devices if Apple’s sales collapsed. For that matter, Apple’s prices would follow the market if it weren’t for their Kool-Aid drinking fanboys and girls.

In the last two years, I have installed SSD’s in four computers (including a 2009 Apple MacBook Pro), installed operating systems and programs on a half-dozen computers, repaired the cooling system of my MacBook Pro, upgraded the video on my 2008 Mac Pro tower, rebuilt one motorcycle fuel injection system, rebuilt one lawnmower carburetor, changed the oil on all of my vehicles and lawn care appliances, troubleshot and repaired the electronics package on a Winnebago Rialta/VW Eurovan,  fixed the AC on two vehicles, learned how to pour a new floor and wall in my underground garage, repaired a small pile of pro audio electronics and music equipment, wired a good bit of two houses, disassembled and repaired the lens mechanism on my 8 year old digital camera, and repaired more things than I can remember for family, friends, and customers. I’m not convinced that all modern products are unrepairable or even designed so they can’t be repaired. I am convinced that most people are so helpless that they are walking Darwin Awards waiting for the moment that solar flare-generated EMP takes out the technology they cling to so precariously.

One of the things you learn from owning an old home is that engineers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons, and everyone involved in product design 50-150 years ago had the same diverse collection of “talents” today’s technicians exhibit. Some were good and some were awful.

Intuition Is Sometimes Right, Even Mine

When I decided to retire from teaching, I felt pretty strongly that Id overstayed my welcome. My patience for bureaucracy, students, and even a few of my friends at the school was wearing thin. I’d stopped having fun teaching more than a year earlier, for multiple reasons. While the subjects still fascinated me, my never-particularly-tolerant tolerance for fools began to suck the life out of my classroom attitude. My last couple of labs were so painfully pointless that I could barely stand the idea of showing up to class on those days. And four of the work days required me to be in those two labs. Between the cell phone addictions and the “Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom . . .” interruptions from a couple of ADHD-diagnosed kids with no more self-discipline than baby bobcats I was back to dragging myself out of bed to go to work. So, two years ago, today I decided I wasn’t going back for the 2013 fall semester.

Off and on, I’ve wondered if I retired too early. If I still had something worth providing to the few students who actually give a crap about music, audio, technology, and the rest of the skills that are required to make a few bucks in the “music business.” One piece of evidence that I’d made the right decision was, oddly, from LinkedIn.com. My youngest daughter, Genya, turned me on to LinkedIn years ago, after I’d left medical devices and was wandering around looking for a 5th (or 15th) career direction. The site never really did anything for my career options, until I’d already began my teaching career. However, it has been an interesting social networking resource, allowing me to keep in touch with past co-workers, friends, students, and employees. LinkedIn has a silly feature that allows users to “endorse” their connections with a button-push; not exactly a rousing recommendation or even something that requires much thought. My friends have generously provided me with hundreds of endorsements for my “skills” ranging from electronic design to recording engineering to musical capability. The last 12 years of my career certainly provided me with more LinkedIn endorsements than the previous 30 years of my career, mostly (I hope) because this kind of resource didn’t exist until recently.

I don’t pay much attention to stuff like this because its no longer relevant to whatever future I have left. I haven’t counted my endorsements or tried to encourage (or discourage) anyone to endorse me. I’m not really looking for work and I don’t care all that much who knows what I know (or used to know) or what my talents are or were. I’m done with a lot more stuff than I expect to do.

However, when I was in New Mexico over the winter of 2013-2014, I offered myself up as an extra-curricular instructor for the Truth or Consequences high school; teaching the same subjects I’d taught at McNally Smith College of Music. Not much happened from my offer for a month or so and I decided to rattle the music department’s cage to see if I’d fallen through the cracks. What I learned was that the school was pretty much dropping music and art in order to concentrate on bringing the state and the school’s ranking up from dead bottom. The only comment the about-to-be-unemployed music teacher had for me was, “Nobody had much to say about your teaching ability on LinkedIn.”
As far as the button-pusher rankings, he was right. I hadn’t noticed that, but I didn’t have a single vote for any aspect of teaching/education/classroom/mentoring bullshit. Not a subtle hint.

Professionals?

We have progressed from when "professional" meant someone who made a living and supported a family in a profession to where anyone who once held a job or an internship until discovered to be incompetent can claim to "have been a professional." The current definition is leaning toward "I paid a shitload of cash (in unpaid loans) to be education in a professional and while I'm too lazy, incompetent, and/or untalented to even find an unpaid internship in that field, I deserve to be called a professional." I can't even imagine what's next.

Real Engineering

In a Linkedin.com Music and Audio Professionals group, in in a discussion about "audio engineering" vs. "real engineering" a character named Stephen Hart wrote, "Disagreeing completely, learning and having success in the recording arts is a whole different beast and is far more difficult than proficiency in circuit board layout, C+, CAD, etc. The 'engineering' skills can be learned by many people: millions have become programmers, designers, CAD users etc. It's not any more complex than capturing, guiding and presenting an emotionally charged musical performance. The number of upper echelon recordists and mixers are few, a handful globally. It's not an easy job to get, and it's extraordinarily difficult to have large scale success.

“Thomas, you're talking about finding work easily, having marketable skill sets, that's fine, if laying out circuit boards or repairing automation systems is your thing more power to you, you will have work.

“I'm in this for the music, and as far as I'm concerned if anyone wants a real career in the music creation arena it's probably best to take the process a little seriously.”

This was in response to my quote from George Massenburg recommending recording engineering students “learn how to do something real.” Like lots of marginally artistic folks, Hart overrates the demands of his hobby while demeaning the requirements of professionals. If there is a hobby-profession that has more practitioners than “recording engineering,” it would be musicians who consider themselves to be recording engineers. I’d be amazed if there are “millions” of professional programmers or engineers on a planet cluttered with 7 billion people, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are a million self-proclaimed recording engineers in Minnesota.

There is no hard line of functionality in art, as opposed to real engineering. Products have to work as advertised or they are quickly recognized to be junk. A bridge has to tolerate the traffic and abuse it was specified to support. A computer program has to do what it claims to be able to do, reliably and consistently. A recording does not have to “work” or provide service to users. Evaluating a mix is a purely subjective act. There are thousands of examples of recordings that violate dozens of objective “rules” for music and are still considered to be musical (by someone). The difference between art and engineering is exactly this vast gap. A work that doesn’t have an identifiable line of function-over-form can be fine art, but it can not be compared to engineering.

A Profitable Kiss of Death

The last few months of dealing with selling a house and buying one has put me in contact with my least favorite sort of engineer far too often: the licensed Professional Engineer (PE). My first experiences with that sad, paranoid, grossly conservative breed of “professional” came in my first engineering job—with a Misfortune 500 agricultural manufacturer. Not only did we have to design many of our products to meet UL’s erratic and irrational demands, but I had to carry on demented snail mail and telephone conversations with UL’s nutty in-house PEs. In a deranged response to the sluggish pace of UL certification, that company bend over and kissed its own ass goodbye and hired two engineers away from UL and a couple more who claimed to be UL and high voltage “experts.” For the next three years, we cranked out over-priced, horribly designed, grossly conservative crap that dropped our field reliability from an already-sad 30%-failed-per-year to an unacceptable (even to our Republican-party-henchman, John Connelly-loving CEO) 70%+ catastrophe. Two years later and several hundred thousand dollars down the drain, the company fired all of the PEs and returned the design task to the run-of-the-mill non-PE-credentialed engineers and techs, mostly out of financial and customer-dissatisfaction necessity. A complete redesign of all of the electronic and electrical components later, our field failure rate was slightly under 3%-annually. (That sounds awful, but most of our electronic components were part of a center-pivot irrigation system; the world’s largest lightening rods.)

A few years later and QSC was trying to meet good ole’ UL’s consumer product requirements and I’m back working with PEs. As usual, it was a depressing experience, not unlike working with a wagon-full of bricks tied to our backs. The UL drones are, like all PEs, terrified of creativity. If you attempt to do something in a way differently than every similar product they have already tagged, you’re in for a battle. There was only one way around their dislike for original thinking: like most bureaucrats, the UL kids are prone to react positively to bribery. Take their PEs to the most expensive restaurant in town, put them up in a Hilton, treat them like the royalty they believe they are, and you can get the dumbest possible designs past their objections. My case-in-point #1? Crown’s Power Base amps which ran a 120VAC single-insulated wire through the middle of the amp’s heatsink without any consideration to all of the safety hazard that design entailed. The UL PEs regularly harped to us, at QSC, about how much better they were treated when they visited Crown in Elkhart.

More recently, my son-in-law’s mother’s boyfriend is an ex-construction contractor who spent much of his career building roads for the state and Minnesota counties. His distain for “engineers” practically burned off my hair. After a few conversations, I found that the only engineers he ever had to deal with were the government road department PEs. He claimed he could design anything better than an “engineer” and after I realized he was talking about civil PEs I don’t doubt him for a second.

As for my most recent PE experiences, at one time I thought I’d have to redesign the basement supports in our Little Canada house and on the recommendation of a contractor, I asked a PE to look at the basement and make recommendations. Luckily, the guy I found was only handicapped by his PE credential but was still young enough to have some functioning brain cells. He gave me a lot of phone time for free and strongly recommended that I not asking him for written confirmation of what he’d advised because once he started to write up our 130+ year old house he said I might as well start tearing the house down. To cover his ass, he’d have to write up everything in the house that didn’t meet current specification and that would be pretty much everything in a house that was begun in 1884 and added on in the 1940’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s along with the updates we’d added in the past 18 years. The contractor who’d recommended this PE told me about a 2’ extension he’d added to the floor joists of a house he was remodeling. Due to the insane requirements of current engineering standards, the PE had required him to attach the 2’ 2”x12” floor supports with “1,000 nails” spaced at micro-intervals. Everyone involved realized that this requirement turned the joists into “Swiss cheese” but current code required that idiocy and PEs live and die by codes.

This week, I’m trying to resolve a flooding issue in my lower-level garage. The problem is that my 1947 house (I’ve modernized my living space by nearly 70 years.) has a garage that is within a couple of feet of the county’s right-of-way and over the years the road has been raised to the point that my garage is lower than the drainage ditch. Because the road belongs to the county, I have to deal with the county’s

Why are PEs so reliably depressing? Grossly conservative, bureaucratic sorts are attracted to the credential and security of an engineering job that requires the PE certification. The requirements—“engineers must complete a four-year college degree, work under a Professional Engineer for at least four years, pass two intensive competency exams and earn a license from their state's licensure board”—are very much like the sort of song-and-dance unions require for membership. Real engineers are too self-motivated to submit to the remedial drivel they’ll have to suffer as part of the “internship” with an old PE drone. A real engineer is more driven to learn how to make things and actually be part of invention and manufacturing than security. The main reason for chasing down the PE certification is the hope for a secure corporate or government job. Not exactly the sort of motivation that inspires a Wozniak, Edison, Tesla, Turing, Wright brother, Kurzweil, da Vinci, Harry Olson, or any other great inventor.

Dealing with a PE is best avoided, but if that’s not an option knowing who they are helps. High on the list of characteristics is their extension of the NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here). Not only are PEs uncomfortable with original thought, their attitude is if it wasn’t invented or approved and documented by a bureaucrat, it doesn’t exit. The best way to convince a PE that your idea is a good one is to convince him it’s not a new one. These guys are not particularly hard-working, so the chances that one of them will do the leg work to determine where an idea came from is close to zero.

When everything else fails, and it probably will, there is a sure weapon against PE-intransience. As best said by Warren Zevon, “bring Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” Lawyers, in particular. The reason PEs are so incapable of original thought or useful activity is that they are buried in their fear of liability. A bureaucrat would rather make no decision than take a chance on an idea might be wrong. The source of this fear is the terror that they might be “responsible” and the people who most scare PEs are lawyers who will identify the responsible bureaucrat and sue the pants off of him. So, bring a lawyer or three to the discussion and while that will not get a decision out of the PE, it will convince him to deny all responsibility and get the hell out of the way.

How to Kill Your Business

I should be an expert on this topic, since it took me almost three years to officially crush the life out of my studio maintenance and equipment repair business. However, intentionally ending a business isn’t really the subject I’m referring to here. I might talk about that some time in the future, but not now. What this rant is about is unintentionally (I think) killing a business with crap service.

Way back in the mid-1980’s, I got caught up in the US manufacturing quality movement as a manager at QSC Audio Products. Because we were trying to qualify as a Dolby and LucasFilm theater system vendor, we needed to up our manufacturing, quality control, and customer service game substantially. At first it seemed like an almost impossible task, since we were probably a 10-15% defective out-of-box vendor and LucasFilm wanted something more along the lines of 0.001% reliability figure. We, however, would be satisfied with 3-sigma ( a little better than 99% reliable) performance as a baby-step toward first-world quality standards.

I found the Phil Crosby “Quality Is Free” book and took one of his courses in L.A. That turned me on to W. Edwards Deming and his books. Those two sources got me and the company headed in the right direction. After a second 3-day Crosby seminar, I ended up getting a part-time gig as a Crosby quality instructor, which I kept for about two years. Early in my classes, the Ford guys were just starting to put some meat behind the “Quality Is Job One” campaign and Don Peterson had just taken over the whole company. (An engineer running an engineering company, imagine that?) Those guys were hungry for ideas because Ford had a habit of replacing engineering guys with MBA morons and they all knew there was a small window in which they could jack up Ford product quality before the company went back to business as usual and form (and advertising) over function. Having those determined and desperate engineers in my classes put a lot of pressure on me and the Crosby organization to provide a lot of value in a short lecture.

One of the QIF lectures included something I remember being called “the 5/5/5 rule.” Whatever it’s called, it comes from the restaurant business. The basic idea is that it takes $50 in advertising to get a customer to try a new restaurant. 5 seconds of poor service will alienate that customer. It will take $5,000 in advertising to get them to try the restaurant a second time. This was a big deal to lots of us, including the Ford engineers. Along with the customer service variation on the Pareto Effect, which is much more discriminating than Pareto’s 80/20 ratio: 1 to 10% of your customers will complain about a product failure while the other 90-99% will simply stop buying your products. Knowing that the cost of poor service is high and hidden and that the likelihood that your customers will tell you when you’ve screwed-up is low is huge. It means that you have to take the few who care enough to complain seriously enough that paying attention to your customers becomes a habit.

The fact that most businesses do the opposite pretty much wraps up the secret to killing a business. Half-assed, intentionally asshole-ish, inattention, or even a few seconds of distracted service will send customers out the door with the intention of never coming back. If you don’t believe me, you are either a very forgiving customer or seriously in denial. Most customers “forgive” poor service by checking the business off of their list of preferred vendors. They might even do it unconsciously, but nevertheless the effect is the same as aggressively complaining about the service/product and shouting “I’m never coming back!”

I realized how far this unconscious effect can carry the other day when my wife delivered her lesson from our winter trapped in VW-powered Winnebago, “Never have your house attached to your vehicle.” She thought the problem was that our Class C RV did not allow us to separate our living quarters from the vehicle. Since she is incapable of driving a vehicle with a trailer, her lesson essentially says “Stay in motels or stay home.”

My lesson, also delivered almost automatically, has been “Never buy anything from Volkswagen and, ideally, avoid all German vehicles.” I have followed that by describing the miserable service I received from two VW dealers in Albuquerque, the stories I heard about VW service from unhappy VW owners all over the country, and so on. As I write this, I am realizing how many times I’ve told this story and heard it repeated back to me from other people with similar, often second-hand, versions of the same message. By ignoring customer complaints (and VW may be completely immune to customer feedback), VW has created a community of VW-haters who are spreading the word faster than any advertising campaign could hope to compete. Now that’s a perfect example of “how to kill your business.”

Taking Pop Seriously?

When I was born, in 1948, the Woody Woodpecker cartoon theme song was the #1 “Top of the Pops” song on the charts and Pee Wee Hunt’s “12th Street Rag” was the best selling song of that year. If that doesn’t make you question the importance or artistic value of pop music, I don’t know what will.  Wikipedia’s List of Billboard Year-End #1 singles and albums would be depressing if you were inclined to pretend that pop music was anything more than mind-numbing distractions and kids’ music. The list contains some real dogs, a lot of drivel, some major embarrassments, and not more than a dozen songs that might be called “semi-adult music” by the least critical apologist for the pop genre.

I’m taking a class at Southeast Technical Community College called “Introduction to the Digital Arts and Creative Multimedia” and the most irritating aspect of that class is the instructor keeps asking “What examples of current digital . . . art do you think will be appreciated in 100 years?” My first guess is always “commercials.” Money and selling shit is what our current culture takes most seriously and I don’t expect that to change in 100 years. Kids’ music? Not so much.

Being A Technoblaster

During the dozen years I taught technology classes I was probably less-than-friendly to people with no technology skills. In a program (Recording Engineering) that required fairly extensive technical skills it wasn’t at all unusual to find that my students had absolutely no familiarity with technology beyond playing with their cell phones or video games. That crowd was irritating and impossible to educate, but they didn’t bother me until student “retention” became such a big deal that I couldn’t purge their lame asses from my classes. There was another much smaller category of student, however, that caused me a lot more grief. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to call them “technoblasters.”

Too often my technoblasters were sincere kids who really wanted to do well. They studied, did their homework, did fine to really well on tests, and they paid attention in class or during labs. They participated. They did everything I asked them to do and, sometimes, more. However, every time they touched a piece of technology, they broke it. One irritatingly consistent aspect to their destructiveness was that they always used the passive voice when they admitted breaking something, “The knob/switch/control or microphone/stand/speaker broke.” Or “I didn’t do anything and the computer quit working.” They never damaged anything themselves. It was always the passive tool that broke itself.

Rarely, I would be on site when one of these inanimate objects committed suicide, but when I was on-site it was pretty obvious what happened. Not only did my technoblasters break the equipment, they did it brutally. They would tighten a mic stand so hard they stripped the grip or handle. They would twist a knob until the pot broke or the set screw on the knob started cutting a groove in the shaft or they’d start spinning the control behind the panel until it ripped out the wires or destroyed the circuit board. One kid so consistently insisted on plugging Aux outputs into headphone amp outputs or main buss or group buss outputs that he earned the nickname “Smokey.” He failed his first semester record laboratory, twice, because he fried the console early in the test. The second time he took out the +15V power supply and set final exam testing back a day for several classes.

One of many things all of these kids have in common is a disconnect between their perception of how they use technology and reality. They honestly think they are paying attention to the equipment, treating their tools with respect, and being careful. In fact, they are distracted and on a completely different plane than the work they imagine they are doing. As sad as this is to admit, my wife is a technoblaster. So, I’ve had a front row seat and backstage pass to observing the life of a technoblaster for almost 50 years. Like these kids, when her tools and technology fail her she always describes the events leading to the moment-of-breakage passively. Exactly like these kids, she is always distracted and mostly unaware of her actions and attitude. I can’t think of a single time when she has wreaked some piece of equipment or broken a tool when she could accurately recount the steps she took before the equipment failed.

Eventually, I suspect my ex-students will develop an attitude like my wife’s. She is a firm believer that technology hates her and she hates it right back. She has constructed a mental suit of armor that allows her to ignore her own complicity in equipment failure while assigning the blame to a personal feud between her and the offending technology. One of the tactics I used to overcome this attitude in work situations, including a few “technology instructors” and engineers, has been to require a detailed description of the equipment failure before I accept the task of fixing it or before I’d allow one of my employees to fix it. If “it’s broke” is all I get, I put that job at the back of the schedule so we can do work that is properly defined. Often, “it’s broke” is a user error and will magically go away if I ignore it long enough. If it’s real, repeating the instruction that the failure mode and mechanism must be described before a repair can take place will often force the user to retrace his/her steps and learn something about how the failure occurred.

Of course, none of that works with my wife. If I waited for her to properly define one equipment breakdown before I fixed it, nothing in our household would work because she will just move on to the next victim. And, of course, I’ve been trained by 50 years of marriage to just follow her around putting out fires.