Brain Drain

Once again I thought I had escaped the cancer world only to be dragged back into it.

It all began last Sunday, when I was suddenly dizzy – and not just a little bit dizzy but dizzy all the time. At one point I was even dizzy sitting in a chair and laying in a bed, and this is when dizzy gets quite annoying. Even worse, the next day I started slurring my speech, which is really not good.

I made sure I wasn’t dehydrated (when I was in my dizzy phase and not the slurring my speech phase) and stopped some of my as-needed meds, which are quite powerful and could have had a bad interaction together, and I seemed to get better but then got up the following morning and – bang – it was still there. The dizziness. “This is messed up,” I remember thinking. But even worse, my typing was forced. I had to think about typing, and normally I type quicker than I think. But now I had to think about it. It’s as if there was a disconnect between my brain and my fingers.

So, long story, but I broke down and actually went to the hospital. Now, going to the hospital for me is not just like going to the hospital. It’s like GOING TO THE HOSPITAL. Not only the hospital, but the ER. At all costs, avoid the hospital but especially the ER. Just don’t do it.

But I had to, and I knew it. So I went to the ER. From this point we follow a Long and Winding Road, to quote the Beatles (my version was The Long and Boring Road), but lets just say everyone and their brother asked me to touch my nose to their finger, and if I felt the same sensation on both sides of my body when they stroked either my arms, legs or forehead. I passed all the tests with flying colors – boy, was I good. That meant no stroke.

Next we did a CT scan. Sitting in my wheelchair in the hallway, I remember thinking that this cannot come out good. If they find something, then that’s bad. If they don’t find anything, then that’s bad also. What do I do when they don’t believe I am really dizzy and tell me to go home? And at home what do I do when I’m dizzy? So either way I knew I was in trouble.

Later when we got the results, it turned out that I have three growths in my brain. Ok, a growth is a growth, and what can it be? Most likely, cancer, as having three benign tumors showing up at the same time is odd. Still, you can’t just start poking around inside the brain and getting a biopsy. No, that could be bad: I wouldn’t want to be left with a nose that droops or fingers that no longer work. Later on I had an MRI which showed conclusively that it is cancer.

So, I see my radiation doctor tomorrow and a neuro-surgeon on Tuesday. The doctor at the hospital said that I would probably end up with a CyberKnife treatment (pinpoint accurate radiation) and that can be quite effective – as good as surgery.

Such is it. We have to let go of the life we wanted in order to embrace the life that God wants us to have – whatever that is. We do know it will be for our best and best means our eternal best. So it’s all good (though sometimes painful!).

Dave the Plumber – Part II

Well, as you see from my first post on installing a toilet, I eventually got through it and was now an expert, having one toilet under my belt and having watched about 10 Youtube videos on the subject. The one upstairs also needed replaced, so I figured I could knock this job over in an hour or two, tops.

Sometimes starting a job is the most difficult part of it, and such was the case with this job. It’s always easier to put off what you really don’t want to do, and there is always tomorrow and if there isn’t, then you got out of this life on Earth without replacing the toilet (not too bad) but still. At some time you run out of excuses and the more days you don’t do it means another day with the old toilet, so you just have to start someplace, so I shut off the water supply to the toilet bowl as Step #1.

A small start, but I was now in the game. There is a staying in another culture (I forget which) that “Once started is half done,” and I agree. So at this point I was half done – or so I thought!

The expert I am, I know all the steps now. First flush then remove the two bolts that hold the toilet to the floor, remove the water supply line from the toilet bowl, and up comes the toilet, and we are off to the races. Then there is the dirty job of taking up the old wax seal with a putty knife and cleaning up the area in general.

I did all that, and everything was going to plan and at that point I was thinking of making my own DIY video, when the unexpected happens. Now if you are a DIY guy, the unexpected is not welcome, because then you don’t know what to do, and such was my fate.

You see, when I attempted to mount the two new bolts in the floor to hold the toilet, one of them would have fallen into the dark recesses of the area around the pipe that goes out to the septic system if I let the bolt go, and I realized that I am now in trouble. Both bolts have to be sticking up to go forward, and I am stuck.

I was fluxmoiguated. Now, you may wonder what fluxmoiguated means, but I just made it up. A dictionary meaning in the next Websters edition would go something like this, “…the feelings of anguish arising in a DIYer when the unexpected happens and he (or she) knows not what to do, or has a clue.”

When you are fluxmoiguated, you look at the problem a long time and stress every brain cell in search of a solution, and in bad cases the only thing you come up with is to resort to duct tape or rubber bands – neither of which works when tried. Since this was the case, I decided to visit my local Ace hardware and talk to the guy there, who seems to know everything about everything – perhaps he has an idea of what I should do.

Now at Ace Hardware, I explained my predicament, but I don’t think we understood each other as his plan didn’t address my problem – and it was hard to explain – when a brilliant idea crossed my brain; I had to go with it: just secure the bolt by threading a nut between it and the floor. How simple a solution, and even elegant.

I bought the bolt and home I went, but had to try it the morning, since it was late by then. That meant no bathroom for anyone until the next morning, with was a trial for us all but especially those of the opposite sex from me. Life is not fair, that’s all I can say.

Next morning, I got to implement my brilliant solution but then it dawns on me: what I planned will not work. The toilet needs to sit flat on the floor, and the nut will in all probably break the porcelain.

I am thinking of how much it will cost to hire a real plumber, and my fluxmoiguate is even worse now, and I really don’t know what to do.

“When will the toilet work?” one of my kids ask.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The entire day there is a cloud over the house, as we are stuck all due to a stupid bolt, with no solution in site. This is akin to Patton taking his pistol out and shooting the donkey because it was disabled on a bridge and holding his entire 3^rd army up, and all because of a donkey, but I don’t have a pistol (which is probably a good thing.)

Later at around 9:15 pm, I have to get out of the house and I take off in the direction of the Great Northern area. Hey, I wonder, is Lowes still open, as it is summer, and check my phone? No, it is not. How about Home Depot? Well, guess what: it’s open to 10 pm. That’s great, and off I go. Who knows, maybe I can talk to someone there who has some idea about this ridiculous problem.

(I should mention before all this I had searched Youtube for a solution, but no videos even addressed the problem – that’s how fluxmoiguating my situation was.)

I wander down the aisle with bolts, nuts and washers and hope to find a washer that is tight to the bolt and can hold it up long enough for me to mount the toilet. Of course, for some improbable reason, I cannot find such a washer. There are all sorts of bolts and all sorts of washer, and all sorts of everything, but nothing that works for me.

I manage to find the aisle that has toilet hardware, and stand there just looking at this and that item, saying that won’t help and this is not even remotely useful, when I see some small bags of toilet hardware items and move the pieces of one bag around in my hand so I can examine each one, and I see a piece that might – just might – solve my problem. It is a round plastic item designed to hold a bolt upright.

That’s it, I think. Of course, there’s a lot of other items in the bag that I also have to buy, but that’s the cost of a solution for all the bottoms (especially female ones) in my house. A small price, in the scheme of things.

I buy it. Next day, I try it. It works! My bolts are now sitting upright, ready for the toilet to be placed on them and screwed down. We are getting someplace.

After that, it’s all easy. Takes hardly any time. Piece by piece is taken from its protective plastic cover, nuts are screwed tight so the bowl and toilet are now one unit, water supply pipes are attached, and we are good. I flush, and it flushes.

The balloons don’t fall, but we have another victory.

As a last step, I unbox the toilet seat and get a screwdriver to bolt it to the toilet. All is good until I realize – in wonderment as I examine both the toilet and it’s toilet seat – that the two don’t match. To an impartial observer, it would appear that the two are incompatible. This can’t be, so I look at everything again and for the life of me, I can’t see how the seat could ever be mounted on the toilet.

The fluxmoiguate is rising again.

Ok, I break down and get the directions. That will solve it. Amazingly, the directions show a different style of toilet seat entirely – it doesn’t look anything like the seat that was shipped to me.

I am glad that I have the gospel, because my fluxmoiguate is in the red zone, but I can be reconciled to this toilet seat conundrum so the gaskets in my brain don’t blow, and, hey, we will find some way, I’m sure.

I ask my mechanical teenager, who is my go-to in situations like this: can he figure it out? A lot of times he looks at my problem for a minute and then just fixes it, where I had agonized over it for 20 minutes with no solution. That’s why it’s always good to have at least one offspring that is mechanical by nature.

He is stumped too, and now I know that something has gone awry in the universe. The nerve, the negligence: to ship the wrong toilet seat to all us DIY nubies, who watch all these Youtube videos where all the toilet seats fit with just a few bolts and nuts.

This toilet seat installation is now turning into an adventure, and the fact is that with no toilet seat, more than half of the people on this planet (54% to be exact) cannot use this toilet. I suspect the peanut gallery will begin to get restive regarding this, and I improvise: I take the toilet seat off the old toilet and put it on the new one. Not an elegant solution, as the old one kinda fits, kinda’ doesn’t, but it keeps any overt criticism to a minimal level.

Now, about the toilet seat: I take it into Lowes and explain to the attendant in the Bath department and show him the instructions and the actual toilet seat, and he asks if I got it mixed up and, no, I don’t have like 10 toilet seats in my garage that I got the new one mixed up with. I just don’t have toilet seats laying around; this toilet seat came from the box, and it is the wrong one.

To Lowe’s credit, they gave me a new one, and I went home a happy customer.

At home I am also happy, because the new toilet seat fits on the new toilet, and what can be better, I ask?

What can we learn from all this. I’m not sure. Keep your cool and don’t get too fluxmoiguated, and it will all work out. Keep it up, and you’ll be doing your ownYoutube videos, where everything works out perfectly.

On Our 25th Anniversary

My wife and I will be married 25 years today. Let me go over that again: twenty five years!

That’s a lot – a quarter of a century, by any measure. It’s two score and five years, and XXV in Roman numerals. It’s almost half of my entire lifetime, and the internet wasn’t even a thing when we were wed. Bill Clinton had just been elected. In other words, it’s a long time.

Back when we were young…

Even more amazing, we have been married only once, never remarried, and that is the same for both of us. Same spouse, same marriage, same arrangement. This is amazing in this day in age since it so rarely happens; what was normal 50 years ago is now on the order of the extraterrestrial.

In case you didn’t know, my wife is from Montana; I am from Central New York. I met her via our Church while traveling out West in 1992 and was astounded by her very honest testimonies, her good heart and the non-pretentiousness about her. And she wholeheartedly believed in Jesus – and had gone through a lot to keep her faith. At the time, I was working on not looking at the girls so at first I just heard her in one of our Church meetings without seeing her, and my heart was lit by what she said, but after seeing her it turned out that she was beautiful. It was a package deal, and what could be better?

We ended up having a very interesting courting relationship. Now, all this was before texting, Skyping, Facebooking etc., so we had an intercontinental relationship using the very old-fashioned US Postal Service. That meant hand-written letters with stamps in the upper right corner and the return address in the right. It took around a week to get a letter there – sometimes more, sometimes less – so round-trip we’re talking about the better part of a month. How did we do it? I don’t know. By the time I asked her, we had only talked a few hours together – maybe five. But I knew I loved her, and we would work out all the other details later on.

We were engaged on a rock at Chimney Bluffs, and soon married, and she moved from absolutely gorgeous Montana to the less beautiful Central New York and for one reason: me. Now if that isn’t true love, what is?!

Every marriage has its ups and downs, and ours was no exception. We have been through more trials than most, if I can be so bold – trials that might have easily split others. My cancer was just one; there were others, and for a while each year registered 9.0 on the Richter scale. I assure you the only thing that got us through it all was faith in God and to trust him in everything, to forgive and move on with life, and to love each other.

We can divide our marriage into two parts. Part 1 was the baby making stage, where we popped out eight babies in 12 ½ years. This came with four C-Sections, so my dear wife took the bullet in the first stage. The second part was the cancer stage, and I took the bullet for that one. The first stage lasted 12 years, the second 13 years – almost perfectly divided. Let’s just say it was planned well!

I should mention that along the way we got eight children. To this day sometimes I don’t know how we got them (well, I know), but eight is a lot and they had to come from someplace. They just kept coming. At number five my grandmother told us in no uncertain terms we shouldn’t have any more, though she was from a family of nine. We didn’t listen to her, and barreled along popping out more babies after that – three to be exact. We don’t regret it now.

I am a lucky (blessed) man because I have a good wife, who has stood beside me through thick and thin. Not everyone is so fortunate. We both took marriage as a 100% total commitment, and if there is not a 100% total commitment, can we say it is true love? I think not. We took it as “till death do us part,” which is the only way to have it. I’ve heard many marriage vows go like this, “…as long as love endures.” The problem is, love doesn’t endure much longer when the husband once again leaves his underwear on the floor or the wife asks again for the garbage to be taken out. Then love doesn’t endure but dies, and the marriage dies with it.

It’s always interesting to look back and take stock. I certainly could have taken situations much, much better and had much, much more wisdom. They have been the most fascinating, exhilarating, soul-crushing and transformative years of my life, and I would not have wanted to miss them. All that we go through should be a help to us, so something is changed inside of us for the better. I can say I’m happier now than I’ve ever been, which is strange, because the ground still often shifts under me, but in God I am more and more able to keep my balance.

Socrates said, “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad one, you will be a philosopher.” I am very glad I didn’t turn out to be a philosopher; far from it! I have married my soul-mate and love of my life, and she is a jewel – that’s for sure. What could be better?

The Bet

Me and my wife had a bet. We put the toilet, pictured below, at the top of our stairs so, when you entered our house, it was right in front of you, and in order to get up in the main living area, you had to pass by it. In other words, you could not miss it.

Who will take this toilet out?

Now where did this toilet come from? It was the old toilet in the upstairs bathroom, having been replaced by a newer one.

Now, the bet was to see how long it would take for one of our boys to decide, of their own free will, to take it outside without being asked by us. So far, it has sat there for six days. The bet is how long it will stay there, and we shall see.

Maybe we can setup a betting pool. Any wagers?

 

Dave the Plumber – Part I

I was feeling so good, I was thinking of quitting my day job and becoming a plumber.

I had missed my calling in life, apparently. You see, I was in the middle of installing a toilet downstairs after watching a few YouTube videos, and on the videos everything happens without a hitch. Here’s a good example: the first step is to just turn off the water supply to the toilet. What could be easier? Of course, my toilet was installed in the late middle ages, and the handle would not turn, so I finally got an industrial size pliers and forced the issue, and every turn was a fight with the Gods, but we got it turned off.

Me with my beautiful new toilet!

The YouTube video also didn’t mention the bolt holding the toilet to the floor. In the video, the bolt comes off with a few turns of a wrench, and in real life the action is fast forwarded to another scene, it’s so easy. Of course, in my house the nut will not turn, and of course it’s on the side where the toilet is nearest the wall, so we are talking about a four inch clearance to try to get all the tools and the hand down to turn the nut that will not turn, and guess what: it’s a super hot summer day and when I get a fan, its cord will not reach the outlet, so forget any type of coolness.

“Nathanial, can you help me get that nut off,” I say after finding him, my son, and I think the undertones in my voice show that I was not happy. Of all the things to stop a great project: a nut! “I have to go take Hannah to work.”

So I left, and my 18 year old was now in charge of the project. I expected to come home with the bolt off, the toilet lifted out and the place swept up. It was not so. I come home and the hammer is on the sink next to the toilet, and there are pieces of porcelain over the floor. Bang, bang, bang, I can almost hear the sounds in my mind, and when I look it is true: he pulverized that side of the toilet and – guess what – it now pivots in place and can be rocked out of it’s moorings.

I get my older boys to take the toilet out and the dirty work falls on me: I clean the area around whee the toilet lay and then confront the next step: taking up the old wax seal, which is now a gruesome blob of wax mixed with other unnamable ugly things. In the Youtube video, a putty knife is used, but of course we don’t have that. I look in the garage and the entryway and ask around. No one has seen a putty knife or seems to care. They are watching videos and playing Xbox games, and who can care about the toilet downstairs when life is so exciting upstairs?

What to do?

I take a metal kitchen spatula and sacrifice it for the greater cause. All the wax comes up in globs and a hole in the floor is left. Great. Now it’s time to unbox and install the new toilet.

Well, at least something goes well. I am no DIYer genius, but I figure out how the wax seal sits around the hole and, feeling like a pro, know why there are two bolts included in the box. The two bolts are to be stuck upright around the wax seal so we can screw the toilet down. It’s all clear to me. I get wax ring and the bolts in place and am now ready to mount my first toilet.

Is this sort of work better than computer work, I wonder. I’m not sure, but soon I fly through the next steps: bolting the tank to the toilet, taking protective rubberbands off the tank guts so they work, screwing the toilet seat on etc. Everything is done, and here I have the fleeting thought to quit my computer job and become a plumber – though not really but I do feel good – so now the drum roll would start if we were in a movie, and here is the climax when I pull the lever down for my first flush and….

…. all the water in the bowl rushes out between the tank and the toilet, and there water all over the bathroom floor.

It should not be true, but it is. How good it would have felt to flush, but in reality nothing had worked out and there was a mess to boot.

And now what do I do?

As with a computer, we have to troubleshoot. I feel underneath the bowl, and it is wet. Somehow the water just blew out from this area. Why? The Youtube video didn’t mention anything like this happening. It just showed a triumphant expert instructing us nubes how to install a toilet, and how easy it is, and in the end everything flushes as it should in this idyllic universe called Expertise-land.

God often pulls rabbits out of the hat, and the rabbit in this case was my father, who just then came through the front door saying “Hello” and in a second was at the bathroom door.

“What’s happening?”

“I just flushed it but the water goes all over the floor.”

I am thinking of course that I did something really stupid along the way. Did I ever line up the hole in the floor with the toilet’s hole? Not really, I just set the thing down on the wax ring and everything should work according to my Youtube instructor. Yes, that was probably my mistake, and I’m thinking we’ll have to take the whole toilet up and start over. That’s what DIYers do best: Do It Over, so DIYers often morph into DIOer and after enough DIOers, you become a true DIYer.

“Oh, that’s easy,” he says. “You just need the gasket between the tank and the toilet.”

He removes the bowl from the toilet and it is true: there is no gasket between these parts. We look around for one in the big box and the many smaller boxes that contain the contents and guts of this toilet, and don’t find any. I tell him I never saw one. How can that be?* Still, it is true, and now installing a toilet is becoming one big pain in the you know what, when the finished product was supposed to nicely service that part.

“Let’s go buy one. They’re easy and cheap.”

And so we do. Of course we don’t buy the exact one needed for the toilet but are close. Still, close is not good enough as there’s not much tolerance when we are talking about flushes, so we have to go out and buy another.

Should I quit my day job? I don’t think so. Computers may be maddeningly finicky, but at least we don’t end up with water all over the floor. And when something goes wrong with this stuff, I really don’t know what to do, except watch more Youtube videos – and isn’t that how I got myself in this mess to begin with?

—

* I am sure our dog walked off with the gasket. I never found it, and either it wasn’t in the box or our dear Winston dragged it out into the yard someplace and chewed it to death.

Epilogue: in the end, the toilet got fixed, and we are now flushing. What could be better?

Bringing Up Baby

It started a few months ago, when I was reveling that I could get our Boxer\Lab dog named Winston to do exactly what I wanted using a treat before his supper.  My son heard this but was not impressed.

“You can’t just get him to do what you want with food,” he said.  “You have to have a relationship with him.”

“Really?” I asked.  “A relationship!?”

Ok, I can see having a relationship with my wife, and working on that, and then there’s my children, and I can have a relationship with them and there’s other family, and Church members, then my co-workers as well, and the sum of this constellation of people I can see having a relationship with, but with my dog?

This is Winston, our Boxer\Lab pup

When we got our new, jet-black, rompy puppy, I’m not sure what I thought.  I never grew up with a dog, so I guess my thinking was on the order of telling Spot to go get the stick, and like a good doggie he would just bring it back and drop it.  The order in the stars was that I was the master, he the doggie, and from this natural arrangement, our relationship would flow, and obey me he would – obviously.

Now I find out I have to have a relationship with this animal.  At least with a cat everything is ordered perfectly right from the beginning:  they are obviously superior, and you exist only to serve them, and they are amused with you.  You don’t work on a relationship with a cat.  No, you submit.

Now Winston, like a two year old, needs guidance.  He can be very mild and obedient, and will mostly do what you want, but he does have a stubborn streak in him.  That is, when I get up from the comfy chair in our kitchen/living room area to get something in the kitchen – perhaps a dab of sugar for my tea – up jumps Winston from the floor and by the time I’ve turned around, he is curled up in a ball on my chair – just where he wants to be.  Even more, he will not get down when I implore him and when we lay hands on his fur, he looks with stubborn dumbness at me, his master, who is now yelling at him, “Would you get down, Winston!”

The final straw is when he gets on my bed, and he is a big boy, all 82 pounds of him, and here he purposefully goes limp when I attempt to extract the mass of dogness from my bed;  he is dead weight, and it is comparable to moving a dead sumo wrestler.

So I work on my relationship and it is going well, as mostly he obeys my commands when he wants to and is always ready to have a relationship over playing fetch or following me as I get his food.  But again, it all falls apart when he is busy waiting for a scrap to fall from my wife’s hand after supper while am commanding him to “Come.”  He will not come.  He has his priorities, you see.

And so I begin to google dog psychology and doggie brain processes, and we read webpage after webpage on the subject, and the conclusion is this:  not only do I have to have a relationship with this dog, but I need to be a good leader.

I never thought I had to have a Masters in Business Administration to have a dog, but this is apparently true.  You can’t be mean to the dog, as then you are not a good pack leader but a bully, and that is exactly how the dog thinks of you.  You have to be good to the dog, fair to it, set boundaries and enforce them, and speak in calm ways that are still firm and convey what you want the dog to do in clear and simple language.  And you have to be consistent, day after day, so the dog gets it.

Ok, I get all this, but are we talking about bringing up a dog or a kid?  At least with Winston, I have 25 years of child rearing with eight kids behind me, so I’m not a total novice, and I suppose that everything I’ve learned raising homo sapien young ones transfers over to a canine, but the responsibility of it all falls on my shoulders;  if I don’t get it right, this dog may have problems in his teenage years – running off throughout the neighborhood after other dogs or chasing cars, barking at everything, even biting the neighbors.

Yes, it’s a lot on my shoulders but though we haven’t exactly brought this mutt into the world, we adopted him and hope he turns out well.  Fortunately we don’t have to have a college fund for him nor do we have to teach him to drive, but still: he’s part of the family.

Perhaps I have it backward, dog first and then kid.  Perhaps every newlywed couple who plans to have children should be court-ordered to have a dog.  If they can succeed with Butch, they’re ready for a McKenzie or Ethan.  I don’t know.   When I got Winston I thought I was getting a pet but ended up with my ninth child. Who knew?

A Quest

In my previous post, I talked about technology, and how it may end up costing jobs, and a lot of them.  In this post I’m’ going to talk about technology again, but another facet of it:  how it drives us crazy.  What follows is a real-life story, and all of it is true.

Here is the idea: I am out with my wife and we would like to buy an Iced Tea at McDonalds, and here begins our adventure. We can actually call it a quest, taking after what all the gamers in our house are embarking on: a quest. We are on a quest for Iced Tea. What could be simpler?

Life is often more complicated than it might seem at first, especially when you add in the wild card called Technology. Then the quest can become quiet complicated – more complicated than anyone could think possible.

I walk into a McDonald’s in Syracuse since we don’t want to wait in the mile-long drive-thru line. Now, recently my parents had made an outrageous statement to my wife and I, that McDonalds plans on replacing all of their cashiers with kiosk’s by 2020, and had already begun this process in New York State.  Wow.  I wanted to check this out, and so my trip to McDonald’s for Iced Tea.

I enter McDonalds in Syracuse, NY, and immediately see 1)  hardly any cash registers – most are gone and 2) four Kiosk’s, all with Order Here signs over them.  What could be more pleasant and customer-oriented, like a young girl with a smile just waiting to take your order? Yes, it is idyllic, except that I see the following on the Kiosk screen:

Kiosk says “Register is restarting”

Yes, All four kiosks need to be rebooted! Well, to be exact, they are not currently in the reboot process but – in computer speak – they are hung.  Inoperable.  Not working at all.  Welcome to the 21st century! I also notice that the paid human help in this McDonald’s is not exactly having a good day, with their robot buddies taking the day off. No, they are going crazy!

We decide to ditch this ugly scene and drive home. Hey, there’s a McDonald’s right on our way, just off Route 690. We’ll get our Iced Tea there!

You would think it so easy, but then again we are talking about technology.

I enter the second McDonald’s and what do I see, but again four Kiosks (again forget the young smiling teenager). These kiosks actually work, so all should be well.

Ok, I have a degree in computer science and have worked with computers for about 35 years; I’ve even designed information systems for several large hospital departments in Syracuse. So using this kiosk should be a snap, right?

Wrong.

I am a logical person, and since everything is broken down into categories (such as salads, happy meals etc.) I make an assumption that Iced Tea would be under the beverages, but upon taking this logical step, I see the following:

The Beverage Menu does not include Iced Tea

Note that there is no Iced Tea listed.

This befuddles me, and I start clicking around but find no Iced Tea, and click more and more and around and around we go looking for iced tea, and find none, so I am once again defeated by this ever-so-helpful technology.  I actually wonder if McDonald’s took Iced Tea off their menu.  It’s possible.

What to do?

This McDonald’s still has a few registers left – most have been removed – so I go up to one and wait. In the back workers are scurrying around getting orders together, to be sure, but they are not taking care of me – or another customer who is also waiting – and it dawns on me: though McDonald’s still has registers, to actually man them is a distraction from the new process, which has workers doing everything but taking orders via an old-fashioned cash register.

I wait.

A teenager eventually comes to the cash register and, in 1950’s style, I order Iced Tea. The human understands that I want Iced Tea and acknowledges my order, and in about three seconds, I am paid and told to get a cup from over there – which is another change in the McDonald’s process. Rather than hand you a cup, you just take one from a spot in the dining area and from there do your own thing, which in this case is pouring your own iced tea.

My quest has finished, and I have avoided the evil dragon called technology and found a side path around his lair. I have my Iced Tea. I’m a computer guy and I often breezily tell my clients, “Technology is great – when it works!”  Would you agree?