Cogs In A Machine

Knowing Your Destiny

Part 25 of 30

We’ve all had it explained to us from time to time -- at least once by a boss, which is unforgettable -- that you're nothing more than a cog in a machine, and that you have one function in life, to be all that that cog needs to be. The other cogs are depending on you. And the boss, the guy telling you the philosophy, is the judge and regulator of the cogs, that each shall do his or her indispensable part until it’s time to be replaced. Which can happen at any point if you ask for more than he can give, like a day off, when there's always work to be done.

So whatever your choice, you’re basically screwed. Think about cogs. They never ask for a day off. But for you, if you fail to show up, you have the short-term value of a day off, but naturally a different cog will be in your place if you’re dumb enough to show up again. If you do show up, though, it’s almost as embarrassing. You’ve accepted that your life is nothing but a cog in this guy’s machine, and he’ll be there to push you around with threats and devious laughter until they swat you with the Silver Paddle on your last day before retirement.

The best course of action would be this: Secretly arrange a new job somewhere else, get it in writing, if possible in blood, but keep the starting date secret for a while. You want it to be a time when you are entirely indispensable to the cog boss. Then you hit him up for a day off. His legs start twitching like they do, knowing that he’s giddy to give you the whole spiel again -- having you over the barrel -- so you let him go point by point over the recitation, occasionally asking him to amplify on particular points.

The big difference this time is you’re yawning, stretching your arms, practically dozing off with indifference. He’s starting to get nervous because you aren't sweating blood like usual. To make this story shorter, you tell him you have this other job where absences are endless, expectations are low. And that you’re unruffled by anything to the point that you’re capable even now of whipping it out and drenching the place. “It’ll be something to remember me by.”

Mother Pig carries something of that message for her chillens. “Get bigger so you can be pork chops for people to eat.” Even Grandma’s aghast at this fate, while we actually endorse it every time mealtime rolls around. A pack of bacon or what have you. The glad acceptance of destiny for pigs comes from their ignorance that anything bad’s going to happen to them. And what if they somehow knew, they wouldn’t be here in the first place, since without pork chops nobody’d be breeding them. Mother and Father Pig would sit in separate pens till their lives were ended for some other reason.

So I guess there’s one destiny for us and one for pigs. Pigs get what they get. We think it through and try to keep ourselves free and clear so that we can be happy, whether we’re absent a lot or whether we’re willing to die at a job that's willing to kill us for a buck.

I Am A Proud Cog

Part 24 of 30 -- Psycho Squad

Have you ever foolishly worried that you're "merely" a cog in a machine? Or are you rightfully proud that as an appropriate match to other cogs the machine runs smoothly? When your long life is finished, will they put your citizen name on the tombstone (boring!) or a nice glorious stylized clip art cog to identify your valued life?

I used to think I was something other than a cog, because really I hadn't given much thought to it. I was 18 and in my first job, but having raging hormones I wanted to go see my matching girl person for a date. But the boss instead wanted me to work overtime. So he came in and shared with me the facts of life. These facts didn’t involve wasting time worrying about sex, but instead me being a cog in a well-oiled machine. I learned that if a cog doesn’t stay put and do its job, it's replaced. Naturally I took that as a new insight, and since I always want to be helpful, I stayed. Even now I can imagine that wise man in his office -- he's long since passed on to the great machine in the sky -- and I still feel privileged that from his lips I learned that great lesson.

Life would be a lot easier if we could cast off all flesh and blood and literally be metal cogs and strong machines, joyfully going at it, no evil hormones to interrupt us. We would pause and submit to on-site mechanics, not waste time going to the doctor. It would be of the greatest value to work 24 hours a day. And our arms would be programmed to reach for the exact medicine we need. I don't always know what to take. The only medical knowledge I have are bandages. Which are tough to choke down, but if you can manage it they're great for a sore throat. If they could only be engineered to cure everything, from headaches to broken bones...

But as things stand, we still need a doctor for everything else. Jock itch, syphilis, Italian breath. The doctor actually helped me with Italian breath. Put hot sauce on a bandage and wrap it around your tongue and replace it every couple months. And avoid Italian food. And I guess there's other medicines we’ve managed to wrestle out of the doctor’s hold: cough drops, triple antibiotic, and fungus spray. Everything else is off limits. With the Psycho Squad, I can't even commit a guy to the psych hospital and throw away the key without a doctor's OK. It tempts me sometimes to blow my top, but I tell myself that there is social wisdom in it. A higher-up cog decided, so that's good enough for me.

Just to come full circle on my triple antibiotic story, I tried healing an itch on my arm with triple antibiotic, with a consult with the doctor. After a few days I thought it was cured so I quit applying it. But it came roaring back. So I ganged up on it, applying the cream several times a day for a couple weeks, till -- yucky! -- my skin was glowing and sagging. Ultimately it worked and that's good. Wrestling psychos into ambulances is a lot easier with two arms.

Just to close it out on my old boss. The last time I saw him was in 1984 at a political debate of the presidential candidates. Beloved Mr. Cog in the flesh! But I didn’t go over and visit with him because I still didn't quite feel worthy. I still had in my mind the original shame of wanting to visit a girl instead of working. This was before I had the Psycho Squad franchise or I certainly would've shared with him my place in the world. And maybe checked his mental health to keep him going. Good health is important, from one cog to another. Do your part and you will fulfill your destiny!

Please, seriously, do your part faithfully. Reading time is now over. Back to work.

The Hillbilly Voice Synthesizer

I've had many opportunities to hear some of the hillbilly reality shows on TV, not intentionally but because they're on when I pass by. These include the one I know by name, "Call of the Wildman," which has something to do with the work of one good old boy, who's capturing ducks and other wild animals that are found where they're not wanted. I'm definitely not an expert in the show.

As I go by, I hear a few of the hillbilly-type interactions, the whiny voices and dialect. I have a couple of strong feelings on this. One, even though I'm completely interested in hillbillies in the abstract, when I see actual ones with TV shows, I'm not interested at all. But, two, I have a a sense of gratitude that some of my distant "cuzzins" are at least working, and evidently doing well. And after so many generations of dissolution, degeneration, and chaos, that's really saying something.

I'm definitely not sure that it says anything good about the state of TV, though. Back in the day when we were first so excited about the endless possibilities of cable TV -- fools that we were -- had we known it would come to this, we would've kept the family radio. Or bought an interest in the barber shop, so we'd have a place to sit with impunity and watch haircuts.

Still, there they are: guys rasslin' gators, guys pulling coons out from under people's houses, and I don't know what all. In the few bits I've seen -- the parts I haven't blanked out -- I believe I saw five or six ducks with rabies either get well or die. Which is a big deal.

But my interest isn't to document the episodes, but to see what we can do about classing them up. In my opinion, the whiny dialect needs to go, or at least be tinkered with to make it not quite so grating. For this, I'm looking for an inventor. I also see on TV that there's lots of opportunities for inventors, even though they admit that most inventions fail. This is one that would completely succeed, because imagine the gratitude, if we had someone would could synthesize the dialogue and have it changed to something classy.

It would go from that backwoods heehaw talk to polished English. And even if the lips didn't match up, it'd still be good. Our inventor makes a machine and synthesizes or translates them on the fly. The hillbilly with his ducks says, "What we're lookin' at right here is a whole passel of ducks foamin' out the bill, them quackers are in a right bad fix with the hydra-phoby." But after being synthesized, replaced, it'd come out more properly, "We're presenting the sad case of five ducks with rabies, their misfortune being properly named hydrophobia. We hope to staunch the dreadful foaming and restore them back to their normal lives." See how much nicer that is?

Or just for another scene, to really sell you on the idea, the hillbilly's chasing a family of coons around the room. One's hiding in a closet, one's under a table, one's swinging from the lights, and one's behind the TV. He's armed with nothing but a stick with a rope looped around the end. In he goes! Instead of talking about the "dirty little boogers" with sharp teeth likened to "the beer openers at a church picnic," it's all synthesized as something more impartial and academic: "In fear, the raccoon shows something less than cheerfulness, baring its teeth as a means of defense against what to it is likely an enemy."

I could almost watch that ... IF there wasn't anything else to do in life.

The Perpetual Vibrating Bed

Today's post is dedicated to the memory of John Joseph Houghtaling, inventor in 1958 of the "Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed." A quarter brought 15 minutes of "tingling relaxation and ease."

We remember with great fondness the vibrating bed. But unfortunately, most of them have been junked by now. Mostly because the original repairmen, long ago, threw away the schematics in a shortsighted, selfish attempt to guarantee themselves job security. Not foreseeing that they would eventually die and the rest of us wouldn't have any idea how to repair the tricky mechanisms.

Admittedly, a few brave souls, working with only rudimentary electronics knowledge, usually gotten from fly-by-night technical institutes, attempted repairs, but none of it was any good. Beyond that, it became impossible to get parts, and trying to jimmy rig the devices with non-matching parts from soda machines and jukeboxes gave poor results.

But let's say we could somehow get back the original intelligence to make these things work, that would definitely be a blast from the past, and, more importantly, great for the therapeutic value the vibrating bed offered. I'm thinking of something a friend of mine said, that the vibrating bed was the only thing that staved off headaches for him. If he felt a headache coming on, diving into a warm vibrating bed was the only thing that could perk him right up!

As for me, I had an idea for the vibrating bed in a perfect world. Just fantasizing here! Remember, when you put a quarter in you got 15 minutes of "tingling relaxation and ease." That was a great promise, but it also had a downside: 15 minutes isn't very long! If you're like me, you could only enjoy the first seven or eight minutes. Because you knew it was about to run out, then you'd have to interrupt your relaxation and ease to put another quarter in.

My idea is why not have a method of automatically replenishing the quarters! And I'm not saying you wouldn't have to pay for the extra service. You'd be glad to pay for it if you could only be spared having to roll over and put another quarter in. So here's the idea: You have a way of loading a disc, almost like in a laundromat, with multiple quarters, which then would rotate and deposit the next quarter as needed. What a great convenience that'd be!

But how to pay for the extra service? What I would propose seems natural to me, in fact the only fair method. The only thing I'm bogged down on is how to pay for the final service of moving the pennies. But bear with me, I have an idea...

I'm proposing a hierarchical arrangement of coins to pay for the services. First, you've got the rotating disc of quarters at the bed that would take, say, 12 quarters. At 15 minutes apiece, that's three hours of uninterrupted vibrating, a godsend! But to actually rotate the quarters, you'd have a disc above it that is loaded with dimes. So that'd be 12 dimes. Then to pay for the dime disc, you'd have a disc above it loaded with nickels. 12 nickels. And to pay for the nickel disc, another disc with 12 pennies. How you pay for the penny disc is the biggest drawback, which I can't entirely resolve at this time. It might have to be that the nickels be somehow adequate compensation for the nickel disc as well as the penny disc.

The key thing is that original 15 minutes, great but inadequate, has been wonderfully extended to three glorious hours! Meaning, except for the need to replenish all the coin discs at the end of three hours, we'd have a virtually perpetual vibrating bed!