Archive | August 17, 2008

Why The Design Guy is Dangerous

So, being in the fire prevention business, I am one of those people who used to actually test the smoke detectors in the house regularly. By that I mean, I go and look at it, see that the little green light is on saying the battery is ok and then press the test button to hear it sound off.

Back before My Queen, I lived very compactly. As in one 15’x10′ room. Being a technical kind of guy, creature comforts were never a big deal to me. In that room, was my TV, stereo, bed, my office chair and desk and computers. I lived, slept and worked in there for a decade. Only thing it didn’t have was a kitchen, for that, I had to travel down the hall to another room.

This started after I finally got smart enough to leave my first wife. Being fairly poor I rented my old bedroom from Mom. Later, she moved out to live with her boyfriend and I had the whole house to myself. Much to the irritation of my buddies, I didn’t spread out to the rest of the house. I liked compact.

So, one night I go into the kitchen and put me on a pot of spinach, which was halfway between a meal and a snack in my thinking. I had a craving. The phone rings, it’s business, my favorite customer. He likes me a lot and he likes to talk, so we talked as usual for quite a while. Long enough for me to get sidetracked from the task at hand.

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They Caught the Unabomber, Why Can’t They Stop The Design Guy?

I’ll get to the smoke detector in a minute. First I have to tell you about my recent re-encounter with a Design Guy device that is so old it proves that he’s been around mucking stuff up far longer than the Unabomber. This evil technology is called the TORX screw.

Some time last week, the cable that supports the tailgate on My Queen’s ’95 Bronco broke. She was taking her Mustang in to Ford for a handful of repairs that only the dealer can make (I felt a great disturbance in the force, it was as if thousands of dollar bills cried out in agony and then were silenced into someone else’s bank account.) and she asked me if I wanted to let them fix this. Hell no I said, it’s 4 bolts and I don’t even have to do any kind of contortion to reach them.

After buying the cables for 44 bucks EACH (It’s an 18 inch piece of 3/16 galvanized aircraft cable with a couple of crimped on eyes, I was expecting it to be high priced at around 15 bucks…) I was DAMN sure that I didn’t want Ford to make this repair. So I buy the cables.

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