Decades

Yeah, while Vietnam was a pretty hot zone and pretty screwed up from the beginning, Berlin was a cold war zone, with daily incidents at the wall. We had free access to the East and our visible intelligence officers cruised around in green military vehicles.

One time a car was coming through the checkpoint back to the West when the gate crashed down on the roof.  Just another harassing tactic.  The next day a Russian intelligence car was rerouted down a one-way street dead end, where a skunk was tossed into the engine while the driver was trying to turn around.  Retribution.

Have you ever seen a heavy tracked vehicle make a turn at 30 mph?  Tanks turn by putting the brakes on the inner track while speeding up the outer track.  At speed the outer track digs into the soil as it’s moving sideways and forward at the same time (commonly known as slip-skid), and the track throws up a lot of dirt.  The dirt is scraped off the surface onto the track, the gets thrown off as the track hits the driver gear at the rear.  Guys would do this in a tank range where there were Soviet watch towers 30′ away – the object was to see how far they could throw the dirt over the wire fencing.

In August of 2019 our neighbors Vic and Sandy invited several couples over to share pizza on their newly-completed front patio.  Daunna and I joined Marc & Mimi, and Swapnil & Gagan in celebrating. The last slide shows Gagan offering his approval!

Do not ever forget to log off a shared terminal; not doing could have terminal consquences
I recently had a discussion with a friend about working in an office in the 1980s. I recalled an experience in 1983 when our word processors were shared IBM terminals.  

I was writing a fairly detailed summary of how our field support offices would be brought up to speed with docs and training before the release of the next software release for our computerized PABX product.  I was called away for a moment, then returned and completed the report, saved the file, then sent to the noisy shared teletype printer.  Our admin then picked up the printout, made copies, and distributed it to the project team and several layers of management. These were the days before email, you see.

The next morning my boss called me in and asked how I dared mention that I deserved a 10% raise, which astonished me.  He pointed to that phrase, which had been tacked on to the end of some bullet points.  Apparently a co-worker stopped by the workstation and saw my report, then innocently added the comment.  I had been royally screwed.  The lesson learned was  to always save and log off when you step away from a workstation, even for a moment to answer somebody’s question.  Ahhh, the joys of early Silicon Valley.

California boy guiding tour bus of Germans through Berlin
In the 1990s I worked for an outfit that had developed a reasonably inexpensive way to to transmit voice and data over fiber optic cables.  One of the investors was Deutsche Telekom and we had an office in Bonn.  

Part of my job was to help verify that installation and programming techniques were as simple as possible, so I spent a lot of time in Bonn, and later on projects near Berlin.

Then Ericsson bought our firm and at one point a group of Swedes that was visiting Bonn wanted to check out the Berlin project.  We all flew into Berlin and somehow I was the designated driver.  As part of the visit the Swedes wanted to take a tour of Berlin, so I drove our minibus around and pointed out all the sights.  There were several guys from Bonn in our group but they had never been to Berlin. At one point the Swedish leader just burst out laughing, saying that this is a story for the ages:  An American from San Francisco guiding a bus of Germans and Swedes through the capitol of Germany, without a map.

Sometimes simply relocating elsewhere has amusing consequences
Shortly after moving from the San Francisco Peninsula to Bloomington, Indiana, I needed to set up refills for some prescriptions.

I made an appointment with a local doctor’s office and was checking in with his assistant.

She was facing down, looking over my forms, asking me questions and filling in my info. It was difficult to understand her because of other noises in the area.

At one point it sounded like this:

“And your (mumble) dressed?”

To which I plucked at my shirt and exclaimed, “I sure hope so!”

The other clerk, who understood my distress, said in a slow clear voice, “She was asking you for your address.”

Clearly the mistake was mine – out West we say ADD-ress but here the accent is on the second syllable – uh-DRESS, which sounded to me as if she were asking, “And you are dressed?”

Never follow a set routine
Our neighborhood is served by a community mailbox where all of our mailboxes are contained in one large box on a pedestal where the mail carrier delivers our mail.

Since most snail mail is junk mail, I normally walk up there twice a week: Wednesdays and Saturdays. Most of our neighbors know my routine.

Neighbor George F. likes to kid me about my peculiar habit, and today was no exception as he pulled his car over when he saw me walking our dog.

“Today’s Wednesday so I s’pose you’ve picked up your mail, huh?”

“No actually, this week it’s Thursday because there was no delivery on Monday .”

You can never pull a fast one on a 1st Sergeant – they will eventually catch on
I was in the Army in the mid-60s, stationed in Berlin as a telephone repairman / switchboard operator. Our outfit was a Signal company, which included any job pertaining to communications – telephone, radio, microwave, crypto, whatever.

Our sergeants and officers were not the the strict gung-ho types you see in war movies or accounts of life in the Infantry. We bunked three to a room. Each of us had a tall closet and a footlocker, where all our worldly possessions were kept.

Every Saturday morning we peons headed to a movie theater for a couple of hours of training in some obscure military course. During that time the outfit’s sergeants would go room to room and inspect our gear and the general cleanliness of our quarters. The basic idea was that nobody’s perfect, so each room would get a demerit for one very minor infraction or another (such as one sock was gray from too many washings). You get the idea.

At one point I found a fake dog poop in a store downtown and I placed it in a corner behind a couple of footlockers. There it remained for months – so long that I’d forgotten about it…until one day the list of infractions that was posted named our room with the following: “Dust on fake dog poop in corner.” The captain knew he’d been had as the layer of dust on it must have been there for a long time and none of the previous inspectors had noticed it. His note of infraction was priceless. And he knew exactly who to discipline over it!

Verse by Fiona

Fiona created an amusing verse after an afternoon of play ended by a drizzle
One afternoon in 1993 or 94, I took our daughter Fiona to Foothills Park above Palo Alto. It’s great for enjoying a picnic, hiking the trails, or playing catch.

On this occasion, we were wrapping up our visit just as a light rain began to fall. A car pulled up next to us with several youngsters, who looked ready for fun. At that point, Fifi came up with this short verse to describe what would probably happen after we left.

When they get out
They’ll jump back in
And ZOOM they’ll be off!

Beware bosses bearing gifts!

Back in the mid-1980s I had a boss who knew that I liked to spice up soups with Tabasco sauce. One day he gave me a new bottle of Dave’s Insanity.

Shortly thereafter, I was making a lentil soup and decided to set a couple of cups aside, ~

then added to that two-cup portion a drop – just ONE teeny tiny .25mg drop – and did I regret it!

Had to ditch that portion of soup and took the bottle to the Hazardous Waste disposal center to prevent my ever-curious infant daughters from accidentally getting a taste from just touching the bottle.

Getting together with neighbors
Daunna and I joined two other couples for burgers, dogs, watermelon, corn on the cob.

As we were eating I was astounded to notice that the other five were “harmonica” corn eaters (side to side),

while I was a “rotator” (roll the cob and eat around the circumference in columns). Of course I was roundly hit with all sorts of barbs and aspersions on my ancestry. I pointed out that my method left fewer missed kernels.

Nobody was impressed.

Take the road less traveled but choose your route wisely
One afternoon as I varied my route from work at IBM, taking a different road to my motel, I came upon a T intersection, with my road ending at the cross street.  On approach, one lane became two:  One for turning left, the other, right.

In front of me was a car straddling both lanes, making it impossible for me or several other cars behind me to make a free left turn on the red light.  The driver behind me began to honk his horn (or “hoot his hooter” in local vernacular).

 This upset the driver in front of me and he and his passenger got out of their car and headed right for me, thinking I was the one responsible for honking.  I quickly rolled up my window and locked the door, but I needn’t have worried as four boys in the car behind me piled out shouting some rather colorful language and were ready to fight.

The lads from the lane-straddling car quickly revised their plans and strategically withdrew to their own car and burned rubber getting out of there.

After the excitement, I made my left turn and drove to my motel, noting to myself to avoid this route in the future.