#411 Card Bored

So I’m driving along the other day and I notice something odd on the street corner. For a minute, I think the elections are still on and the guy I’m watching is a candidate of some sort. Then I think, this must be some new and improved homeless guy, that he’s simply taken cardboard signs to a whole new level. Then my ancient brain, after cycling through all the familiar habitual alternatives, finally opens up enough to accept the one thing it’s most often not prepared to accept these days, the new. And different. One of the many perquisites of age is thinking you’ve seen it all. That you’ve got the whole world figured out and that nothing can surprise you. Not in this here world. The 21st century is the century of surprises, from Karl Rove finally kicking Rumsfeld to the curb to Ashley Simpson singing her own songs. So these guys on the corner were something new, proactive billboards. Moving, eye-catching, shouting, mobile, in-your-face billboards. They were holding up human-sized signs that just covered them enough so you didn’t have to make eye contact and personally connect with them and just small enough so they could hold them all day long. The signs appeared to be made out of that plastic corrugated stuff that is impervious to weather. Which was good. Except it was pretty windy and the signs were kind of acting like sails. The one guy I saw was chasing his in circles. Talk about trying a new tack to get your message out. I felt sorry for these folks. It was wet and windy and the rain was washing sideways in horizontal sheets. I mean, at least the hobos have a choice when the weather’s not fit for man nor beast. These poor people had to put on full raingear, hoods, boots and gloves and stand out in a Northwest November gale.
So being the ignorant guy that I am, I have to speculate about how they came to this extremity. Did they answer an ad? “Like working in the great outdoors? Tired of impersonal dehumanizing work flipping tacos? Able to hold things upright? Call 555-jobs-now. We’ll have you back on the street in no time.” And how thorough is the application process? Can you stand? Can you hold? Can you wave something? Do you have any political, religious, or psychological position to prevent you from looking like an idiot? And what’s the chances of career advancement? I mean, what do you put on your resume? Go getter, company person, looking to advance in a career of marketing and display. Can wave, wiggle, jump and appear enthusiastic in the worst weather. Available for political campaigns, one-day sales, store closings, and special, one-time-only, mattress inventory reduction events. Miming services for no additional charge.
America, ya gotta love it.

#409 Cringe

I recently had my first physical in about 22 years. It’s fun going in and having the nurses and staff look at you like you just fell off another planet just because you haven’t been in for every ache, pain, and sniffle. It’s not that I don’t have those things, it’s just that I figure doctors have more important things to do than hold my hand while my immune system does its stuff. Cause at the root of it all, I figure my immune system is kind of like the rest of my body. With adequate training, it will perform at optimum levels. They offered me two shots while I was there, a tetanus shot and a flu shot. I took them up on the tetanus shot since I live in an area that has horses and since my thin skin means I seem to get any number of cuts, nicks and scratches these days. Since I talk a lot in my profession, Tetanus is a real deal-breaker, lockjaw makes it tough to enunciate. I skipped the flu shot cause, what the hell, they have no idea what flu is really gonna hit this year and the one everybody’s afraid of, the pandemic bird flu, they have no shot for anyway. I figure if I keep my immune system fighting off the little crap on its own maybe when the big superbug comes down the line I’ll have half a chance. Lifting hundred pound weights may not help you clean and jerk a thousand pound piano but if one falls on you, you can at least hold if off you long enough to get out of the way. So after I get the tetanus shot they hand me an information sheet on the vaccine. It tells me what I should know about the vaccine, and what I should look for in the way of allergic reactions. Now, no offense to my medical office staff, but the principle of informed decision means I should have actually been given this handout before I agreed to take the vaccine. There was this great line in the handout that kind of summed the whole thing up. It said “a person who gets these diseases is much more likely to have severe complications than a person who gets the vaccine.” Well, yeah. A person who gets in a head-on car collision is more likely to suffer severe injury that the person who burns his hands over candles so he can’t drive. But I’m not volunteering for the Gordon Liddy treatment. It’s all about the chances of you getting the disease or not, ever, as opposed to definitely taking the vaccine and having a reaction. .03 people get a reaction to the vaccine. Reaction for people who never take the vaccine is .00. The final line on the handout kind of chilled me to the bone. Or maybe it was just the backless smock they had me put on. It said “In the event that you or your child have a serious reaction to the vaccine, a federal program has been created to help pay for the care of those who have been harmed.” Hmm. Someone actually determined there was need enough to create a costly bureaucratic federal program in a nation with no universal health care. Sounds perfectly safe to me.
America, ya gotta love it.

#408 Caplets Crunch

Previously I talked about the odd product recall of a generic brand of acetaminophen. Seems bits of metal were found in a number of tablets. The number was small, only 200 tablets in a grand total of 70 million run through a metal detector, but still. I’m sure I’d rather not be that point 00007 percent that broke my crown when I was trying to cure a headache—even worse if I was taking the drug for a toothache to begin with. Some unanswered questions linger. You may remember the metal fragments found in the pills ranged from microdot size to pieces of wire a third of an inch long. So first, how did the metal get into the pills? Is there a big vat of dried drug that’s all caked up and ready for a crusher before it gets shaped into a pill? Did someone accidentally dump in a box of paper clips? If so, what were office supplies doing in a clean drug room? Presumably, the drugs that you and I ingest are not just lying around picking up microbes. It’s not like we cook our acetaminophen before eating. If submarine sandwich workers have to plastic glove their hands I’m thinking drug workers need to have the whole white outfit regalia. So again, from whence cometh the metal? Did one of the workers have an orthodontia problem? Just got fitted out in a Nerdstein 2000 around-the-head mega-retainer, elastic strap breaks, mouth metal flies out, there go 200 pills? Maybe. Maybe the metal came from the pill-making machine itself. Some of them have the pressure of an industrial vise. Maybe something broke loose, a washer or screw perhaps—or maybe one of its nuts got in the vise. The larger question to me is: Had this sort of thing happened before? Because what really made me wonder was when they said they had run over 70 million tablets through a metal detector. Just happened to have a metal detector lying around did they? Standard issue in a drug manufacturing plant? Or are industrial mishaps common there? Well, guess what, this same company has had problems before. Since 1993, according to FDA records, Perrigo Company has had at least 32 other product recalls in all its plants. The company wasn’t exactly sure where the current heavy metal pills came from. Maybe their Iron Butterfly plant in Mexico. Or their Metallica plant in China. Definitely not their Jethro Tull plant in the United Kingdom. Still, it’s apparent the company is not at the tippy-top of safety records. I’m thinking they need either better worker supervision, or a search-before-entering program at least as efficient as the airlines or rock concerts. They seem to already have the metal detectors. Maybe they could wand their employees as well. Because just last May they recalled 59,000 drug bottles contaminated with acrylic mirror particles. Yep, mirror. I don’t know about you, but the idea of someone powdering her nose while she makes my pain pills is enough to give me a head ache.
America, ya gotta love it.