Single Point of Failure

According to my computer engineering husband, it’s important to find the weak spot in the computer software—that should it fail—causes all the other spots in the system to cramp up, keel over, and die. 

That weak spot is a pimple on the butt of everything—sort of. Or it’s the string on the collar of that made-in-China shirt. Give it a quick tug and the sleeves fall off. 

This weak link is called the single point of failure. 

It’s the single piece of broken crud in your life that is responsible for the systemic destruction of all the other crud in your life that you hold dear.

In our world the single point of failure is a tire on a John Deere garden cart. It’s flat. And that ruins everything—absolutely everything.

That tire is our single point of failure.

We have horses. They poop. A lot. They poop a lot in the barn. And as I have stated in the past, farming is the business of purchasing animals that poop and then moving their poop around. Our John Deere garden cart is the official poop mover. I NEED that cart to move poop, or the poop builds up to gargantuan, mountainous proportions that threaten to avalanche onto small children, burying them alive. I mean it.

One tire went flat on the garden cart. My husband pumped it up. It went flat again. He filled it with magic blow up stuff. It went flat again. He took the wheel off and dragged it to the John Deere tractor repair shop, run by the meanest married couple on the face of the entire earth. 

No really. This couple is so mean that we play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who has to go and drop off the flat tire.

Sherwood lost. 

He took the tire to the shop. The shop was closed. Seems the John Deere repair shop couple were so mean John Deere had to shut them down and put them out of business. Burned the repair shop to the ground and sowed the acres with salt. (No, I made that last bit up.) 

Meanwhile, the poop pile continued to build.

“The John Deere repair shop couple were so mean, they’re out of business,” he said, holding the still flat garden cart tire.

“Now what?”

The poop pile grew another foot while we talked.

“Well, I thought about buying another whole wheel deal, but it’s about the cost of the whole darn cart.”

“Now what?”

The top of the poop pile shook loose, rumbling to the barn floor. Road apples danced and rolled near our feet.

“How about using the wheelbarrow?” he said.

“It has a flat tire.”

“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” 

Exactly, or in our case it’s, “A tire! A tire! My kingdom for a tire!”

Before the whole kingdom fills up with poop and tips over like the island of Guam if you put too many marines on it. 

(During a House committee meeting, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia said he feared that stationing 8,000 Marines on Guam would cause the island to "become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.") True Story!!


Single point of failure? How about the whole darn federal government?


Linda (Scoop) Zern 

ON TIME ARRIVAL

When I tell folks that I’ve been to places like Korea and Australia, they always say the same thing.

“Oh, I would love to travel like that. That’s so exciting.”

No. It’s not. It’s brutal.

It’s thirteen hours at a pop squished in an airplane seat the size and shape of no one, and unless a person is the general consistency of pudding I cannot imagine anyone but a pudding pop person flying comfortably.

Traveling is not exciting.

Arriving is exciting. Arriving is the part of traveling that has something going for it.

Unfortunately, by the time  many travelers get to the arriving part they have been going through the traveling part for so long they have a difficult time appreciating the actual getting to where they’re going part.  And the more you travel, the worse it gets.

My husband of thirty-plus years travels a lot for his work. When I say a lot I mean he has been fondled by strangers in airports on every major continent except Africa. It’s starting to take its toll.

Recently, after a grueling return flight from South Korea, we flew into the delightfully bankrupt city of Detroit, Michigan.  The experience was a lot like looking across the DMZ into North Korea—no one seemed very happy with the situation and everyone is pretty sure it’s the other guy’s fault.

But we were home. Almost.

All we had to do was clear customs, get through immigration, retrieve our already checked luggage, go back through security, take our shoes back off, get fondled by an Amazonian woman declaring that I was wearing a belt because “the machine SAID so,” Note: I was not wearing a belt, redress, repack, find the shuttle bus, fling ourselves onto the bus, race the final ten gates to THE proper gate which was changed from the previous faux gate, locate our ticket information, and finally collapse into yet another airplane seat designed for pudding people.

Having fun yet?  Yeah, me neither, especially when my husband lost his mind at one point in the ordeal, stood in the middle of the airport, observed two customs agents stamping forms in slow motion, and yelled, “This is a F-----g mess.”

“Boy, we’re traveling now,” I said.

Calmly I took his arm and hissed, “Be quiet, you crazy.  Airport jail is real. Believe me.”

Pulling up my shirt, I demonstrated the stretchy nature of my 110% stretchy band on my stretch pants. “Does this look like a belt to you? What? No?”

He pretended to understand me by ignoring me and grinding his teeth.

“Well, like I told the Amazonian TSA chick, ‘If that machine is telling you that I have a belt on then it’s defective and you should contact the manufacturer, because it’s broken.”

Several airports officials that could have been working but weren’t working watched us with jaundiced eye.

We shuffled into line tried clicking our heels together three times and saying, “There’s no place like home.”

Because, there is no place like home, and that’s what I’ve learned from traveling.

Linda (Elastic Band) Zern

Will Work for Free

I go to college. I am a student of higher education.  I have a book bag from Gap, a map of my college campus, and for seventy dollars per year they let me park in the parking garage.

I pay, no—strike that—my husband pays an exorbitant amount of money for me to go to a private college with an excellent reputation and a parking garage. When I say exorbitant, I mean stupid. My husband forks over stupid amounts of money for my education.

Why?

Because I sleep with him. That’s why.

Oh, you mean—me. Why do I go to college?

I go to college because when I’m done I’ll be able to get a good job working for an evil corporation that will suck my life’s blood like a giant tick, thus turning me into an empty, fluttering sack of desiccated skin stuff, while that very corporation crushes the “average, regular American” under its evil feet like Godzilla stomping Tokyo.

I am an English major. Can you tell?

Thus we come to the crux of the higher education dilemma.

Parents, or in my case, a sugar daddy, spend stupid amounts of money so that students of higher education can go to school where they are told, often and emphatically by famous authors that CEO’s making stupid amounts of money are both greedy and practicing the moral equivalent of beating up five-year olds for their Halloween candy. Note:  These famous authors never GIVE their books away but always take CHECKS OR CASH for their books.

The students who listen to these famous authors are then encouraged to graduate, with honors, so they can make stupid amounts of money, which is cool as long as said students donate stupid amounts of that greed money back to their colleges.

It’s called the alumni association.

Higher education is like one of those Chinese finger traps, where you stick your fingers in a tube of cheap, brightly colored paper and pull. The harder you pull, the higher your tuition will go.

I’ve fooled everyone and outsmarted the evil Tokyo stomping corporations. I never plan to graduate or get a “real” job.

For thirty years, I’ve listened to folks whine about: their rotten bosses, their rotten jobs, their mind numbing work related responsibilities, their crap salaries, their crap retirement, their idiotic co-workers, and lest we forget—the crap evil corporations which crush us all by importing Chinese finger traps from China, forcing us to buy them with their clever marketing ploys which they learned how to do by hiring COLLEGE GRADUATES WITH DEGREES IN MARKETING.

End the proliferation of evil corporations now! Don’t go to college! Be a stay at home mom and paint the baseboards! Because that’s as NON-PROFIT as it gets.

Bang a drum in a public park and demand to be paid the same amount of money as, oh let’s go crazy here and say, a lawyer.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a student of higher education it’s that societies can never have too many lawyers or too many drum bangers or too many graduates with student debt greater than the average cost of a Hollywood mansion  . . .  

And don’t forget that we can never have too many kiosks at the mall selling Chinese finger traps imported from China where they shoot the factory manager when the Ministry of Embarrassment finds out he’s been using cheap, lead based inks and dyes to cut corners and pocket the difference.

Linda (Will Work for Free) Zern