Equivalences
October 5, 2009 in Blogs
I thought I had mentioned but cannot now find a note with reference to my recent notion of a scale for explaining life, which I call the Nine Five Equivalent, abbreviated 95e. In essence, it is determined by taking the time an individual ordinarily reports to work, calling it effectively nine in the morning, and then referencing all other times by their relationship to this.
I mention it now because I had car trouble–last night the alternator died on the car on which we rely for our own transportation. I spotted the problem in time to cancel any evening travels and managed to drive to the garage early this morning so they could repair it. That means that I was out of bed around eight thirty. For someone on a nine-to-five schedule, that’s probably sleeping in a bit. I, though, am on a three-to-eleven schedule, dictated by my wife’s employer. Eight is seven hours before three, and thus I was up at 95e two-thirty in the morning. I spent the worst part of the day falling asleep over a book and several cups of coffee in a diner that has a no sleepers policy, and settled the bills in the early afternoon.
Under the heading of what else could go wrong, I decided that since I was passing the inspection station on my way home, I would stop and ask how I get the car reinspected if I lost the paper that said for what it failed originally. They were very helpful, having no one waiting, and said that they could print a copy from the central computer and bring me through right away. Although it had failed for bad tires, apparently they had to drive it through the inspection line, turning it off, starting it, turning it off, starting it, turning it off, starting it, as it moved to the end, where they turned it off. When I went to drive away, there was nothing left of the battery to start it yet once more.
Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I have Triple A, so I called them. I know that in our part of the world it can take as much as ninety minutes to get emergency road service, because the approved service stations are some distance away and are often busy. However, it was barely ten minutes before a vehicle, a large flatbed, arrived, and I thought I would be headed home. Wrong again. It seems that this particular truck was passing through the area and got a call from his dispatcher to check on me, but he had no jumper cables and no jumper pack–the tow truck could not give me a jump. I could wait for him to drive back to his base, probably half an hour away, and return with cables, or for someone else to get to me, or I could let him tow me wherever I wanted to go.
On reflection, I had him tow me the mile or two back to the garage that had done the repair. They found my story of the inspection station running down the battery entertaining, and set about charging the battery for most of an hour while I sat this time on a bench in the sun.
It drove home fine, and the gauges and lights all looked good, but as for me I wandered about a bit trying to get oriented and finally collapsed for a nap in the nine-five equivalent of about noon to three. I am now attempting to get up to speed on some of what I missed in this disrupted day.
I hope you found it entertaining.
I did have the foresight to upload the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article before I left for the garage, although I am only this evening announcing it (you should subscribe if you want to be notified, but I have no idea how that works). This was an answer to Primer Question 1: the disappearing Abe, treatment of one particular doppelganger in the cult-popular film. It remains to be seen how the readers will respond to these question-and-answer articles, but I had been planning to do a third viewing of the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score so I could continue the analysis, and the car trouble disrupted those plans as well.
So at this point I think I’m pushing most of Monday into Tuesday and trying to get back to some semblance of sanity around here.
–M. J. Young