Category: Life with Pratts

Blog @ 33⅓

Today is this blog’s 15th anniversary. This month is also the 50th anniversary of starting my high school job. 50/15=3.33 — a third of what I consider my adult life or, by shifting the decimal point, the speed of a rotating LP, which seems fitting. My job was in this building, which was originally a W.T. Grants store.

For $1.60/hour, I washed dishes at the Bradford House restaurant, at the far end of the store, where the white posts are. I worked very, very hard, and how well I remember the logo and pattern that’s on these cups and saucers.

My junior year of high school I worked up to 25 hours/week washing dishes. Note the restaurant’s hours on this old ad.

Finishing a 5-10 PM shift on Fridays, there were many Saturdays I returned to work at 8 AM and worked fourteen hours. I’m sure it wasn’t legal for a 16-year-old kid to work a 14-hour day, but I was desperate for the money.

At end of my junior year, a kid who worked part-time as a cook graduated. He left for Canada, where he could be certain of avoiding the draft by attending McGill University. I was given his job, along with a raise to… wait for it… $1.85/hour. The 14-hour Saturdays ended, and from the start of that summer, through the start of the following summer, I filled the plates at the restaurant, rather than wash them.

Being a short-order cook was challenging, but it was a lot of fun, and I held similar jobs in college. After high school graduation, I quit the Bradford House when I heard about a summer job working for the town’s school system for $3/hour. The exact same pay I would earn four years later at the radio station.

A Face Too Good For Radio

This video was recommended to me by YouTube from one of my subscriptions.

I gasped, even before playing it. The woman on the record jacket cover could be a twin for the woman I worked with when I was a voice on the radio, many years ago. I was the news guy during her afternoon shift. We used to indulge the sort of on-air playful banter that became more common later in the business.

Why would such a stunningly beautiful woman choose to work in radio, rather than being seen on TV? Because she was married, and being as smart and strong-willed as she was beautiful, she didn’t want to be objectified by men, to use a current expression.

There’s No App For That

When my father was in an assisted living facility, I was taking care of his house during my many frequent trips to Phoenix. His answering machine was constantly getting automated messages from CVS, saying he had prescriptions ready for pickup.

I’m now having the same problem with my cellphone. There is no option in the CVS app to stop the calls, let alone turn off automatic refills. So I resorted to Facebook.

So an old-fashioned phone call is what it’s going to take? I’ll give it a try on Monday.

Paying to House Watch

With another $119 having gone to Amazon to renew Prime, I felt justified in sampling a TV series I’ve never watched, that my subscription makes available for streaming. I think of “House” as a recent show, but it started a couple of years before this blog, which is coming up on its 15th anniversary.

The series is old enough that it was written to a formula that isn’t ideal for binge-watching. The sequence of events is essentially repeated in each episode. “Okay, here’s where they try the wrong thing and it causes a heart attack or seizure,” etc. So, like my experience watching “The Walking Dead,” I was losing interest at the start of the second season. Then I saw this scene in S2:E3.

My mother lived for seven years after surviving a deadly Aspergillus fungal infection in her lung, by undergoing an extremely difficult course of Amphotericin treatments. Two of my sisters — one an MD, the other an RN — installed the central line themselves, after brushing aside the attending physician and nurse. The drug’s side effects are so awful it deserves to be called “amphoterrible.”

The impossibly intertwined personal lives of the “House” characters is typical TV soap opera writing. But physicians breaking into patients’ homes to find clues to the cause of their illnesses, and never getting caught during or afterwards? Ludicrous! But… hmm… come to think of it, there were times at work when the quickest way to fix a problem was to open a VPN tunnel to a hospital without prior permission, and use RDP to access a system console with administrative privileges. (Note: This is the method cyber criminals prefer to introduce ransomware.) Okay, so the idea isn’t so ludicrous. Maybe the breaking-and-entering plot device is resolved later in the series.

As expected, Hugh Laurie is fun to watch. I’m sure he made a lot more money playing Gregory House than he did appearing with Rowan Atkinson on “Blackadder”…

… or when he teamed up with Stephen Fry. This is about as British as British comedy gets!

Black Friday the 13th

Dealing with a nightmare situation resulting from having the deck demolished, in preparation for replacement. The work is now on hold, pending review by the town’s building inspector. When can he get here? No idea. I’ll try to cheer myself up by looking at this delightful Jack Davis illustration.

Click to enlarge

Follow-up: After crawling around in a small and very dirty space, all is well once again. The inspector is still required, but for a routine reason.