#3
Our final story of the sequence occurs much later than the first two, in 1979. I have been teaching for 6 or 7 years, first in Lake Forest and now in Mundelein. Besides teaching math classes, I am a football coach in the fall and a tennis coach in the spring. If you remember, I mentioned that I had become a member of the union when it was possible to do so. By this time, I have worked my way up to the position of President of the Mundelein Education Association, a branch of IEA/NEA. In Mundelein at that time, our superintendent was not happy with the outcome of the most recent round of teacher negotiations (I was the chief negotiator for the union). As a result, he fired me from my job as Freshman Tennis Coach. His stated purpose at the time was that we would need to meet from time to time to discuss the new contract and I could not do that if I was busy every afternoon coaching tennis. Our union contract did not cover extra-curricular positions, so there was not much I could do. He also tried to lower my evaluation as a teacher based on what I had done as union president, but when the IEA rep called the school's law firm to discuss that, that got thrown out pretty quickly. Within the next year, I found a new job in Barrington and moved out of Mundelein. My six years in Mundelein were very enjoyable. The guys I coached football and tennis with were great, and the people in the math department (and science department where my desk was) were good to work with. But it was time to move on. With the higher pay in Barrington, I could stop coaching and go back to school to get my Master's. And soon thereafter, there was the pitter - patter of tiny feet (at first - eventually they grew to a size 13) in the Armstrong household, and a new set of duties to take on.
So, that's the story. Thanks for following along. We'll try to pass along some happier memories in the weeks to come.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
You're Fired, Part Two
#2
After my Junior year in college, I found out that the Goodyear factory where I had worked the last two summers was not hiring summer help that year. It was a great job and paid good money. I worked the 11PM to 7 AM shift in the Banbury division (we took the raw rubber in bales, threw it in a two-story mixer with a bunch of chemicals and lamp black powder, turned up the heat, and out of the bottom came usable rubber that ran through a big pasta making machine that turned it into thin sheets that hung up to dry before being shipped out to the rest of the factory. The lamp black was terrible stuff to get off your face. It took a lot of time and vaseline to clean it from around your eyes, so most of us only did that on Friday morning when we finished our last shift of the week. Which meant I spent most of the summer looking like a raccoon. Ann barely mentioned it (three or four times a week, tops). When I got off work at 7 AM, I would meet Ann for breakfast or to play tennis, then she would go off to work and I would go home to bed. We had evenings together, until 10:30, when it was time to go to work. One of the pluses of working at Goodyear was that as I went off shift, I would swing through the first floor of the factory and say Hi to my dad who worked the morning shift. He was a supervisor and my most lasting memory of him at the factory was coming downstairs and hearing him explain to a young man that a box of #4 washers shouldn't be dumped into the bin marked #5 washers and that he'd better get busy sorting washers. Although he used a lot more colorful language than that which I think he learned while in the Navy.
So when the Goodyear plant quit hiring, I was forced to look for something else. My brother Alan and Ann and I spent part of the summer making candles which we sold to gift shops and department stores. As you can imagine, not a lot of money there. Probably not even enough to pay the damage we might have caused melting wax over an open flame in Mom's kitchen. Luckily we got the fire out in time. Mostly it helped to fill the time in the summer. Every weekend we went to a craft fair and set up a booth selling candles to people passing by.
I found out from my roommate Guy that the steel mill in Cleveland he worked at needed help and I was welcome to move up to his house and we would work together. So I packed what I needed into the VW bug and headed for Olmsted Falls. It turned out the steel mill was owned by his girl friend's father, which is how we got jobs there. I worked most of my time on a big machine that pressed down on a piece of steel and made something out of it. After 40 years, I have no recollection of what it made. It was just tedious work (I was low man on seniority and got the worst job). It broke down often and I would have to sit and wait for someone to come fix it. The machine was probably 10 feet tall. On one of the days when I got to work I was a little early and someone else was running the machine. It must have broken down for him, too, because when I got there he was hanging from the top of the machine pounding on it with a small sledge hammer. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, "Percussive maintenance."
On our last day of the summer, with two hours to go before we were officially off the job for the last time, my machine broke down again. I called it in and when Guy came by to see what was up, he suggested that we take a tour of the plant and say goodbye to everybody while they fixed the machine. Guy had an office job and had a lot more freedom than I did. Ten minutes later the foreman found us and fired us on the spot. When he escorted me back to the machine to get my stuff, it still wasn't fixed. I asked why I was being fired for not working when I couldn't be working, he said I was required to stay by the machine. I asked when the machine was going to be fixed and he said they needed a part. It was down until the next day. He also made some comments about how we weren't in the union and there wasn't anything we could do about it. Probably one of the main reasons I have been in a union on every job since then if it was possible. When he walked us to the gate and we punched out for the last time, I had lost 57 minutes of work time. I know Guy and his girl friend talked to her dad about what happened. I don't think anything came of it except to let her dad know we weren't goofing off when we could have been working.
So that was job #2 for being fired. Soon, firing #3.
After my Junior year in college, I found out that the Goodyear factory where I had worked the last two summers was not hiring summer help that year. It was a great job and paid good money. I worked the 11PM to 7 AM shift in the Banbury division (we took the raw rubber in bales, threw it in a two-story mixer with a bunch of chemicals and lamp black powder, turned up the heat, and out of the bottom came usable rubber that ran through a big pasta making machine that turned it into thin sheets that hung up to dry before being shipped out to the rest of the factory. The lamp black was terrible stuff to get off your face. It took a lot of time and vaseline to clean it from around your eyes, so most of us only did that on Friday morning when we finished our last shift of the week. Which meant I spent most of the summer looking like a raccoon. Ann barely mentioned it (three or four times a week, tops). When I got off work at 7 AM, I would meet Ann for breakfast or to play tennis, then she would go off to work and I would go home to bed. We had evenings together, until 10:30, when it was time to go to work. One of the pluses of working at Goodyear was that as I went off shift, I would swing through the first floor of the factory and say Hi to my dad who worked the morning shift. He was a supervisor and my most lasting memory of him at the factory was coming downstairs and hearing him explain to a young man that a box of #4 washers shouldn't be dumped into the bin marked #5 washers and that he'd better get busy sorting washers. Although he used a lot more colorful language than that which I think he learned while in the Navy.
So when the Goodyear plant quit hiring, I was forced to look for something else. My brother Alan and Ann and I spent part of the summer making candles which we sold to gift shops and department stores. As you can imagine, not a lot of money there. Probably not even enough to pay the damage we might have caused melting wax over an open flame in Mom's kitchen. Luckily we got the fire out in time. Mostly it helped to fill the time in the summer. Every weekend we went to a craft fair and set up a booth selling candles to people passing by.
I found out from my roommate Guy that the steel mill in Cleveland he worked at needed help and I was welcome to move up to his house and we would work together. So I packed what I needed into the VW bug and headed for Olmsted Falls. It turned out the steel mill was owned by his girl friend's father, which is how we got jobs there. I worked most of my time on a big machine that pressed down on a piece of steel and made something out of it. After 40 years, I have no recollection of what it made. It was just tedious work (I was low man on seniority and got the worst job). It broke down often and I would have to sit and wait for someone to come fix it. The machine was probably 10 feet tall. On one of the days when I got to work I was a little early and someone else was running the machine. It must have broken down for him, too, because when I got there he was hanging from the top of the machine pounding on it with a small sledge hammer. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, "Percussive maintenance."
On our last day of the summer, with two hours to go before we were officially off the job for the last time, my machine broke down again. I called it in and when Guy came by to see what was up, he suggested that we take a tour of the plant and say goodbye to everybody while they fixed the machine. Guy had an office job and had a lot more freedom than I did. Ten minutes later the foreman found us and fired us on the spot. When he escorted me back to the machine to get my stuff, it still wasn't fixed. I asked why I was being fired for not working when I couldn't be working, he said I was required to stay by the machine. I asked when the machine was going to be fixed and he said they needed a part. It was down until the next day. He also made some comments about how we weren't in the union and there wasn't anything we could do about it. Probably one of the main reasons I have been in a union on every job since then if it was possible. When he walked us to the gate and we punched out for the last time, I had lost 57 minutes of work time. I know Guy and his girl friend talked to her dad about what happened. I don't think anything came of it except to let her dad know we weren't goofing off when we could have been working.
So that was job #2 for being fired. Soon, firing #3.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
You're Fired!
Over Christmas break, while the kids were here, we got to talking about the jobs we had when we were younger and I happened to mention that I had been fired from at least three jobs in my life.
That immediately prompted a request for details. So, here goes.
#1
When I was a sophomore at Michigan State University, I spent fall quarter working at an International House of Pancakes in East Lansing. As Paula Poundstone would say, "It was a dream and I made it happen." I worked there from September through December from 6 PM until midnight. I was a busboy and dishwasher, and besides making some money, it fit the bill in another way. My friends, Guy Conger and Bob Paski, and I had moved that year from the regular dorm room into an apartment in the dorm to save some money. The money savings was that we didn't get a meal plan - we were expected to do our own meals in the apartment. At IHOP, I was given one free meal a day, and I made it count. An omelet with pancakes and a root beer were gourmet cooking to me. Unfortunately, they didn't understand that I went home to Ohio for Christmas break for three weeks. That was the first time I got fired. After talking to the manager about coming back on the job in January when I returned to campus, I was told not to bother because they would have to hire someone to fill in for me while I was gone. Luckily, I found a job in January working late nights in the dorm grill. I spent a lot of time Freshman and Sophomore years in that grill playing pinochle when I got tired of studying, so it worked out OK.
Looking back, moving to the apartment in the dorm was a bad idea. I wasn't at all prepared to be responsible for my own food, so it was a year of peanut butter and crackers. I had a yellow VW bug that I could drive, but there was no parking near the dorm. You had to park in an outlot and take a shuttle from the dorm to the parking lot, so going to get groceries was a hassle. Students weren't allowed to drive on campus until after 6 PM, so you couldn't really go during the day unless you wanted to chance getting a ticket bringing the groceries back to the dorm, which was expensive. And as Nate found out in his Freshman year, it is a pain to have food around when you and your roommates are not all on the same page when it comes to cleanliness. There was one plus to it Junior year. Guy's dad had been working as a scientist for NASA in Cleveland, but got transferred to California during our Sophomore year. So Guy transferred to Stanford that summer to be near his parents (we kept in touch; Guy was a groomsman in my wedding). The dorm assigned two new people to room with Bob and I. One of them was from Detroit and his parents owned a restaurant there. So when he came back to the dorm Sunday night, he brought lobsters and steaks and we ate well for one night. On the downside, they were the impetus for me to learn the ins and outs of the bail bond system in Lansing (for them, not for me). Turned out the older brother of one of my best high school friends was a bail bondsmen. But that's a story for another time.
Later this week: part two of You're Fired!
That immediately prompted a request for details. So, here goes.
#1
When I was a sophomore at Michigan State University, I spent fall quarter working at an International House of Pancakes in East Lansing. As Paula Poundstone would say, "It was a dream and I made it happen." I worked there from September through December from 6 PM until midnight. I was a busboy and dishwasher, and besides making some money, it fit the bill in another way. My friends, Guy Conger and Bob Paski, and I had moved that year from the regular dorm room into an apartment in the dorm to save some money. The money savings was that we didn't get a meal plan - we were expected to do our own meals in the apartment. At IHOP, I was given one free meal a day, and I made it count. An omelet with pancakes and a root beer were gourmet cooking to me. Unfortunately, they didn't understand that I went home to Ohio for Christmas break for three weeks. That was the first time I got fired. After talking to the manager about coming back on the job in January when I returned to campus, I was told not to bother because they would have to hire someone to fill in for me while I was gone. Luckily, I found a job in January working late nights in the dorm grill. I spent a lot of time Freshman and Sophomore years in that grill playing pinochle when I got tired of studying, so it worked out OK.
Looking back, moving to the apartment in the dorm was a bad idea. I wasn't at all prepared to be responsible for my own food, so it was a year of peanut butter and crackers. I had a yellow VW bug that I could drive, but there was no parking near the dorm. You had to park in an outlot and take a shuttle from the dorm to the parking lot, so going to get groceries was a hassle. Students weren't allowed to drive on campus until after 6 PM, so you couldn't really go during the day unless you wanted to chance getting a ticket bringing the groceries back to the dorm, which was expensive. And as Nate found out in his Freshman year, it is a pain to have food around when you and your roommates are not all on the same page when it comes to cleanliness. There was one plus to it Junior year. Guy's dad had been working as a scientist for NASA in Cleveland, but got transferred to California during our Sophomore year. So Guy transferred to Stanford that summer to be near his parents (we kept in touch; Guy was a groomsman in my wedding). The dorm assigned two new people to room with Bob and I. One of them was from Detroit and his parents owned a restaurant there. So when he came back to the dorm Sunday night, he brought lobsters and steaks and we ate well for one night. On the downside, they were the impetus for me to learn the ins and outs of the bail bond system in Lansing (for them, not for me). Turned out the older brother of one of my best high school friends was a bail bondsmen. But that's a story for another time.
Later this week: part two of You're Fired!
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
The Cowboys Are Working Overtime
On my Christmas list this year, I included an Arduino Starter kit. Luckily, Steve came through for me. The Arduino home page says
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.Some of the projects described on their website are a window blind that opens and closes automatically based on the sunlight hitting it, a car alarm system that sends you a message when your car door is opened, (for Mike) a turn signal biking jacket, and a self-balancing Segway-like robot. It's all about the sensors you hook up and the instructions you give in the programming.
Open source means that everything is out there for you to use and adapt as you want. You can download the software for free and launch it on the Arduino. The bluish thing on the right is the Arduino.
You hook it up to your computer through a USB port and you are off and running. I walked through the introduction, which described what all these parts that came with the starter kit do.
Mostly, they are lights and sensors and wires to connect everything. Now here is where the problem starts. I am not at all comfortable with the electronics side of this. Even though I don't know the programming language that is used, I do get programming and can follow a program to see what it does. I learned Fortran in college, mastered Basic while teaching math to write programs for computers and graphing calculators, and did a little Python in the last four years just because it looked interesting. But I still assume there are little cowboys in the wires driving those electrons along the trail to make electricity. And when the tutorial says it doesn't matter if I put the resistor before or after the blinking light, I don't get it. I understand plumbing, and plumbing doesn't work like that. So I am going to have to e-mail Steve a lot when I don't get the electronics part. (He's an electronics engineering trained person.)
On the plus side, I hooked up the computer, downloaded the software for the first tutorial (Blinking Light) and got the light to blink just like it said it would. I even modified the program to change how long the light stayed on and stayed off. So I have made a good start. Next up is Arduino Tutorial 2: LED Lights and Resistors. Ah, those pesky resistors. By next Christmas, I hope to have some operating robots to show off. If I put bar codes on the presents, the robots could decide who gets each present and deliver them around the living room. That would put Mike out of a job, but it would be really cool.
It's Getting Better
So we're up to 15 degrees today, from -17 on Monday night. That's the same amount of change as going from 18 degrees to 50 degrees, so in comparison it feels really nice outside. Whimzy played in the snow for a while instead of dashing in and out as fast as she can. And it won't be that long before things are nice again. So in honor of that idea, some summer pictures to give you something to look forward to.
Whimzy at Grandpa's in Ohio, chasing rabbits out of the woodpile.
The last blooms of the fall, Aconitum or Monkshood, which put up stalks in May, but only bloom for two or three weeks before the first freeze in October.
Our New Years resolution for this year: use our deck more for entertaining, grilling out, and, most importantly, reading in bare feet.
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