Superhero – Homeownerman

A Homeownerman Home-Honesty Review: Shark Professional Steam Mop

A Homeownerman Home-Honesty Review: Shark Professional Steam Mop

When I saw an infomercial for this product, I was sure immediately it would be a homerun. Watching the people in dingy clothing on the commercial kick over full buckets of wildlife-destroying chemicals with long faces and sweat on their brow, push around a dirty string mop on a floor so muddy that you could grow herbs in it, and finally throwing their traditional mop and bucket in the trash can, I could relate with all, well maybe some, no really none of it. But those same people were better dressed, fully made up, and had huge smiles on their faces when they bought the Shark Professional Steam Mop. I wanted my life to be as happy as theirs at those few moments a year when I was mopping floors. So I pulled out the Homeownerman line of credit, dialed the 800 number (it was actually an 866 number, but let’s not flash back to simpler times when 800 numbers were 800 numbers), and even sprung for the extra head cover, a $19.95 value for only shipping costs of $19.95.

First, let me describe how I used to mop the floors so that you will have a frame of reference for how much better my life has become. I used to don the dingy Homeownerman spandex suit, the old one that fits really tight and accentuates my beer belly because of its lack of chevron stripes. Then I would commence sweeping the floor with one of those old straw brooms, the type that the wicked witch of the west used as her Uber vehicle, until most of the dog hair, Wifegirl hair, and crumbs that I brushed off my supersuit were in a small pile, shooing away Underdog from it. Usually there are one or two previously unseen spiders crawling out of the pile. I sweep them up too. Next I would take a mundane, ordinary plastic bucket and fill it with hot water and a little bit of ammonia. (Normally at this point I would bore you with my knowledge of general chemistry and mention that ammonia comes from the ancient temple of Ammon, where the elite would park their camels while they went to worship their gods. And they had a lot of gods, so it would take a long time to worship them all. In the meantime their camels, who were crossing their legs trying to keep their urine in, would finally unleash, allowing it to flow. It had a distinct odor which comes from the nitrogen-based waste. But I won’t bore you with that here.) I then would repeatedly dunk the sponge-mop in the ammonia water, clean small segments of the floor, re-dunk the mop to wring out all of the dirt, and repeat. It would take me about 10 minutes, the floor would sparkle, and the house would smell pretty good (they put perfumes in the ammonia these days so that it doesn’t smell like camel piss.) Do you see how inefficient this method was and why I had a long face and a dingy supersuit on?

But now, with the Shark Professional Steam Mop the process is much simpler. I change into my size-appropriate supersuit with the chevron stripes. Everyone looks at me and asks “Did you lose weight?” or “Did you get new glasses?” I pull the newly washed, dazzling white, cloth microfiber pad on the steamer head. I should mention the cloth head needs to be washed with nasty, wildlife-killing detergents, thereby negating the first reason for using the Shark in the first place. I locate a convenient source of distilled water. There is usually an empty gallon near the Aero Herb Garden (see future product review), so I go to the back-up source at the grocery store. Once I return, I fill up the reservoir on the steamer through the ridiculously small opening. Fortunately Shark has provided an unlikely tall and narrow pitcher with which to fill the reservoir. I plug in the unit, which immediately dims the lights on my side of the neighborhood, and this is even before the unit is turned on. Once powered up, the Shark begins to make a quiet, mechanical noise like a 1970s clock, and almost immediately steam starts to flow from the head. I begin gliding the Shark lightly over the floor, allowing the steam to kill any bacteria to sanitize the floor while the microfibers scrub stubborn, baked on stains. This is the theory anyway. In reality, the dirt is rearranged on the floor, redepositing it in the hardest places to reach. I then frantically twist and turn the pivoting head, trying to recollect the dirt with the microfibers. After ten minutes in the first section of the floor, I give up trying to get up the dirt and figure I’ll just sanitize the floor with the steam so that I’ll have a very sanitary, organized layer of dirt on the floor. By this point the unit has run out of water, and so I must go through the filling procedure again.

Three hours later, I have a nice, hazy finish on my tile, a filthy pad which needs to be washed, and an electric bill that looks to the NSA like I have been burning sodium lights in my house to grow pot.

So, I am giving the Shark Professional Stem Mop three bent nails (out of a possible four.) I should mention that the more bent nails, the worse the product. I am not gleeful like the people on the infomercial, and come to think of it I have never seen any professional cleaners using one of these. So, call Homeownerman old school, but I’ll keep my mop and ammonia, thank you.

HomeOwnerMan’s Advice to New Homeowners

I posted this about four years ago after talking to a guy at work who had just bought his first house. The advice is still good.

10. When it comes to leaves, the amount on money you spend on equipment is inversely proportional to the amount of time you’ll have to spend managing them.

9. Always turn off the circuit when doing electrical work.

8. If there’s a question, buy one of each at Lowes. You can always return the wrong ones.

7. Home Depot never has exactly what you want, but they have something that will do.

6. Prime with Kilz. Buy good paint. You’ll be happy you did.

5. Overestimate the horsepower you’ll need.

4. If you have more than ¼ of an acre, buy the gas one (of anything.)

3. Screwdrivers are migratory. And I’ve tried flooding the market with them; it doesn’t work.

2. Put a floor in your attic. Today.

1. Always…no…Never start an elective plumbing job in the evening.

Roll out the barrel, and we’ll have a barrel of fun!

Many years ago [a couple of olympiads ago actually] the HomeOwnerFamily visited the FriendInRaleighFamily for a weekend. FriendInRaleighMan is always a few steps cooler than HomeOwnerMan and just a few years ahead on technologies. For example, he was the first person HomeOwnerMan knew who had given up cable TV for streaming content. He described to his wide-eyed superhero friend how he had used an old computer and the internet to watch streamed content like NetFlix. While everyone else was going to their mailbox to retrieve damaged DVDs that would refuse to play just at the climax of the movie, FriendInRaleighMan didn’t even have to go to his mailbox! It was the coolest thing WifeGirl and HomeOwnerMan had ever seen, but it was still a year or two too cool for them. But they all sat down and watched the olympics on broadcast TV.

Later in the visit, though, there was discussion of a futuristic gizmo that HomeOwnerMan thought might be in reach for him. The invention was so far out there that HomeOwnerMan was sure that it was brought to earth by some advanced time-traveling civilization. The invention was called a “rain barrel” and it ingeniously captured rain runoff from the roofs of houses. This water could later be used to irrigate plants, wash cars, or even to flush toilets in the event of a water emergency. HomeOwnerMan was struck with awe and had to investigate further.

It was all HomeOwnerMan could talk about that year. He looked up plans for how to build and deploy them. He priced out the materials needed to make them. He spoke to everyone who would listen about the virtues of them. (At the time, he wasn’t sure what the virtues were, but he knew it must be virtuous.) One neighbor, we’ll call her PolesReversedLady, was listening to HomeOwnerMan and declared, “You know those things are illegal. You aren’t allowed to take the rain water. It belongs to the township, not to you. And besides, it is really bad for the environment. It will kill all the fish and dry up the aquifer…” She went on and on. Even though PolesReversedLady was wrong on every account and HomeOwnerMan was pretty sure it was all bunk, it was enough to stem his enthusiasm for almost 8 years.

HomeOwnerMan continued to research rain barrels but never with quite the zeal that he once had.But then just a few weeks ago when WifeGirl was reading SocialMediaBook and found a site that was offering a seminar on “how to make your own rain barrel”. She passed the link along to HomeOwnerMan for the New Jersey Water Supply Authority (NJWSA, http://www.raritanbasin.org/rain_barrel.html) and happy days were here again for HomeOwnerMan. To begin with, it was vindication for him. The rain barrel program was listed under the watershed protection program. They keep runoff from carrying pollution to the streams, allowing the water to filter naturally through the soil before returning to the water supply. They help prevent stream erosion by lowering the volume of water entering the stream during storm events. The water can be used rather than pure drinking water for watering plants and washing cars. They use no energy, and are so beneficial that many municipalities offer a credit for installing them.

Secondly, the program is very inexpensive. For just $35 you are given all of the materials to build one, and you could build more than one if you wanted. There is some installation expenses, but they are minimal and might be done with materials HomeOwnerMan has around the house.

C: the three women who run the program (Sarah, Alex, and Kathy) were superhero nice. HomeOwnerMan was reminded of a flight attendant he once met on a particularly long flight where the passengers had become angry and restless. The flight attendant offered a perky “Turkey Sandwich!?” to 310 passengers with poise and grace and never lost her smile. The NJWSA women were just as perky and nice.

and IV: It took less than a half an hour to put the rain barrel together, and I’m guessing about a half and hour to install it as well.

So what are you waiting for? Find out when the next seminar is in your area. Build and install your own. Save the planet. Be a HomeOwnerMan (or HomeOwnerWoman) yourself. You may not have the tights and the caricature (courtesy www.EmilyArts.com), but you will be a reasonable facsimile. (FriendInRaleighMan had a facsimile machine, or Fax machine, before HomeOwnerMan, too. He was just way cool!)

The Electric Octopus

It was newlywed bliss in the Mr. & Mrs. HomeOwnerMan household. They were living in a starter cave that HomeOwnerMan had purchased during his single years. It was humble but it was where HomeOwnerMan called home for many years, and now he welcomed WifeGirl into it hoping that she would give it the loving touches that only a female super-hero was good at.

There was a finished attic in the place which made the cave a bit larger and had been the residence of HomeOwnerMan’s college roommate, EconoBoy, who made his living in the World Trade Center. The HomeCave was attractive because of its proximity to public transportation into the Big City, so EconoBoy rented the attic for a time until he met and later married Leeblu-Woman. They moved out to the suburbs, and shortly thereafter along came WifeGirl, who at the time went under the name GirlfriendGirl. HomeOwnerMan thought this was a somewhat redundant name, but fell in love just the same. But I digress.

WifeGirl made the large walk-in closet in the attic the home of her extensive wardrobe of spandex Lycra suits that all had “W” emblazoned across the chest. She was a working super-hero, with corporate looking supersuits and a collection of tiny shoes that would have made Imelda Marcos proud. One morning the light in the walk-in closet, which was a 65-year-old pull-string type, gave up the ghost and WifeGirl was unable to tell her taupe supersuit from her mauve supersuit in the low light. So she asked HomeOwnerMan to replace the light. He knew instinctively that the mystique of his identity hung in the balance of his ability to do a quick, clean, and high-quality repair on this, the first of many home repair jobs to come.

Sizing up the job, HomeOwnerMan wanted to knock her socks off, so he decided he would not only replace the light but also add a light switch outside the door of the closet for added convenience. He furthermore noticed that the wires were the original ones from 1926 when the house was built, so he thought he would replace them, too. So off to Home Depot he went. Lowes was not yet in business and Grossmans had just gone out of business; Square D was around but was lame.

He chose a nice sealed light fixture because the ceiling was low in the attic, and a clean-looking toggle switch, box, a wall plate, and plastic coated Romex wire. He also bought a ceiling box because there was not one where the old fixture was. HomeOwnerMan’s brother-in-law, Mayor McWeinerMinder, who at one time worked for the Electric Company (not the children’s show on public television but the actual power company), had given HomeOwnerMan personal lessons on wiring, so he knew that safety was always the right choice.

Turning the power off at the electrical box, HomeOwnerMan faced the reality that the one breaker was responsible for all the power on the second and third floors of the HomeCave. So working in the ambience of flashlights, HomeOwnerMan taped the new wire to the old wires in hopes of easily fishing the new wires to the power source and to the wall switch. He started to pull on the one end. To his delight the wires moved about a foot, but then abruptly stopped. So he went to the other end, figuring there was just a snag, and pulled the wires back the other way. Again they moved a foot and then stopped. So he summoned the able help of WifeGirl.

WifeGirl was instructed to stand at the one end of the wire and, when given the HomeSignal, pull the wires towards her. HomeOwnerMan would use a stethoscope, which was entirely useless in his short-but-dazzling medical career but was invaluable for things like working on his car and finding out what was crawling inside the walls, to listen to where the wires were moving. So WifeGirl pulled, and HomeOwnerMan discovered that there were wires moving twenty feet away on the other side of the attic. “This is bad,” he thought to himself. The noise was coming from a recessed light. So HomeOwnerMan got started removing the fixture to investigate further.

As he removed it all manner of dead wasps, leaves, sticks, straw, hay, Jimmy Hoffa, etc. fell out of the hole in the ceiling. After making sure that no active wildlife had taken refuge in this hole, he began inspecting it using the most effective means available for a small hole – a make-up mirror and a flashlight. To his surprise and enjoyment, there was an OCTOPUS of wires a scant one foot from the hole, which was easily pulled toward him for inspection. Needless to say the wires from the other two areas that he was previously working pulled toward HomeOwnerMan one foot, both being connected into this octopus.

At this point I should describe the octopus. There were not less than ten sets of wires coming into it. There was wiring from 3 distinct time periods: Romex from the contemporary era, mesh covered wires from the Neolithic period, and knob-n-tube wiring from the Paleolithic era. The wires went to every outlet, light, fan, and switch in the room. In short, it was the power plant of the third floor, but it had all the makings of an incendiary device built by middle-east terrorists. There was no such thing as a wire nut, junction box, or ground wire in the whole mess. Instead, the whole entity was held together by carbon-datable electrical tape.

Here was the problem: HomeOwnerMan needed to identify the wire which was carrying the power to the entire organism and isolate it from short-circuiting. Otherwise, he would be unable to turn that circuit on at all rendering the whole second and third floors devoid of the new Edison electric lighting and throw the whole place back to pre-industrialization days. After deciding that that would truly be a hassle, HomeOwnerMan began cutting all of the wires off the octopus one-by-one, labelling their probable function, and taping them up with electrical tape.

With his superior intellect, HomeOwnerMan finally reasoned that the knob-n-tube wires were likely the power source since they were the oldest and the previous owners were undoubtedly too lazy to bother running new cable to the electrical box. But, of course, reasoning was not enough; as a true scientist, he needed to test his hypothesis. For this he again needed the help of his lovely assistant WifeGirl. His instructions to her were simple. “WifeGirl, run down to the basement and flip the breaker. If it pops back, come back up here, and bring the ‘swear jar’ with you. If it doesn’t pop back, RUN up here with the fire extinguisher.”

WifeGirl ran down to the breaker box as instructed flipped the [correct, amazingly enough] breaker, and raced back up the stairs with the fire extinguisher, just as she was instructed. Fortunately, there was no fire, smoke, or smoldering wires. AND, when tested with HomeOwnerMan’s trusty multi-meter from his tool belt, his hypothesis held up – the oldest wires were the power source!

Over the next two months HomeOwnerMan and WifeGirl set about rewiring the attic, making it safe and restoring it to present day technology. It was a good thing that WifeGirl and HomeOwnerMan found this problem as to avert an inferno but that was not what they had expected to get into at the start of the project.

HomeOwnerMan – making the ordinary extra-ordinary.

Tree Limbs and WifeGirl from Heaven

When we last visited HomeOwnerMan, he was flat on his back repairing a lawn tractor. Today, as we look into the sky, we find HomeOwnerMan high atop a poplar tree, preparing to carry out some necessary and overdue pruning to the oversize sedentary creature.

As he looks out over the Metropolawn skyline from his perch, his eyes come across Wife Girl tangling adeptly with a pressure washer and a moderately soiled deck railing. His gaze lingers just a beat too long on Wife Girl however, triggering her arachnid sense as she feels the eyes on her. She turns nonchalantly and smiles at Homeowner Man, who suddenly feels self-conscious that he is wearing tights and a cape. He’s always longed to be more than a Superhero associate to Wife Girl, but knows that the life of a Superhero is a solitary one. Besides, she always seemed more attracted to Brown Lantern, the Delivery Guy. Still, he wonders for a moment what she looks like under her Spandex Lycra suit, but resists the temptation to invade her privacy by using his X-ray vision to find out.

Using the chainsaw devise he borrowed from Neighbor Man, HomeOwnerMan makes the necessary cuts to fell the lifeless branch, dropping it two stories onto a picnic table. Scampering down, HomeOwnerMan saws the branch into 12” pieces only to find that “divide and conquer” are not always the best way to defeat a foe. For each of the segments fought back by becoming like lead weights which needed to be carted and stacked at the edge of Metropolawn. In blazing heat, HomeOwnerMan painstakingly carries out the task, until at last there are only brush and twigs remaining.

A new day dawns as HomeOwnerMan gathers the twigs and brush, processing it into small wood chips using the chipping device with which Jeeves had outfitted him. Jeeves, always the prankster, made the device just a little difficult to start such that HomeOwnerMan is nearly tired out by the time he fires up the device. Undisturbed by this minor inconvenience, HomeOwnerMan carries out the bone-jarring task of chipping the waste. Again, the sun did its worst to desiccate HomeOwnerMan, but drawing on sheer determination he gradually amassed a one cubic yard pile of wood chips. He doesn’t rest, though, until the chips are safely in their mulch pile.

HomeOwnerMan – making the ordinary Extra-ordinary.

[Originally posted on FaceBook 05/30/2011]

Broken Belts and Bamboo

When we last left Homeowner Man, our hero was dangling precariously from an extension ladder in a rain storm. This week, Homeowner Man finds himself flat on his back underneath a John Deere LT155 lawn tractor. Having had an untimely run in with a wayward tree stump, Homeowner Man came up on the short end of the fight, breaking the mower timing belt in the process.

Upon inspection of the damage, Homeowner Man noticed a fraying drive belt and bravely decided to proactively conquer this problem while addressing the matter at hand. Undaunted by the closure of the nearest John Deere parts store in the wake of a sagging economy, Homeowner Man plays the waiting game by ordering the parts online, unwilling to pay expedited shipping.

The grass was unfazed by the inability to be maintained and continued to grow in a manner resembling its larger cousin, bamboo. Doing a quick calculation in his head, Homeowner Man realized the beauty of the neighborhood lay in the balance between the news brought to him by the UPS tracking site and the unrelenting biomass. He reached out to his associate, Neighbor Man, to borrow his lawn mowing device. This kept the grass at bay, and Homeowner Man affected a small repair on Neighbor Man’s machine to alleviate the vapor lock situation.

The parts finally in hand, Homeowner Man began taking the necessary steps to repair his lawn mowing device. Piece after piece was removed, some requiring superhuman strength to unbolt and others requiring the agility and contortion skills of Yoga Man (who strangely has never been seen in the same place as Homeowner Man) until hours later all obstructions were removed and the drive belt was accessible. Requiring his super-human intellect, Homeowner Man managed to re-assemble all of the pieces and not have any left over. He required the assistance of Wife Girl (who some have suspected is more than just a superhero sidekick for Homeowner Man) to re-attach large springs.

After installing the mower deck timing belt, which was responsible for the whole adventure in the first place, Homeowner man re-attached the deck and turned the key. With a roar of a Kohler engine and a whirr of blades, Homeowner Man made the yard safe for man and beast alike.

Thank you, Homeowner Man, for restoring truth, Justice, and straight grass lines!

[Originally posted May 3, 2011 on FaceBook.]

Before there was HomeOwnerMan, there was Pretzel King

A long, long time ago in a kingdom far, far away there was a family with six children. The youngest of these was a little boy who was so starved for attention that he would go to great lengths to be noticed by his family. He tried comedy acts which brought brief attention but required long hours of dreaming them up, planning them, finding the appropriate time to perform them, and making them look spontaneous. (I should mention that the little boy is older now but still devotes a fair amount of time to this.)

Observing his youngest sister on a few occasions, who was equally starved for attention and was further saddled with middle child syndrome, he noticed that she started making a coffee cake recipe which, although it took some time, brought with it praise an accolades from the other family members. They started heaping praise on her and spontaneously giving her attention by requesting that she make the coffee cake when they were hungry for something homemade.

So the little boy got an idea. He found a soft pretzel recipe and tried it on his family. The recipe took some time and a great deal of effort and the pretzels were somewhat dense, but the family loved them. They started giving him attention. He started making the pretzels more often. All was good.

But soon the boy realized it was a lot of work, and so he wouldn’t make the pretzels when the family asked. But they were clever. They started saying things like, “we’d make them, but they don’t come out as good as yours.” That worked for a while, and even stirred the boy into improving his own recipe. He looked up other recipes. He experimented with the recipe. He got advice from his grandmother, who was an expert at all sorts of breads and foods. The pretzels gradually became lighter and of better quality.

But again, he began to resist the effort of making them. Until one day when a sister, much older and more clever than he, came up with a new strategy. She began calling him “Pretzel King”, and began saying things like “Pretzel King makes the ~best~ pretzels” and spinning yarns about “the Pretzel Kingdom” and his “Pretzel subjects.” He so loved these stories that he went back to the kitchen to again make pretzels, passing the time and work with visions of his kingdom. The stories became more fanciful; the pretzels reached a pinnacle. The little boy had truly become “The Pretzel King.”

For many years the Pretzel King guarded his recipe, keeping it close and modifying it only slightly. In the advent of bread machines the most laborious part, kneading the dough, became much simpler. Later, he even added the use of commercial style mixers to the process. But now, for all to make, is the Pretzel King’s secret recipe.

Enjoy them. Make them for your family. Have your own fantasy kingdom.

Soft Pretzel Recipe

Dough Ingredients:

1 ¼ cup water (warm)

2 tablespoon Margarine

1 tablespoon Sugar

1 teaspoon Salt

4 cups flour (or 2 cups whole wheat and 2 cups white)

1 tablespoon yeast

Preparation ingredients:

¼ cup baking soda

1 egg

¼ cup Kosher Salt

In a bread machine add dough ingredients in order, or if kneading by hand, put the water, melted margarine, yeast and sugar in the bottom of a large glass bowl and mix until dissolved. Allow yeast to activate for 5 minutes. Add flour gradually, mixing well until it becomes too thick to mix. Then knead in the rest of the flour and add more until the dough is no longer sticky. Work the dough hard for 3 – 4 minutes until smooth, then set aside in a bowl in a warm area to rise for 30 min to an hour.

Pre-heat oven to 375° F. Divide the dough into 12 equal parts. Roll each dough ball into a 18” x ¾” rope, and twist into traditional shapes or braid into tiny loaves or wreaths.

Boil 4 cups of water and add ¼ cup baking soda. Blanch the pretzels in the solution until they float to the surface, and remove them with a slotted spoon. Place them on cookie racks to drip dry. Move them to cookie sheets. Prepare an egg wash by beating the egg with 2 tablespoons of water. Brush liberally on each pretzel. Sprinkle kosher salt on them to liking. Bake for 20-30 minutes until they are golden brown. Cool on cookie racks or eat while still warm.

Who is that masked caricaturist?

I wrote this Yelp* review of www.EmilyArts.com a couple of weeks ago after she created the “face of HomeOwnerMan.” (So you can all blame her.) I wanted to post it here too along with some other tidbits about Emily…

****

I should mention at the outset that I’ve known Emily for many years, and I mention this because I have had the opportunity to view scores of her caricatures on social media. I never get tired of looking at them, and I’ll tell you why. Emily does more than capture what the person looks like; she somehow manages to depict their entire personality right on the page. For many years I thought this was just a perception I had, but one day she posted a caricature of a woman I’ve known since high school. Let me tell you, the image so accurately depicted her personality that I had to do a double-take to make sure it wasn’t one of those animated “Harry Potter” photographs.

So, when my wife suggested that I start a blog to showcase some of my tall tales and attempts at painting, I immediately thought that the site would be enhanced by a caricature by Emily. I contacted her, and she made the process as easy as could be. She asked me to email few good photographs of myself (if there is such a thing). Then we discussed what it was I was looking for. Her pricing schedule is written clearly on her web site, so we chose the appropriate one, and she was off and running. She sent periodic drafts to ensure I was happy with the direction in which she was going. From the first pencil sketch it was clear that I would be better off giving her full artistic license, because she really knows the business. By the time she got to the finished product, I marveled (and was horrified at the same time lol) at how much it looked like me. Even more incredible was that it looked a little like my mother, who to my knowledge Emily never met and even more incredibly most people say I look like my father. And yet she accentuated parts of my face that are part of my mother’s ancestry.

So, let’s talk about the business transaction a little more. Have you ever worked with artists? They can be quirky and the business transaction can be awkward. This is not at all the case with Emily. She is upfront about costs, deadlines, and requirements. This makes her perfect for doing corporate events where there is a bean-counter watching from a business perspective. She is unobtrusive, which makes her perfect for your wedding or Bar Mitzvah. Her prices are very reasonable, which makes her perfect for your family gathering. And she is fun, which makes her perfect for your birthday party.

Thanks, Emily, for making the ordinary extraordinary!

*****

I went to high school with Emily. It was in the early days when they started closing down Catholic schools for low attendance, or as I learned recently from Emily, in order to sell off valuable land to the highest bidder. Anyway, Emily got displaced into my high school from an all-girls high school, which in theory meant that my chances of a date on a Friday night just improved. It was always just a theory. Anyway, it turned out that I was not the only senior in the parking lot driving a ’74 Plymouth Satellite, there was also a “Notre Dame” girl who drove one, too. Actually, hers might have been a ’73, I can’t remember and it is not important to the story, but if my brother is reading this and happens to remember what year hers was, he would correct me so I might as well disclaim it here.

Anyway, it was a foot in the door to talk to Emily which I did, shyly, but I never got to really know her until Senior Week 1982 in Wildwood, NJ. It was there I found out she had a boyfriend, and I was demoralized only slightly, because I had a girlfriend at the time too. But it turned out her boyfriend was working and couldn’t come to senior week, and my girlfriend was an underclassman so wouldn’t likely be there. So we made one of those “When Harry Met Sally” deals that if we both were alone on Wednesday night we’d hit the clubs together.

Wednesday came, and I was alone as was she all day. Things were looking up. So I gussied up the best I could and arrived at her door to go out. I was crestfallen as she answered the door and introduced me to her boyfriend. [queue violins].

Flash forward 30 years. Facebook came along. Emily and I got back in touch. She immortalized me in a caricature. HomeOwnerMan.com was born.

What Do You Do For a Living?

It is frequently the first question people ask you when they meet you, and sometimes it is more difficult to answer than one might think. It should be a softball question, one you can hit out of the park, and yet I find myself stumped by it frequently. I mean, not as my Super-hero self, mind you. I always have a good answer when I’m in uniform like “Oh, save the world from leaky faucets” or “keep America squeak and leaf free.” But when I’m protected by the super tool belt, few people ever ask me that. They ask me “can I have your autograph?” or “did you really build that yourself?” or “are you going to eat those Fritos?” (Actually, Wifegirl is the only one who ever asks me “are you going to eat those Fritos?”).

No, it is when I’m not in my supersuit that I have the most trouble with that question. And it gets harder and harder every year. When I was young I could easily answer with:

I’m in third grade.

I’m a student.

When I started getting jobs, they were defined by one task and so it was easy to answer:

I mow lawns.

I wash lunch trucks (and forage through the Tastykake pies that I’m supposed to load onto them).

I flip burgers.

As I got into late high school and early college, it got more complex, but still was pretty straightforward:

I serve dinner to senior citizens, and sometimes wheel them back to their apartments when they can’t make it on their own. Sometimes I make up their menus by crossing out the things they’re not allowed to eat like salt or fat.

I drive a Rosati Italian Water Ice truck. Not the kind that sells to the kids who are running down the street with a quarter in their hand and their little sister trailing behind; the kind that delivers to Woolworths and ice cream parlors and little league fields.

I repair A.V. equipment for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Well, I don’t actually repair it,I clean it and plug it in. If it works I wrap up the power cord and put a twist tie on it. If it sparks or makes a grinding noise, I put a repair tag on it and describe the noise or the color of the sparks.

For many years I was an organist at my church. One morning after Mass a man came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re pretty good. Do you do this in real life?” He saw the quizzical look on my face as I formulated an answer. [Hmmm…In real life…Hmmm…Is church not real life?] I was pleased with the answer that popped up in my glasses like they did in the “Terminator” movies. My answer was neither insulting nor used any swear words like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s answer, but was a simple:

Yes, but not by trade.

Soon I was out in the working world. It became tougher to answer “What do you do for a living” for several reasons. First, I didn’t do just one thing. Like in my first job for an AgChem company the answer was essentially:

I kill weeds.

But it was actually much more like:

I kill weeds while trying simultaneously to not kill the crop species, not cause harm to the environment or wildlife, and do so without breathing anything that will kill me or adversely affect my heretofore non-existent offspring.

And I found that girls in bars were not so impressed by:

I kill weeds.

So I learned to cloud the actual truth with corporate speak like:

In a challenging environment I subject the next generation of agricultural chemicals to a rigorous round of biological efficacy testing before they make it to the toxicological stage of testing.

That didn’t so much work with the girls in the bars, either. It only got harder when I moved from research on plants to research on animals. I found out quickly that I really had to shroud what I actually did for a living by what I in theory did for a living.

I’m looking for a way to protect the heart from the damage caused by an ischemic event.

That sounded better than what I really did which involved the hearts of many different species of animals. As the years went on, research increasing moved from the animal to the test tube. But there was a fundamental lack of understanding for the complexities of molecular biology and biochemistry, and if I used terms like “gene-splicing” or “cloning” people would either yell at me or get all weirded out. Invariably they would ask if I was making Dolly the Sheep. “No, I’m making IL-4” would be my answer, and they would get more weirded out thinking IL-4 was some humanized form of R2D2. So I began answering the “what do you do” question with:

I move minute amounts of liquid from one place to another with great precision.

By this point I was married, so I didn’t have to impress the girls in the bars. Most recently, however, I moved out of the labs and into the world of computers. I thought this might make it easier to answer the question, but it really didn’t. While in theory my answer should be:

I support the discovery research scientists with their data collection, reduction, and aggregation needs

it is really more like:

I tell people to “press the button.”

Because most of the time people call me with their computer problems, and most of the time they have a pretty good idea that their problem could mean the loss of a lot of work. So my job is to, in a very calm voice, tell them to do what they already know they have to do. It goes something like this:

Them: It says “Unspecified java error. Ignore or Abort.“ I already tried “Ignore.”

Me: Try clicking “Abort.”

Them: Are you sure?

Me: Oh, absolutely. (I’ve never seen this problem before in my life, and it’s not my data afterall.)

Them: OK. Here I go. Hey! It worked! Thanks, you’re a genius! (I love that part.)

And as I’ve progressed in my IT career, I have learned the wisdom of turning the machine off and turning it back on. So after 18 years of school and 28 years in the working world, my answer to the question “What do you do for a living” is:

I tell the people to turn it off and turn it back on.

I’m a genius.

http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Have-you-tried-turning-off-your-conscious-mind-and-then-turning-it-back-o-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i10809056_.htm

HomeOwnerMan takes on E-Commerce

I will say at the outset that I love e-commerce. I never set foot in a store unless I absolutely have to do so. But the internet has not necessarily simplified commerce, as seen by the example below:

The old way:

You choose the item from the shelf, walk to the front of the store and hand the guy $21.49 in cash for the item. He puts it in a bag and hands it to you.

The new, simplified way:

Pictures3

You choose the item from the web site, ignoring the pop-up from “Fore See” asking you to take part in a survey when your shopping experience is finished. The item goes into your shopping cart. When you click on your shopping cart to purchase the item you have to ignore the ads for “people who bought this item also bought…” You click check out and it asks you if you are a new customer or if you’d like to create an account. You can’t remember ever shopping with them, so you choose “create new account.” You fill out the forty specific fields on the form, and it is rejected because you used your 9-digit zip-code and it only wanted 5 digits. You fill all forty fields in again, and it rejects your form because it can’t find the street on which you’ve lived for 16 years. You accept their suggestion (it has an extra space between the words), and fill in the 40 fields again. It rejects it because you got the warped visual “Captcha” letters wrong. You fill out the forty fields again, and it rejects your form because your password was too weak, and should include “at least one number, one capital letter, and one special character, but not #, %, @, or &.” You come up with a password you will never remember, and it rejects your form because “an account already exists for this email address.”

So, you try to log in with your existing account. It tells you either your username or password are incorrect. You are given the choice “forgot username” and “forgot password.” You choose “forgot password”, and it asks you to verify your account by security questions. The first one is easy -“What is your favorite color?” You’re sure it is blue, but wait, did your wife set up this account in which case it would be red? You guess correctly, and it asks “what is your maternal grandmother’s maiden name?” Racking your brains, you come up with a name you are pretty sure about, but it turns out it was your paternal grandmother’s maiden name. It gives you another chance, and you get it right. It sends an email to your email address on file, so you open another browser window and log in to your email. There is a message from the company from whom you are trying to make the purchase, with a link that says “reset password”. You follow the link (it opens another browser window), and it asks you to type a password and repeat the password. Having been through this, you know to include at least one number, one capital letter, and a special character but not #, %, @, or &. The little “Strong” icon pops up next to your password, so you click “submit.” You get the message “You may not use any password you have used in the past 90 days.” So you come up with a new one. It accepts the new password.

You’re in, except that your shopping cart has expired, and you have to find the item again. You locate the item, put it in your shopping cart, and click “checkout.” It asks how you want to pay and you choose “PayPal.” A Paypal log in pops up. You rack your brain to remember which email address you used when you opened your Paypal account. You guess correctly, but immediately opt for the “forgot password” choice. Paypal sends you an email with a link to reset your password. You reset it, using the above procedure, and are confronted with a new set of warped letters to decode. You get it wrong twice and click the “listen” button. Someone with a strong German accent and a lot of background noise says “depletion”. You type it in, and the screen refreshes with a page that looks like an invoice, except that it says, “The item you has ordered is no longer in stock. We suggest these other items as a replacement.” None of the items have absolutely anything to do with what you wanted.

You go away and play “Bejeweled Blitz” in frustration.