Big Pair of Brass Ones

It’s 7:20 on a weekend.

I’m coming home with the kids – about to reach the house door when I hear it:  
Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt!

I’m like WTF is that?

I’m standing in the garage, the kids are coming up behind me and the noise is pulsing, but constant. Sounds like a machine that’s straining to do something and failing.

Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt!

I open the door thinking something’s wrong with the dishwasher, ’s the beater arm stuck?

No. Dishwasher’s off. Sounds coming from the right and-

-there’s water on the hall floor, right in front of the bathroom. Water flowing out of the bathroom.

Damn.

I scramble into the bathroom door and see a geyser of water shooting out of where the faucet’s cold water shutoff used to be. It’s spraying easily 7 feet into the air and the walls have water stains on them. There’s standing water on the bathroom’s tile floor and on my hardwood floor in the hallway.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

I fling open the vanity doors under the sink and go for the shutoff valves. I’m congratulating myself on having the valves installed a year ago (for reasons beyond my understanding all three bathrooms had no local shutoffs – I could not see that as a good thing long term, so we paid a plumber to put in shutoffs when he put in our new faucets).

Two cranks on the cold side’s valve and the water stops. We go from a thundering geyser to silence punctuated by steady dripping sounds.

Dripping down.

I go down the basement stairs and see water dripping through the ceiling tiles. The basement ceiling seems to be snakebit when it comes to water.  Remembering how I’d managed to spray water over them two years ago -  I’m like: here we go again.

I walk across the sponge-like carpeting and go into the finished half of the basement. Water is dripping through the light fixture nearest me and the floor is totally soaked.

I tell the kids to stay upstairs and I begin flinging the sodden mass of stuffed animals and pillows into the uncarpeted side of the basement.

Damn.

The downstairs ceiling is not merely wet, it’s soaked. The ceiling fixture is now an inverted fountain, and our laundry pile is now a sponge. I call E and ask her to come home with a shop vac (wondering for the thousandth time why I got rid of our shop vac when we moved), we’re going to have a long weekend cleaning this mess up.

As an afterthought, I call my insurance company. Their WATS line tells me they are closed, but I can report my claim online. I do. An hour later, they call me to tell me they are sending a water remediation expert to my house – that night.

I’m like Uh, okay. An hour later I have a guy in my house evaluating what I need to have done, and his team shows up with serious gear an go to town.  The remediation guy tells me they’re going to set up fans and dehumidifiers in my house. “It’s going to be loud. For days. It will also raise the temperature in your house by about 15 degrees. For days.”

Uh, okay.

The guy is right on both counts, we have big machines blaring in our house for four days. It's 80 degrees in the house and that's with windows wide open to pull in 60 degree air from the outside.

Bleah.

But enough of the what, let's cut to the why. The cold water shut off on my bathroom tap shot failed.

See it here in the picture?

Yeah, that handle is supposed to be attached. As in here:

Inside the cold water handle, still held in by its screw, are the valve and the valve nut. So the handle shot off because the valve somehow allowed water to get past it and propel it up and off the supply pipe.

I'm thinking I have two more faucets just like this. Was this just one bum faucet? or a failed design?

My faucet is the American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet. 8125 Series or 8124 Series (no way to tell at this point and the documentation is identical for both). I bought three of these at Home Depot about a year ago.

I get my paperwork and head over to a local plumber. He's set up a storefront so you can walk in and get expert advice and good parts.

I plunk down my documentation and the part and ask him what the heck?

The plumber says "Well, if you buy a Ford anywhere - its a Ford. But if you buy American Standard, it matters where you get it from. These box stores lean on their suppliers to lower their prices - and the suppliers like American Standard are shipping a lower cost version that isn't as good as their regular stuff."

I checked the American Standard website, looks like my faucet (American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet. 8125 Series or 8124 Series) is only available through Home Depot. According to the plumber, they are total garbage.

He's like, "I'm betting there are going to be an awful lot of lawsuits when these things start failing all over the place. You should save your parts and give them to your insurer. They might be able to get your money back through subrogation."

I'm half listening, half thinking about the two ticking time bombs I left sitting in my upstairs bathrooms.

The plumber digs into his parts cabinet and pulls out a valve with a brass valve nut. "That's the part you need. The valve is basic, but the valve nut is the key piece. Brass isn't always brass. You'll see this bright yellow stuff they call brass but it's just a piece of crap that's waiting to fail on you."

I blow $78 on four valves and four valve nuts, about what I paid for two of my three (useless) American Standard faucets from Home Depot. Swapping them out turns out to be easy enough, but (oh hilarity!) one of the old valve nuts cracks in half while I'm taking it out. Could have had a second flood in my house.

Nice.

So here's the offending object:

On the left is the valve and valve nut in the American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet (available from Home Depot). As you can see, the valve nut it is coated with calcium carbonate, which means the nut's been getting wet a lot. When the water evaporates, the calcium carbonate remains and crusts things up.

More important than that is the large crack you see in the middle of the valve nut.

For comparison, here's the valve and valve nut I bought to replace it:

New valve nut = good. Old valve nut = total piece of crap.

I don't have a engineering degree or industrial forensic tools, but my kitchen scale gave me a big indicator of how useless the original valve nut was.

Here's the original nut American Standard / Home Depot supplied:

It weighs 1 eighth of an ounce.

The new one I got from the plumber?

It weighs three times as much.

I'm insured, and we'll be re-doing the bathroom, but I'm out my $500 deductible and the major hassle of losing a bathroom for a few weeks while this all gets sorted.

Now, I know I was buying a faucet based on price, but I went with a known brand at a big store.

Which just goes to show you how utterly meaningless those pieces of information are when it comes to quality. Consumer reports doesn't do faucets (there are just too many models) and even if they did, the model numbers would turn over and rapidly make them obsolete.

I have to say I look at Home Depot merchandise very differently now. All the other parts on those faucets were none too solid - and when I see a boxed up toilet that says "Contains everything you need, no tools needed!" right below a giant "Sale!" sign - I'm thinking and what did you turkeys cheap out on to make this price, eh?

Like dad always said: Sometimes the cheapest is the most expensive.

The Standard That Works Best For Us

(via illusory tenant)

In July of 2008, a convicted sex offender named Dinkins was due to be released from prison. State law required him to register his future address with the state's sex offender registry ten days before his release. He did not do this and was charged with a class H felony as a result.

His argument at trial was that he did not know where he would be living. No relative agreed to take him in and he had no solid prospects. He had no address to register.

Nonsense, cried the state:

...Dinkins, like everyone, knows that he must sleep somewhere, and Wis. Stat. § 301.45(2)(a)5. and (e)4. merely requires incarcerated sex offenders to identify and report the address or nearest address of the place where they plan to sleep at least ten days prior to their release—even if the place is a park bench or similar on-the-street location. The State asserts that such a location is an “address” within the meaning of § 301.45(2)(a)5., citing several dictionary definitions of “address.”

That's the WI Appeals Court summarizing the Wisconsin Dept. of Justice's position in their published opinion.

So, according to the Wisconsin DOJ, a convicted sex offender can fulfil their address registration requirement by stating they live under a park bench.

Understand they are saying this because they want Dinkins to go to jail - but consider:

Dinkins fulfills this requirement by scrawling "I think I'll sleep under a bench on the 100 block of East Main St. Not sure which one, but there are quite a few on that block" on his form and he's good to go.

Let's set aside the fact that makes the sex offender registry a whole lot less effective and zero in on the point illusory tenant makes so well.

According to the state of Wisconsin, registering as a sex offender requires filling out the address form as best you can. There is no requirement that you show a utility bill for that address, a rental agreement for that address. There isn't even a requirement that it actually BE an address. Quoting the WI Chief Justice, "...park bench okay?" State says, "You betcha!"

But if any Wisconsin resident tries to vote in an election, they will be asked for a photo ID with an address that will be checked against valid addresses for their polling place.

Priorities, people.

It's all about priorities.

Chill You To the Bone

Just spent some time listening and watching the NYT's amazing audio site dovetailing the 9/11 recordings with transcripts and the plotted positions of the hijacked planes.

Incredible.

Calling Gableman Out

illusory tenant makes a great call - Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged judge-on-judge action. Not that Gableman really wants that, based on how badly he's managed his accusation. Interesting to see if his actions are scrutinized as much as say, a women who accuses a man of assault?

And there's also this hugely awesome call out

Gableman also told the police:

Justice Gableman said he has not told anyone about that incident and has not talked about that incident with anyone, including Justice Bradley, after it happened.

Then Justice Ziegler tells the police (page 69 of 70):

She then said, recently Justice Gableman told her about Justice Bradley hitting him on the back of the head, but she said she did not have any details of that and did not know when it happened. Justice Ziegler said she could not be specific on when Justice Gableman told her that happened.

Gableman's interview was on July 5, and Ziegler's was on July 18, so presumably Gableman told her about the September 18, 2009 (née 2008) incident after July 5. But Ziegler hadn't known anything about it.

Even though Justice Zeigler would have been present.

Followed by the even more awesome comment by gnarlytrombone:

"Not only present, but a witness: 'Justice Gableman said that he believed Justice Bradley was not joking because nobody was laughing at the time.' [page 64 of 70] i.e., they had to have seen it happen to choose not to laugh. Because it was serious. But not memorable."

Gableman's tying himself in a bit of a knot there, isn't he?

Bring on the investigation!

Two on Foreclosure

CJR's Ryan Chittum says about all that needs to be said about the current state of foreclosures in America, netting a fistfull of great articles- like this one from American Banker:

Several dozen documents reviewed by American Banker show that as recently as August some of the largest U.S. banks, including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., Ally Financial Inc., and OneWest Financial Inc., were essentially backdating paperwork necessary to support their right to foreclose.

Oooh! Tell us more, do!

And then there's Reuters, saying that the Federal Housing Finance Agency is suing the big banks.

The government will argue the banks, which pooled the mortgages and sold them as securities to investors, failed to perform due diligence required under securities law and missed evidence that borrowers' incomes were falsified or inflated...

Ya don't say...

Out of Control

While I’m hardly a Swiss-watch kind of person, I’d be hard pressed to come up with occasions where I was totally incapable of asserting myself. Oh, there are countless times when I ought to have done something, but genuinely being powerless to affect an ongoing situation is kind of an odd thing.

The easy example was the time I ski’ed backwards over a snow jump. Flung up into the air as I tried to wrench myself rightwise - I had the distinct, ice-blue memory of falling downward at the mountain slope that was – itself – falling away from me at an alarmingly similar rate. I knew there would be impact – that it would hurt a great deal – and that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

The mountainside cometh.

I’m told that the mind retains more input in times of stress – and this is one of the reasons time seems to slow down. You are processing everything – a continuous stream of data rather than the usual staccato of base-level-stimuli surrounding bits your mind already threw away. If your brain is thinking it might die, *anything*  could be important, so you drink it all in.

And you keep it.  I can picture this fall with total clarity, despite decades of inattention. What I wore. What the sky was like. The fact that my ski tips were going to hit first-

It’s funny. I remember trying to tip them away from the slope – to gain a few (micro) seconds more before impact. Think of that, perception of time so compressed that I’m planning my impact despite never being more than a few feet off the ground. The entire episode took probably less than two seconds from launch to bloody heap – and I vividly recall making the decision to bend my knee so my ski would be above me when I hit.

Not that this  made the slightest difference.

With equal clarity, I remember my other ski tip hitting the ground  and (to my mind) launching my leg into an arc that ended with the ski’s opposite end spearing into my lower back. I remember thinking how improbable that was –

-right before I went face first into the mountain slope.

I’ve since forgotten my injuries. They can’t have been terrible, I didn’t go to the hospital, but whatever part of the brain that manages crisis situations was clearly convinced. Cut. Print it. Possible near-death #4.

Funny thing. I don’t even remember where it happened. I broke my leg at Breckenridge and I could tell you the year and location - but I have no idea how I fell.

Odd.

What made me think of this was the feeling of inevitability. Airborne and hurling earthward. The certainty of impact – and the complete inability to do a thing about it.

The mountain cometh. All determining inputs are complete. No further inputs will be accepted. This will happen.
Brace for impact.

So months ago, I’m in a hospital bed – waiting for impact. Three days prior  I’d called my kids and told them that I wasn’t coming home because I was going to have surgery. E’s overseas and my week of being Dad Solo is completely FUBAR. Friends and family have jumped on the logistics grenade and I’ve been left to lay in a room being useless for days.

Having never been operated on before, this was uncharted territory. I’d resolved to be the good patient. I smiled, I joked and generally tried to make the best of it. Whatever danger there was had passed, and now there was just the massive inconvenience of being hospitalized, hooked up to numerous machines and generally treated like a lab specimen.

Anybody enjoy being a lab specimen? Right.

Three days is enough  time to nail down exactly what is wrong with

• the interface of your hospital bed: the tilt controls change location as you tilt from barely visible but accessible while reclining, to invisible and nigh impossible to reach while inclined. This is an interface designed for people with impaired motor and cognitive function.
• the CPAP machine: it comes on automatically when you put it over your nose, but no one knows this except a specialist who no one thinks to ask for days.
• the TV remote / Summon assistance button: It’s on a cord and always manages to fall between the bed rail and lodge there. This is only a big deal for people who have no abdominal strength like anyone who’s recently had surgery.

The bonus round is the Summon assistance button: I hate being a burden, but when you’re alone and essentially helpless, you need help. You push the button and wait for someone to respond. First few days this response is pretty quick, but on day three hitting the button it might take several minutes just to get someone to ask what you need.

One time, it took 12 minutes. Again, nothing was urgent - but I’d filed that away.

I’d been told I could be released the following day, so I’m trying my best to do all the things they want me to do so there will be no last minute snags. You want me to walk? Fine, I’ll walk around the floor.

Ugh. Getting up out of anything without using your stomach muscles is not fun. Walking in a hunch is even less fun. But I’m going to do this thing. For the millionth time, I snag my jammed-into-the-front-of-my-knuckle IV on the bedrail – twisting the needle and generally causing pain to blossom in my left hand. Every nurse apparently has their own style of doing these things, but pretty much everyone who’s looked at mine has sort of rolled their eyes like “I wouldn’t have done it that way.” Whatever the right way is, I’m thoroughly sick of mine.

Once up, I can’t help but tense up – which makes everything worse. I remember spending about five minutes just getting myself to slowly unclench everything until I achieve a bearable baseline of discomfort. But – I’m mobile.

Into the hall. Oh wait. First call the nurse. The antibiotics IV bag is beeping at me. It needs a refill.

Right here, I ponder a career in revamping the user interface in hospital equipment. I’m post-operative and on drugs, yet here is the workflow that makes sense to the designers of this machine.

Bag Near Empty? > Yes: Begin beeping at patient.
This will provoke the patient into calling a nurse, who will ask what the patient wants.
The patient will say “something’s beeping,” which will cause the nurse to walk the length of the hall to find out what, in fact, is beeping.
Once the nurse arrives she will determine what the issue is, switch off the beeping, then walk back to the nurses’ station to get whatever materials are needed.

I ask you, in a world of telecommunications – why the hell doesn’t the device send a wireless message to my assigned nurses’ PDA?

Patient in 422 needs more antibiotics.

Why does the device need to beep at a patient at all? Like they have any idea what the hell needs to be done.
Hell, the system could have a queue. My nurse is busy, they can slap a snooze button and bounce it to the central desk who WILL find someone to do this. Coverage and redundancy, and patients can (y’know) not be bothered with this sh!t.

Speaking of bothered:

I, the provoked patient,  spring to action. There’s beeping. What do I do now? I need to call the nurse. Where the hell is the call button?

Naturally, the call button is on the end of a device the size and shape of a multi-plug power stick, and it is wedged between the handrail and the mattress. Again.

Having achieved a vertical posture without using my stomach, I lumber over to the bed and gingerly try to pry the call button wand out and fail. I don’t want to flex, I don’t want to bend, and I will have to do both to get this out.

Arrrgh.

I opt to twist it just enough to press the damn button.  Blip!  There. Now I wait… I guess.
Ten minutes go by. I think I know the button the nurse used to snooze this thing last time, but all the buttons are cryptically labeled and there are MANY buttons. I could guess, but guessing wrong could be (unlikely) hazardous or (more likely) something I’ll have to explain so the nurse can correct it.

I stand for awhile until I decide to sit. I was going to walk outside, but I don’t want to take a beeping machine into the hall. The nurse could arrive any minute, so taking direct action seems premature until I’m around minute twelve.

“What do you need?”

My machine is beeping

“We’ll be right there.”

Sigh. I wait.

Again. Not a huge deal, but I was all worked up to moving around, and now I sit. The nurse swings in, mutes the machine, and swaps out the antibiotics.

I’m off. By now I’m feeling a bit nauseous. Getting up, sitting down, getting up again. Bleah. I do a quick lap around the floor and flop back in bed.

Shift change and New Nurse takes over. She tells me my blood pressure is high. Like 140 over 90. Nothing bad, just something to keep an eye on. I tell her I was walking and she says I should keep that up.

Soon as she’s gone, I try to sleep. Sleep hadn’t generally been a problem – but since my schedule is shot to hell, I’m like a jet lagged traveler. Drowsy in mid-day, but unable to sleep.

Plus, I’m getting twinging pains that aren’t enough to really hurt, but annoying enough to keep me awake. Side, shoulder, arm, chest. Twang!

Bleah. Back to my iPhone. My lifeline and salvation. I’ve paid the phone bills, notified work and kept up with current events with this thing. Anytime I need to kill time – there’s RSS.

I’m eye deep in the Spanish financial crisis, when the twinging pain returns. Mostly across the chest, and not bad – but annoying.

My nurse pulled in to check a my vitals – No signs of infection, but my blood pressure is up 140/100 and she’s saying “that’s got to come down.”

Which is perhaps the least helpful thing you can tell a person with high blood pressure.

I consider asking her about the seemingly random pain – but that just feels wrong. It’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be the whining patient. “Uh, nurse? I have an owie.”

I’m not sure I could pick a precise event that got things rolling. But I started having this cold numbness in my upper arm – then it began hurting.

Now – I’m no hypochondriac, but I know almost nothing about medicine. What little I do know comes from TV, perhaps the worst source for solid information. Ha ha. My left arm hurts. I get it. Funny.

I try to go to sleep, and fail.

I’m warm – and I want to get out of bed. I have this odd feeling that I’m going to throw up. Since I can’t move fast, I start to get up much sooner than I would have otherwise. Don’t want to be late.

I grunt my way up and disconnect the various cords and tubes. Mobile. I’m headed to the bathroom. Light headed.

And now – without any doubt – my left hand is numb. Like I’d slept on it, only I haven’t slept. There’s a tingling pain along the upper arm and I’m coming off my wave of nausea.

Now, I’m as skeptical as the next guy. But I’m a father of two, my wife is on the other side of the planet, and the last time I thought something was going to get better on its own – I ended up having unplanned surgery.

Blood pressure’s up. Left arm hurts. Twinging pain in the chest. This is complete horsesh!t. If I was at risk, they would have said something, put me in ICU-

-I’m remembering the story a coworker of mine told me. Of being at a dinner engagement where one of the guests had a coughing fit and excused themselves. They found her dead a half an hour later in the bathroom. She’d choked to death on a piece of food.

This is stupid.

I get back into bed and try to calm down. My heart’s going fast, I’m warm – my arm still hurts. Flexing my hand merely redistributes numbness with a splash of pain.

I ponder hitting the Call button – but what do you say? “Hey, I think I might be very ill, right now. Can you come see?”

And the last time it took them twelve minutes to even ask what I wanted.

I opt to compromise. I need to walk around, I’ll go walk around. If I’m fine, I’ll be fine. If not, I’ll at least be in the hallway where people can see.

Up again. Light headed again. Disconnected again. And out.

Trying to walk and relax at the same time isn’t doing much for me. My head’s pounding. I’m having that cold feeling. Heart’s hammering. And I’m about halfway to the nurse’s station.

This is stupid.

I can’t see my nurse anywhere, but there’s one nurse leaning on the counter – and I have this sudden feeling like I have to say something before-

“Uh-“ This was my opening bid.

“I… I don’t feel right.”

And like that - a line had been crossed.

I begin to babble. Counter nurse calls a colleague over and we’re headed back to my room.

I’m literally shaking. She’s asking me if I can walk, ripping through a series of questions.

My head’s spinning, I still can’t feel my hand.

And then I’m in the room with three nurses. Mine’s asking me to push on her hands, then pull. They’re checking my BP and staring into my eyes.

And I remember having this disembodied sense of

This is all so stupid, but I have kids. I can’t be found in a room.

My BP was at a level that I cannot remember precisely but when they read it out- I remember thinking This is Bad. Really Bad.  I knew throughout the process that my imagination was getting away with me, but my blood pressure was much higher than it had ever been.

And I’m sitting there watching it all play out – thinking It’s about to get worse, or I’m about to be proven a complete idiot.

All determining inputs are complete. No further inputs will be accepted. This will happen.
Brace for impact.

Nurses being nurses, they rapidly establish that I am not, in fact having some cardiac episode. I am having a panic attack.

My left hand is numb, because my IV keeps snagging on things and scraping around in my hand. My twinging pains are because the air they pumped me full of during surgery is bopping around my body and causing all manner of pain. Nausea, I would learn later, was due to the pain meds having less pain to fight. If they aren’t fighting pain, they screw with other neural inputs. Like balance, and your inner ear. Sometimes they make you feel warm.

All so stupid on so many levels. And the whole time I’m telling myself this is a load of crap – but unless you really understand what your likely trajectories are – you just can’t sit back and be stoic.

I remember telling one of my nurses afterwards. “You folks have a better picture of where I’m at, what paths I’m likely to move in to and how fast I’m likely to change course. Me? I have three frames of reference and they’re all on a line. First, there’s me in perfect health. Second, there’s me right now – high blood pressure, sweats, numbness, freaking out. And lastly, there’s the ending of an episode of ‘House.’  I have no idea how many other likely paths there are out there, all I see is I was good, now I’m feeling bad, and it seems like I’m moving towards a status I really don’t want to get to.”

The disparity of knowledge was how it was possible for my nursing staff to be totally comfortable with a paging system that alerted them in ten or more minutes. If I was likely to need immediate assistance, I wouldn’t have been in that room. But that’s an easy thing to rationalize when your BP is normal and you feel fine.

A saint of a nurse went out of her way to put me at ease after that. Got an ace colleague to swap my IV to a place where it wouldn’t grind against bone when I moved – and got me telemetry so that if anything bad did happen, they’d know immediately. I had the distinct impression that I was the laughingstock at the nurses station – but honestly, I could give a crap. It let me sleep. You get to a point where you’re afraid you won’t wake up – you are not going to be able to function.

Thinking back, it was an odd transformation. I was cutting up and goofing off only hours before, but the right buttons were pushed in the right sequence and I was completely off the deep end – and watching myself do it besides.

The night I lost my sh!t.

And, I’m betting – a similar set of circumstances presents itself. I could easily do that again.