readherring

I'm filling out an application for a 72 hour tourist visa to visit Russia. And...holy crap. I'm on like, page 25, and the questions are getting ridiculous.

Do you have any special skills, training or experience related to fire-arms and explosives or to nuclear matters, biological or chemical substance?
[]Yes
[]No

Have you ever been involved in armed conflict, either as a combatant or a victim?
[]Yes
[]No

Have you ever been afflicted with a communicable disease of public health significance or a dangerous physical or mental disorder? Have you ever been a drug abuser or an addict?
[]Yes
[]No

I probably shouldn't have mentioned that I work for the U.S. government. I definitely shouldn't have entered my occupation as 'spy'.

I just got flagged for suspicious activity on my own credit card. Apparently, a $500 flight from Moscow on Aeroflot triggers the Bank of America "O NOES!" alarm. I guess I should have booked the DC-to-Moscow leg first.

Have I told you that I was going to Armenia?
http://share.habitat.org/tavushregionarmeniapetrenkoteam10

Today I recused myself on the grounds of being too touchy-feely. My number came up for jury duty, and I set off for the courthouse with every intention of performing my civic duty. So long as the civic duty didn't go for more than 2-3 days, that is. Since my job is to protect the public from questionable medical devices, I am a non-stop show of civic duty. And humility. Whatever. Anyway, I don't know if I could give up protecting the world from ill-conceived bone wedges for more than 2-3 days.

So I was a bit concerned when my juror number got called for the big case. The big case is scheduled to go for at least 6 days. Something I really don't want to do. But since I had decided that 'civic duty' would be my mantra for the day, I was determined to give it a honest go. That meant that there would be no slipping out of the courtroom by fabricating a story of a drunken tryst with the prosecuting attorney.

After being sworn in, the judge told us about the case. Rape. Really bad rape. That's not to say that all rape isn't really bad, but in the realm of really bad, this was really, really bad. It was the continual rape of two sisters over a 4 year period. The younger girl was 4 years old when the abuse started. The rapist was also a minor at the time, starting when he was 14. When the judge read the charges alleged by each girl, in very clinical terms, I felt slightly nauseous.

When the judge asked for jurors to recuse themselves on the grounds of not being able to make a fair decision based on the subject matter, I kept silent. Out of 75-100 jurors in the room, about 20 left for this reason. I thought about excusing myself then, but I didn't. I wasn't sure if my queasiness on the subject would have influenced my decision. Sure, listening to six days of graphic descriptions of raping children would be hard, but I couldn't honestly say that it would cloud my judgement.

Then I realized it would. A few questions later, the judge asked a similar, "Are you comfortable with this?" question, and I approached the bench. I told her that I had worked with Women Against Rape and a domestic abuse agency in my past, and that this issue was too close to home with me. Plus, my stepfather was involved in psychological evaluations on abuse cases. She recused me.

I absolutely did not expect to get emotional over this. As I walked out of the courthouse lobby, I felt like crying. I don't know what this says about myself; I don't think it's necessarily a good or a bad thing. As I said, it just caught me off guard.

One of my co-workers was fairly mystified that I was not only attending a baby shower, but I was also organizing the baby shower. This was mystifying to her because I am a man, and men supposedly don't:
1) Attend baby showers
2) Organize parties
3) Organize baby showers that they attend

Eh, whatever. We had the party last night, and it was a lot of fun. The party was like other baby showers; there was just a lot less pink crepe paper. And we had it at a Scottish pub. And the shower party game was: if you say "baby", you have to drink. If mom-to-be says "baby", everyone (except mom-to-be) drinks.

Hi,


I'm a fucking moron. I went to your 'directions' website page and, as I was neither taking the Metro nor biking to Artomatic, I didn't notice that the address was hidden in those sections. See, I was driving to Artomatic, which obviously is not a viable option this year, because no driving directions were posted. However, following a completely accidental incident on the Metro involving myself and four gallons of paint, (The accident resulted in a much better color scheme of olive, muted violet, and lemon yellow than Metro's current orange-on-orange cars. But the Metro Police showed absolutely NO appreciation. Dicks.) I am no longer allowed to ride that system with art supplies. Also, biking was not an option, since I needed to transport a 100x scale model of Dick Cheney's flaming, flaccid phallus fucking over America's poor, and as everyone knows, Cheney's phallus isn't aerodynamically stable. Since Metro'ing and biking weren't options, I decided to risk driving.


To get some direction, I clicked the link for "See a map for walking routes..." Maybe that wasn't the best choice. Walking is the opposite of driving, I know, but I just couldn't resist the link because it was blaring out in big red letters. I can't resist clicking on anything that is red. (I once spent an entire paycheck at a Coke vending machine. Couldn't stop clicking. True story.) So, with map in hand, I thought I had enough information to find you. But I must have not followed the directions closely enough, because they took me to a Ruby Tuesdays.


It. Was. Horrible. If I ever want to hang out with a yuppie happy hour crowd, swilling bad beer and eating appetizers that taste like cheese covered cardboard, I now know where to go. Seriously, I now realize that the skinny blonde girls that go to those places invented bulimia just to get that crap out of their systems.


Erm, I seem to have drifted off-topic. The point that I wanted to make was that you should probably put the address at the top of your directions page under the heading "ADDRESS". I probably should have mentioned that part first.


Thank you for your attention on this matter. Stay away from Ruby Tuesday's. Seriously.

I got pulled over for not having my headlights on AGAIN.
Once again, I was leaving a well lit bar & restaurant neighborhood, and realized my lights were off as soon as I turned onto the main road. Once again, the cop pulled me over to see whether I was drinking or just absent-minded:
"Sir, have you been drinking tonight?"
"No."
"Are you sure you didn't have anything to drink?"
"Yes"
"Are you absolutely sure you didn't have anything to drink?"
"Yes"
"Sir, were you watching the hockey game?"
"Actually, we were watching this..."
I handed the officer a DVD of *Faust*.
"Oh, OK. You can go. Drive safely."
Actually, I was leaving bar trivia at The Barking Dog. (Which my team won - Huzzah!) That DVD has been in my car for months.

Remember kids, when emergency strikes, Goethe will save your butt.

I did a small, emergency job for my friend's company over the weekend, and this morning he called me to get my information so his company could pay me for it.

Among the things he asked for was my tax ID. It took me a few moments to realize that he was asking an erroneous question. The "Tax ID" section is for the company's tax ID. The employee's tax ID is their Social Security Number.

Funny, I've never thought about my SSN being a tax ID before, but basically, that's its main purpose. The number doesn't apply to social security until you turn 67 (or more). I guess the government calls it a 'social security number' because the citizens wouldn't like getting stamped with a 'tax number' for their entire lives. It's all about perception, you know. Like how they use the name "Department of Homeland Defense" instead of "Department of Mother F*cking Police State".

My phone was missing from the side pocket of my backpack. It had been thrown in that pocket when I went through the metal detection station on my way into my building. So the most likely place the phone could have fallen out was inside the x-ray machine.

Fortunately,my office is right next to the security checkpoint*(1), so I was able to call my cell phone from my desk and hear it ring. I walked over and asked for it back while it was still ringing.

"How do we know this is your phone?", asked the guard on x-ray detail.
"'Cause I just called it."
Stunned by my quick (but accurate) line, the guard immediately handed me my phone.
"Hello?", I said as I took the call before the ringing died. "Yeah, he's right here."
"Hello?", said the guard on x-ray detail after I passed him the phone.
While the other guards were laughing, one of them said to me, "Yeah, we'll let you go this time on account of that."

Whatever, dude. You all know that I won that round.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*(1) Fortunately for just this one instance. All other times, I don't really enjoy hearing the various detectors beeping and whooping, while the guards make loud small talk all day.

If you're not familiar with it, the Metal-on-Metal hip aren't people who say they listened to Ozzy before he was cool. It's an artificial joint that has been failing when some of the metal elements start scraping apart, leaving fine bits of metal around the joint. Originally, the main problem was thought to be a wearing of the ball on the inside of the mating cup. New research is looking at possible wear where the ball is connected to the femur bone. It is mounted on a trunnion on the top of a stem implant.

I - genius that I am - have just figured out what the problem is. The problem is that the artificial joint manufacturers were playing fast and loose with the English language. The ball is supposed to attach to the hip stem and never move again. But someone named the connecting piece a 'trunnion', which is supposed to refer to a conical protrusion that allows another part to pivot or rotate about it. By calling the part a 'trunnion' they let it do what a trunnion normally does - pivot, wear, and have metally bits flake off. The original trunnions were the doohickeys that jutted out of the sides of French cannons and let them rotate up and down.

If you want to name a piece that holds something tight & fast, call it a 'locking peg', or an 'anchoring mount', or a 'clingy, overprotective parent'. My heart goes out to all of the patients who have suffered due to the industry's improper selection of correct terminology.

I'm still recovering from the disaster that was last week.

With two reviews due, and one that was late, it was a busy time. The late one wasn't actually late, it just got past the 'soft' deadline. But the other two were due-due, and missing those deadlines results in the governmental 'hell to pay' program.

Still, I was treading water admirably right up to Wednesday afternoon. The 'late' review and one of the due-due's were safely closed. But the last due-due was due on Friday, which meant that I had to have a polished rough draft to my mentor by 5:00 Thursday. But the due-due's do date looked do-able, so I was duly, um, the dude?

Or so I thought before I went in to see one of our department's surgeons at 4:30PM Wednesday. The manufacturer had, among other things, modified their device by moving some holes about a centimeter or so. Their rationale was given as, "Our surgeons said this would make it fit better'. A nebulous answer, for sure. It begged me to ask what the hell they meant by that and be done with it. But just in case I was missing something that would be bleedingly obvious*(1) to a surgeon, I showed it first to our surgeon.

He was glad that I did. Not only was it not obvious how fit would be improved, but he also recalled that about 10 years ago, a similar trochanter-inserted fixation device had distall cannulation moved to the inferior tip, which resulted in affixation breaching from the epiphysis into the diaphysis which gave way to an abnormally high causality of stress-induced peri-implant failure, which resulted in all future manufacturers adding a distal buffer. I dutifully wrote down the name of the device he mentioned, then went back to my office to research its history, so I could figure out what the hell he just said.

By about 9:30 PM, I gave up. A 20 year history of the device didn't show any recalls or any significant papers written about a bunch of the things breaking. There is a database of device failure reports available nationally, but it's spotty on a good day, and finding specific evidence there would be like finding a needle (that had its eye moved about a centimeter or so) in a haystack. Defeated, I tried instead to dance around the issue by writing a very vague question about moving holes and things breaking, and hoped that the manufacturer would know what the hell I was talking about. If he didn't supply the right answer, I could always write another letter.

The next morning was spent trying to settle that issue. It went on until the surgeon got back from a conference late that afternoon, and corrected me that the device wasn't breaking, the bone it was installed in was. (There were a few papers on this) Revisions continued later into Friday than I felt comfortable with. Comfort was not helped by the getting of "Where the hell is it?" e-mails from the director.

I had no idea where I had gotten the mistaken notion that the device was breaking. But I figured it out later that day. Another engineer remarked that the surgeon liked to use the term, "peri-implant failure". The suffix "Peri-" means near. The term meant that something near the implant broke, not the actual implant itself. Mystery solved. And here, I thought the term referred to the inauguration of another horrible Texas governor.








*(1) OK, that was a bad choice of words.