Harrumph!

I’m a notorious TV disdainer. That’s odd for a boomer who grew up, enjoyed and benefited mightily from the box. I’ve aged to much rather do a cryptic puzzle, read a book or use the net.

I’m the least TV-centric in the family. Yet, I do like a few series that the family watches — Treme, Downton Abbey, and Mad Men. It’s the latter that had me reminiscing and projecting.

I’m a child who followed the WWII generation, not one of them. I did work with and know those guys (almost all men) and their younger siblings/nephews in the 1970s New York City.

I worked trade and business magazines in the 3-martini-lunch era. In fact, one publisher always ordered the same drink, “A triple Bombay martini, hold the olives and hold the vermouth.” It was all three martinis in one, very engineering efficient and thus appropriate for a construction mag.

Drunken afternoons were less of a shock to me as the dissolute lives of those magic creatures the space salesmen. The very term space salesman seems mythological if not metaphysical. Selling space…ooooo. The mundanity of actually pitching ads for print media does not rise to the phrase.

I knew a lot of these guys, men whose work brought in my salary. They often shocked me with the likes of their casual comparisons of sexual conquests of women customers, sales reps, waitresses and even friends’ wives.

However, I also got a few life lessons that have rooted.

I certainly recall the best space salesman I knew at Construction Equipment magazine. I’m comfortable using his name, Larry Huckle. He was one of the wholesome guys. He was also the company’s best salesman year upon year. That was particularly odd as he had Texas and the Southwest, virtually devoid of equipment manufacturers. He skunked the other reps time after time.

He and I were at a bar at the mag’s sales meeting in Boca Raton one time. As a former newspaper reporter, I just had to ask him how he did it. I had grilled the other editors and they claimed not to know. Larry was candid and had no fear of giving up his secret. He said, “I know one thing the other guys don’t. When you’ve made your sale, shut up.”

Sure enough, later on sales calls with various ad guys, I’d see them goof up a sure deal again and again by talking about themselves, making inane talk about the customer or otherwise souring a deal in the bag.

I found as a single guy that Larry’s advice was as good for someone seeking companionship as well. That’s another sale.

Likewise, I came to appreciate a silly rejoinder from another space salesman. He’d inveritably come back to the rhetorical, “How ya doing?” with “Any day I’m not pushing up daisies is a good day.”

That certainly falls in the class of painfully obvious. Yet, the longer I live, the more emotional, intellectually and physical troubles that visit me, the more meaningful and sensible that seems. It’s certainly better than the meaningless, “Fine.” And it inspires introspection.

A third space salesman had another iterative response when anyone did the drama-queen whine about a birthday. To one who complained about marking another year older, he’d always say, “Consider the alternative.” Sure enough, death would remove any joy or even observance of a birthday.

Space salesmen, as well as engineers and other stereotypical literal sorts can pluck all the feathers from our social conventions. After all, they have jobs to do that yield to metrics. To those other of us who like to think that everything is fungible, malleable, such brutal realism can only be good.

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A lot of years ago when I was the editor of a grocery magazine, I wrote a feature about throwaway products. By today’s standards, it would surely fall into a rant.

The point was that our readers made a lot of money on items like disposable razors. These non-foods or HABA (health and beauty aids) as supermarket and convenience store folk call them are where the margins are. Overall, a grocery may average a profit margin of under 5%. Contrast that to, say, software companies that may have margins of 45% to 95%. Profits on toiletries are among the highest in the stores.

So when use-and-toss products like razors, condoms and such sell, store owners do little capitalist dances.

My concentration at the time, convenience stores, even measure inventory turn differently. They think in terms of square inches and not square feet. Turns per inch per month determine what they stock, which is why you likely won’t find your favorite brand of this or that unless it’s among the most popular.

This is also one of the reasons they put certain small, high-margin movers on the counter by the cash register. For those, they get paid twice. As impulse purchases at POS (point of sale), these items give great returns. Moreover, manufacturers want that space and turn level as well. For that, they pay an RDA (retail display allowance), which to many not in the biz would seem like a bribe to have the best position.

By the bye, when I was covering grocery, the best seller and highest turn per inch per month in convenience stores was rolling papers. When you gotta have ‘em…

As so many posts here, this circles back to bicycles.

In my article decades ago, I waxed richly on my grandfather’s straight razor, as well as his long marriage. He was not into disposable anything if he could help it. Years later, I had a huge shock in the early days of PCs when my $1,300 24-pin dot-matrix printer malfunctioned. A Toshiba repair shop guy said sure he could fix it, but he noted that it was the chip welded into the motherboard. That would cost $900 to $1,000 to replace. A newer, much quieter, more capable and reliable model sold for about $500. It was the old almost-working-paperweight cliché. With regret at being wasteful and trapped, I handed it to a tech training school to fix or cannibalize for parts.

So this week, I found myself locked into the more fragile, higher tech replacement routine, this time for bike pedals and cleats.

I’ve used Shimano SPD cleats and pedals for eight or nine years on my road bike. The cleats were small, ugly, steel and damned tough.

A week and a half ago, one of my pedals came apart, irreparably, on a ride. The spindle and pedal separated. I managed to keep squeezing my shoe toward the crank to keep putting the pedal in play for the 10 miles home. Going up the steep hills was, shall I write, exciting.

Those pedals are so 20th Century. Shimano, among the others, has moved on. The bike shop didn’t have the old style, but I was able to order the newer version from the cycling cyclops Nashbar/Performance/Bikes Direct. (Pic note: I claim fair use from a cropped image from the box to show non-cyclists what a pedal looks like today.)

Modernity brings:

• Easier clip into the pedal
• Quick kick out as needed
• Slightly lighter pedals and cleats
• More comfortable, less noisy walking on the cleats (I tend to bring light mocs and swap out for beer bars)
• Plastic pedal body covers
• Plastic cleats

The instructions make it plain that I’ll be replacing the cleats and covers. It may only be once a year or two for the cleats, but like any good disposable product, new, improved, better means also costlier.

I bought spare cleats when I got a new pair of road-bike shoes that did not come with SPD ones. Those cost me $11. The list on the SL style models is around $30. A discount is about to $25, plus shipping or full price at a bike shop.  At every two years, replacement amortizes at about 4¢ a day, ride or not. In contrast, the much longer lasting old metal style might be in the range of 0.3¢ a day.

Those are still small beer in the world where people routinely buy a coffee for $2 or $3. On top of that, I estimate that I’ve put between 50,000 and 60,000 miles on that bike and that original set of Ultegra pedals. I don’t think anyone should say Shimano made a poor-quality product. I sure got my money out of the pedal that finally broke.

There is no metal equivalent of the new cleats. Were there to be one, it would surely damage the pedals with use — much more expensive replace than plastic cleats.

Here I am, again an alter kaker in a new world. Life in fact insists on going on, bringing me with it.

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Unlike many bar stool warmers, even into a second drink or beyond, I don’t have a lot of brilliant advice.  There is one love-related tidbit from my early 20s that still seems relevant.

Last week, speaking with a female neighbor outside, that arose again. She was lamenting that she couldn’t click long-term with a great guy. She just breached 40 and knows there are fewer gems free in the muck of the mine. She discussed a recent effort to connect to a match from e-Harmony, allegedly compatible interests, bright enough, and nice looking. She said she sent him off to think again with the candid appraisal that his ego and vanity were too well developed.

Hence that personal historical moment.

In my early 20s, I was a single Manhattanite working at a huge trade-magazine publisher across 42nd Street from the Daily News building. We were in what passed for bar and party central in NYC. After the married commuted largely by rail to NJ or CT, we were left to patrols of the heart.

For many of my co-workers, those patrols were frustrating and sad. They’d chat objects of desire up and still return home solo.

Quite a few guys asked me, usually one on one, what was up. They’d note that I always had several women I, as we of Southern backgrounds are wont to say, kept company with. The implication was that I wasn’t rich or 7 feet tall or any of those clichés of evening  love. How was it that I connected and they didn’t, and moreover, how was it that I kept my women instead  of having a one to three-night relationship?

That one was easy…at least for me. My flash was wisdom was simply that I listened to a woman.

Invariably the guy would interrupt to state strongly that he too listened to women and that couldn’t be it. Yet, I’d seen him in attempted action and knew he didn’t. As with my neighbor, women found that he talked about himself and heard only responses that related to himself talking about himself. There’s a huge difference between acknowledging affirmative conversational reactions and listening.

I could ask the guy what he knew about this woman or that. He might know where she went to college or high school, but little else. Pow! He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t left openings for her to swap revelations. He did not value what she had experienced, what she felt, what was important to her, what pleased her, what made her angry. He didn’t know squat about her.

I suppose if I had been savvy or driven by greed instead of the joy of earning a living writing and photographing, I would have started a matchmaking business. I knew something they didn’t.

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Without a doubt, the meanest teacher I ever had I associate with cursive writing. This came to mind today with yet another tale of a school system dropping penmanship. This time it is Indiana’s…and statewide.

Instead, they want kids to learn keyboard skills. It’s not that any one of them has the digital strength to operate a manual or even an electric typewriter. They almost certainly won’t have to. Squishy brains with vague knowledge shards can push low-resistance computer keys though.

For the gaggle who think “I wasn’t even born then” is any excuse for ignorance and incompetence, not  being able  to write cursive, connected characters easily must certainly seem trivial. Both because of poor manners as well as inability, many may well have never written a thank-you note, even to Granny. If they have to add to a grocery list or put their names on a pop quiz, they can use puerile block letters.

Now instead of feeling like the replacement to my mother’s generation, I could move it farther back. My wife’s grandmother spoke of growing up before electricity, before hardly anyone owned an automobile, before radio and on and on.

While I don’t go back to quill and inkwell, I do span an impressive writing-technology history.

• I started with fat pencils and crayons suited for holding in fists.
• Stick pens, like BIC ones, had not been created. Instead, we used fountain pens with tubes of ink.
• Mechanical pencils were new and fairly expensive, treats to those of us who loved school.
• As all college-bound students, I had to take a year split between typing and shorthand. The former was on a manual typewriter, as electric models were also rare and very expensive, new technology. There were no computers, much less PCs.

In second grade, I started on the Palmer Method of cursive writing — cruelly boring stretches of sitting bolt upright, while the wicked Mrs. Carnes patrolled the room, hair in a tight bun, mouth in a tight purse, and ruler ever overlaying a forearm ready to strike. A moment’s inattention to the rows of circles on paper and WHACK!

She got me once. We sat alphabetically then and as a B, I was in the left row next to the windows. On a spring morning, a songbird sat on the maple next to our room. Distracted and pleased by its warble, I looked up, only to first hear and then feel the sudden and rough wooden slap on my hand. What an ass Mrs. Carnes was.

I don’t know whether it was some form of reaction to in inanity of drill or the nastiness of the teacher or just my bent and motor skills. I have never had a beautiful hand.

My mother and my paternal grandmother did. I have letters from each and admire the flowing, artistic words and individual characters. My grandmother even developed a non-Palmer lower-case f that doubled back on itself like some plump legume.

Now as an old guy, I’ve gone from time-sharing on mainframes to noisy, slow PCs to graphic workstations to time on minicomputers and on to laptops, fast desktops, and delightful toys like iPads. I’ve been through a variety of programming languages, punch cards, paper tape, ATEX type setting, a numbing range of pre-GUI operating systems, the internet before there was a web (and thus command-line gibberish to connect to distant servers), and both Windows and Mac-based PCs, both of which constantly crashed.

I’ve had all the old experiences and used the old skills. By necessity, I’ve had to learn how thing work, how to fix them, and how to be the alpha-geek both at work and for friends.

I Don’t Do My Phones’ Bidding

Yet, I have my set of fountain pens that I still use (five shown at top). I enjoy both the fluidity of writing with them and the beautiful output. Of my range of writing options, I tend to think  of it like more modes. I certainly did not stop walking when I learned to ride a bike or drive a car. I just have more options.

That vestigial range of experience may be why I have such disdain for those controlled by their electronics. So many do as bidden. The smartphone buzzes and they look at the screen and answer the call, regardless of who is there, what they are doing, seeing or hearing, or whether they should be watching the road. Pathetic.

In my house, when phones ring during dinner, they ring. My phone work for me, not the other way around. I carry my cellphone with me when I leave the house and have taught people to call the nominal land line (part of a bundle) first. That was hard for my cell-only sister.

I like having communication options, not requirements and limitations. I have no doubt many Americans and others will live and die without knowing how to write in cursive. They’ll feel comfortable and likely never consider writing connected letters as any sort of useful or necessary skill.

I think how they have limited themselves, lessened themselves, turned themselves old long before necessary. We become old when we stop learning and do not add to our skills.

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