The Manic Mechanic

I was looking over my Amazon order from earlier in the week and I was a bit amused. Some are humorously telling me the item could've been delivered sometime last week but are still on the slow boat from China. But one particular order had me giggling a bit. "Guaranteed delivery by Sunday, November 30." The amusing part of that entry was the delivery method being by US Postal Service. Well, I did hear about Amazon partnering up with the USPS for Sunday deliver in some major cities. But I knew this wouldn't be the case for me because I don't have mail delivered to the house, for ever since I built La Casa Mayhem back in 1988, I opted to have a post office box due to, at the time, the box needing to reside on the main drag rather than in front of the house (private gravel drive 800 feet from the road). When I finally ended up with a real road, I installed a mailbox mostly as a place to display the house numbers and not to look odd without one. The mail was still being delivered to the PO box, where it's safe against theft and weather, and I can let it accumulate when I am away on vacation, etc. I like our little post office, though it's a much busier place these days. Any order I have sent by mail usually takes an additional day to wend its way from the truck to my little box at the PO. So here I was, chortling about a guarantee that Amazon could never keep because things have been going a certain way for 25 years and mail has never been directly delivered to the house and...

*doorbell ringing today at about 3pm, and I see the familiar little white postal truck leaving my driveway as I slowly limp my way to the door*

There is my order, sitting in the front entryway. Damn, Amazon, you're gooood. I knew for certain that I would at least have to head to the post office on Monday to pick up the order, but this, well, I never expected. Amazon will be building at large distribution center in Baltimore next year, and promising same-day delivery for certain items to boot. The downside, of course, is now Amazon had started charging sales tax on orders fulfilled by them since October, a tactic I can assume was worked out to grease political palms, since they haven't even begun construction on the warehouse yet. The upside, there are sill lots of third party outfits that offer the same Prime shipping which are still out of state. I can work the system as much as they can.

This little order had nothing I was in a hurry for, in this case it was an assortment of USB cables plus a webcam for the lab workstation PC. So, while Jeff was still stuck at work doing his occasional manager-on-duty duties, I fired the aforementioned PC and did some needed updates along with attaching the camera. I wanted something I can take pictures of circuits and projects, and this one offered 15 megapixel stills and 1080p HD video. Webcams have come a long way from the grainy, low res output. was I was testing it with closeups of random stuff in the Mayhem Lab, I noticed my eyebrows were again in need of trimming...



When I was a young'un, I had a very pronounced unibrow. Almost as bad as the one Baby Gerald from the Simpsons has. As you can probably imagine, this provided yet more ammunition to those who were already relentlessly bullying me about at the appropriately named Savage Elementary School. Yet one more thing I would hate about myself, I'd nervously pull and yank at my eyebrows as a result, trying to get rid of this apparent scourge under my forehead. Cruel kids would look at my eyebrow (no "s") to see what sort of winter weather would be coming, accuse me of wearing a pipe cleaner over my eyes, you name it. This got added to any number of idiosyncrasies they could muster to make sure their bullying would be incessant. The pulling on my eyebrows would continue until at least middle school, where my early puberty gave them even more things to latch onto. My facial and body hair showing up before everyone else was not only something to pick on me with, it became a chance for me to turn the tables a bit and accuse the hairless children of being left behind in the maturing process. This obviously pricked up a fair amount of envy in many of the late bloomers, and it was where I was first made aware by a sympathetic gym teacher of a condition known as "penis envy" because, in addition to the (at the time, embarrassing) copious amount of pubic hair showing up as I first tripped into my teens, I was also becoming fairly well endowed compared to the bully crew that hounded my everyday life at Hammond Middle School. This teacher had seen the same thing happening with many students over the years, and it was common during those awkward days of early manhood that the underdeveloped among the student body would often feel inadequate. While I had to endure near constant accusations of being gay (hell, I barely knew I was at the time), I was able to flip the tables once again a bit and accuse the little children of being angry at themselves and their hidden desire to keep eyeballing my junk. Life eventually went along, and these days, thanks to the magic of Facebook, I can find some of those original haters and see that the majority didn't turn out to be too much in later years. My vengeance was simply the passage of time. I still have to remind myself to let go of so much of the hurt in the past, because, like so many others that share my traits, I ended up stronger, smarter and street-savvy than those that worked against my very existence back in the early years.

These days, my monobrow isn't as pronounced, most likely from my constant pulling of the hair. Enough of it remains as a reminder of dark times, but also as something that makes me a bit more unique. As age and my Russian heritage has set in, the eyebrow hair has become wild, seeming in defiance of those younger years. Every now and then one of them gets so long it scratches at my eye in a breeze. I will sometimes yank out the offending brow hair, but more often than not I will carefully trim them instead. I don't want to revisit those days of unnecessary mutilation anymore.

Since I am in no condition to be doing one of those "It Gets Better" videos (hell, one look at me and everyone would think "better" looks pretty damn awful), much less take a photo of myself in a purple shirt, a condensed version of my early life in text format will hafta do.

I was relentlessly harassed through most, if not all of my K-12 years. Oftentimes it was with a twist, since I was an "early bloomer" who grew sooner and matured (read: body and facial hair, pubes, low voice, etc) earlier, a great deal of the teasing of my early years seemed to come from the scrawny punks and decidedly baby-faced bullies who were always trying to see what I "got." Rarely did I fight back, because in just about every instance where I did, it was me who got sent to the principal's office, got the detention, or even the retaliatory slap or punch from the teacher. These kids were playing the victim in every case, the teachers would side with the bad actors and I would have no advocates. The accusations of lying, the complicit actions of a few (but not all, I had my "crew" as well) teachers and generally miserable primary school life showed up in my at-best average performance.

Things did improve somewhat during grades 10, 11, and 12, but not after a run-in with the phys-ed teacher, who wanted someone of my size to help with the football and wrestling teams. But he also played that "testing" card and would not stop the bullying that would be a nearly daily occurrence. I was strong, yes. Very, in fact, but completely uncoordinated with it. Rather than help me, the miserable gym experience, the gay taunting, attacks and such made me refuse to help the school in that way. Once that was in place (I actually got my physical stuff done at a local community center since it was required), a few of the teachers (who also doubled as various coaches) that once had my back turned on me. Science, my top subject, became a nightmare. The algebra teacher/soccer/T&F coach let me fail miserably. I toughed this out for the next few years, knowing I'd be free forever from the cliques, claques, bullies, malcontents and schadenfreude of the school years. And I'd have my comeuppance.

I went on to tech school right after high school, to work toward an electronic engineering degree and to eventually get into the electronics field as my full-time employment. I repaired cars on the side during this time, and also worked in a TV repair shop. I was very adept in electronics before I even set foot in the schools. However, there was that little problem of math that haunted me from my early years, and scared me shitless. However, I had two things going for me. I had a teacher (as well as new friends) that would give me a boost, and, more importantly, I had a means to relate the abstract concepts of math with the solid knowledge I gained entirely on my own in the many years prior. What happened then still freaks me out to this day. In a span of less than a week, everything not only made perfect sense, but I blew past everyone else taking the math classes as well. How? I finally could relate to the concepts, the numbers, and, most importantly, I was in an environment where it was fostered and encouraged. I had done a complete 180 from my previous years. Instead of being the bullied, taunted and forgotten student, I became the top dog in every sense throughout my training years. I never let this go to my head, in fact, I did all I could to help those around me, and our class went on to become the one with the highest graduation rate of any previous! I aced my exams, I got the highest score in the FCC General Class radiotelephone (with ship radar endorsements! lol) out of the classes and also tested perfect (or very close to) in other technical classifications. During a recruitment drive by various employers I landed a spot with Westinghouse Electronic Systems. Of all the positions, the one for Calibration Technician was the one with the highest requirements, and was sought by most of us who toured the facilities. Guess who landed that spot, way back in '82? And to top it off, when there were some openings in our department later on, I helped get some of my friends from that time a place in our lab. Most of us are still in that same place to this day.

Outside of all this newfound confidence, I managed to catch a glimpse into the lives of a few of those who made my life hell. Most of them had miserable lives once outside of school. Their bullying had no place or no effect in the real world, their power was stripped, and they had to make due with life as it was to be. A few had menial labor jobs, a couple went to prison when they thought they could use their old tactics outside the playground, the hallways and the classrooms. And a couple, well, apologized. I don't tend to carry grudges. I didn't need to.

I won.

The other day I was sitting in the waiting room of my physical therapist. For some reason I mixed up the time, and arrived about 45 minutes early. No biggie. There was a Car and Driver magazine on the table to keep me company. Then there was a baby crying, coming from one of the areas. Great. Not tool long afterward, a woman came out, carrying the baby in a bassinet/car seat thing. I figured it would be time for some silence. She then looked at me and said "I know you", to which I said, "You do?" "Yep, you're Phil. I used to live up the street from you." There was this vague familiarity, but I could not place a name to the face. She said her name is Myra. It was then a huge OMG moment with all the hugs and howareyas. The kicker is, I had not seen Myra since before high school. We were friends back then, since we had gone to elementary and middle school together and rode the same bus. Her family moved a short distance but that put her in a different high school.

I was completely floored that she recognized me. I said that I had less gray in the beard back then. And lots more hair. Well, okay, one was a lie. Still, I don't look very much like I did as a kid for the most part. Some folk do have that uncanny knack for faces and names, something that eludes me. As my brain dusted off and fired up some decades-old memory banks, I recognized her as well (despite the time that passed), and we had a good time talking. She is now a grandmother, living only a short distance from where I used to live. She had married a man that also went to the same schools as she did, he was the one who was at the place having therapy done for a really messed up hand and arm. We said our goodbyes and I had one of those incredulous grins that turn up in such circumstances which lasted me for the rest of the day.

Here was a perfect demonstration of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Despite all the years, all the moving, etc, two people who have not seen each other in nearly 35 years will cross paths and will reconnect, even for an instant. Life is cool like that sometimes.