January 13, 2007 at 10:00 am · Filed under Life
This is the second (and final) big essay we had to do for Advanced Grammar and Composition. It tells the unfortunately true tale of February 17, 2005. Enjoy!
Murphy’s law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will.” I’ve witnessed this law in action many times, and it usually kicks in at the most inopportune moments. However, I’ve never seen it happen as many times in a row as it did on one fateful day: a day that has been not-so-affectionately nicknamed “Murphy’s Law Day’” by those who experienced it.
We started the day driving by driving to L-3 Communications to make a presentation about the Phoenix Project. The Phoenix Project was a senior design project with the goal of creating an autonomous helicopter, and I was on the programming team. Because each of the helicopters we purchased cost several thousand dollars, we had to raise funds from large businesses. L-3 Communications is one of the largest military contractors in the country, and we had several contacts within the company, so we hoped they would be willing to give us poor college students a few thousand dollars.
On the way to the presentation, the lead car accidentally decided to take a “short cut” along a dirt road that cut through some farm fields. Because the weather had been rainy the last few days, there was some significant mud off the side of the road. The road was bumpy, and one of my passengers was getting sick, so I pulled over to the side to give him a brief reprieve. The team lead, who was driving the car in front of me, thought I was turning around, so he started to turn his Isuzu Rodeo around too. Here, Murphy’s Law struck for the first time: just as he got the Rodeo angled perpendicular to the road, his front tires slipped off the side and became firmly entrenched in the waiting mire.
We were going to be late if we didn’t arrive soon, and the Rodeo was carrying not only the team lead, but also our helicopter that we planned to demonstrate to top-level L-3 executives. So we tried our best to free the car quickly. However, no amount of pushing, lifting, or digging made any difference at all. The car was stuck. What made things worse is how close we had come to our destination. We could see some of the large warehouses of L-3 just across the field. With minutes until the presentation was supposed to start, we finally gave up on freeing the Rodeo. We crammed the helicopter and extra people into the remaining cars and took off.
The presentation went very well. We made a point to emphasize our need for funds to buy a backup helicopter in case ours crashed before the final competition–not that we expected anything like that to happen. After the presentation finished, we went out to a field by one of the parking lots to demonstrate of our flight technology. We got the helicopter in the air, and, to our delight, all of the electronics started communicating perfectly. But we soon discovered that Murphy was just getting started. Suddenly, the rotor began to violently gyrate back and forth–our auto-leveling system had gone haywire! Before anyone had a chance to react, the rotor smashed into the tail boom, causing it to burst into pieces and send the doomed craft hurtling to the ground.
Having sufficiently proved that we needed funding for a backup vehicle, the team left, discouraged, to try to free the lodged Rodeo again. Perhaps asking for help at this point would have been intelligent, but we were a large group of guys, many with degrees in Mechanical Engineering–we were going to free this car ourselves. On the way back to the car, we purchased a come-along (a type of winch) at a local store, thinking we could use it to pull the car out. However, when we got back, we couldn’t find a good place to anchor the come-along. Eventually, we decided to use some other straps we had in the car to tie it to a puny-looking tree. We started cranking. Either the straps or the tree looked like it had a good chance of snapping before we got the car out, so we covered all the hooks and clamps of the come-along with our jackets, hoping that if the heavy pieces of metal went flying, the blow would be somewhat softened.
After an hour or so of work, it become obvious that there was no way we could get the car out with the equipment we had. Luckily, we had noticed that we were close to several wrecker businesses. Problem solved, right? Not with Murphy in full swing. We went around asking to borrow a chain. I’m not sure what we planned to do with a chain, but it was better than just sitting there. Unfortunately, the sight of a group of guys dressed in nice khakis and matching Phoenix Project polo shirts didn’t inspire generosity in the hearts of the small-town wrecker shop owners. None of them would let us borrow anything.
We were on the brink of despair. A full day of work had left us with only a stuck car and thousands of dollars of damage to our helicopter. I finally remembered that my dad had signed me up for a AAA membership, and I could get a tow truck to pull us out for free. Our collective pride hurt, we decided to call in help. After we had waited for what seemed like an eternity, the tow truck finally showed up. We felt better when the wrecker’s big pickup stalled several times while it was pulling the car out.
With the car finally freed, everyone was ready to go, and I thought this failure-filled chapter of my life was finished. Naturally, Murphy had other plans. I was the last to leave the site because I had to finish up some business with the tow truck guy, so none of the other cars from the group were around when I left. As I started to drive home, I noticed something didn’t feel quite right when I used my brakes. I tried slamming on the brakes to make sure they still worked. The car only slightly slowed. I tried the hand brake. Same result. Two hours of essentially brake-free driving loomed ahead of me, but I didn’t have much of a choice but to continue.
The drive was one of the worst I’ve ever made. Driving through the towns was bad enough–I had to start braking hundreds of yards before any stop signs or stop lights. But it was even worse when I got up to highway speeds. I had to think 10 steps ahead of everything that was happening: “If he goes there and that other car goes over there, then I have to go there,” or, “If he goes there and I’m stuck over here, then I’ll have to head for the ditch,” or, my personal favorite, “If he goes there and that happens and I’m here … then I die!” Despite all this, I still made it home, two horrible hours later.
I finally got back to my room and collapsed on my chair. I resolved not to do anything else that day. Murphy wasn’t going to catch me again.
January 1, 2007 at 10:00 am · Filed under Life
For my Advanced Grammar and Composition class last semester, we were supposed to write an essay about something we inherited. I chose to write about my room. I figure since I spent so much time on the essay, I might as well post it where others can read it too.
Sometimes, I crave a good movie viewed from the comfort of a hammock with plenty of friends and fish to keep me company. Where can I go for such a unique experience? My dorm room, of course. A complex wooden structure fills its sides and spans the ceiling. Three large wooden shelves give extra storage space and provide support for the rest of the structure. Four hammocks supply plenty of seating for friends to watch movies or to just hang out. A ten-foot-long tube is home to about fifteen guppies. And, to top it all off, a disco ball hangs overhead.
None of the things I just described really belong to me. In fact, I inherited the majority of the items in my room, and the single largest donor of these items was my former roommate, Igloo.
My freshman year, I was placed in the same suite as Igloo, who was rooming with a guy nicknamed Zorro. The same wood that now makes up the structure in my room created a similar arrangement in theirs. I remember being amazed at how complicated their room was, and I don’t think I ever figured out just how the whole thing was put together. They seemed to cram more into that room than was physically possible. Igloo and I became good friends, and I spent many hours hanging out in his room, talking, fixing his computer, flipping knives around in the strobe-light-illuminated darkness, or staying up all night to help him finish editing a movie about a super-villain made entirely out of duct tape.
The next year, Igloo and I decided to room together because Zorro had graduated. Igloo got to keep the crazy structure, so I benefited from it as well. I didn’t realize how involved building the room could be until I had to help. The first week of school saw two-by-fours, plywood, and carpet scattered along the hallway outside our room as we hastily screwed the sprawling monstrosity together. Several weeks after we completed construction, we noticed that one particularly heavy shelf—that happened to be placed right over my bed—was supported by a beam that was not at all intended to be load-bearing. After a few nervous nights of waiting for the whole thing to come crashing down on me in my sleep, we brought in several car jacks, lifted part of the room up, and built a better supporting structure underneath the shelf.
Not very many rooms have hammocks; ours had four. Our structure provided plenty of places to hang them from. We started with just two that straddled the center of the room, angling out from the rear wooden pillar. But people enjoyed them so much we decided to add a double-decker suspended from the crossbeams directly in front of the pillar. This hammock setup, combined with a surround sound system, was perfect for watching movies. Or, on a lazy day when Igloo and I wanted to avoid homework, nothing was better than taking a nap in one of the hammocks with the simple, laid back music of Johnny Cash or Jim Croce playing in the background.
We made several modifications to the room as the year progressed, the most interesting of which involved a ten foot long, three and a half inch diameter, clear Pyrex tube that had been floating around the dorm for several years. Abu, one of my other floormates, had apparently pulled it out of a dumpster when the university remodeled the Science Building into the Education Building. People on the floor had tried several ideas to find a good use for the tube. At least one of these ideas ended up partially flooding a room on the floor, but nobody did anything interesting that actually worked. Igloo had the idea to turn the tube into a fish tank. After a few months of kicking the idea around, we finally decided to do it. One of the professors on campus told us how we could create a self-contained ecosystem inside the tube–there was no way we were going to try to clean this thing until it was time to empty it–and gave us some guppies, snails, and plants to get us started. After a few trips to Home Depot to find the right size of rubber fittings to cap the ends, we were ready to fill it. The memory of the previous flood was still fresh in our minds, so we were somewhat nervous about filling the tank, especially because we had chosen to position it directly above our still-running computers. But, other than one small, easily-fixed leak, there were no problems. We had the best fish tank on campus. But Igloo wasn’t finished adding things to the room.
For Christmas decorations that year, our floor decided on a Swiss Family Robinson theme. Together, the guys on the floor converted the lounge into a jungle complete with several tree houses, live birds, and rope bridges. To add to the jungle feel of the room, we placed a giant log upright in the center of the lounge. After we had torn the decorations down, Igloo had the bright idea to put the log, which was so heavy it took about fifteen guys to move, in our room. I thought it was a dumb idea, but he was so excited that I didn’t really have much of a choice. We moved it into our room and tried to secure it to our structure in such a way that it wouldn’t fall and kill someone, and everything seemed to be fine. Then we heard the noises. Bug noises. They were coming from inside the log, and they were getting louder every day. Since it was getting close to Christmas break, we decided on a plan: empty an entire can of Raid on the log right before we left and hope the problem went away before we got back. However, Igloo didn’t stick to the plan. The night before we were supposed to leave, he decided to spray just a little bit of Raid on the log. The problem with that idea is that Raid doesn’t just kill the bugs; it flushes them out of where they’re hiding and then kills them. So, when Igloo started spraying, multitudes of all kinds of bugs spewed forth from the log. At least, that’s what I assume happened based on what I could hear of Igloo’s reaction. I was already in bed and still wanted to get some rest that night, so rather than see what would probably end up crawling all over me in my sleep, I just stayed in bed. Igloo hurriedly sprayed Raid around the bottom and top of the log–which was right next to his bed—hoping to contain the problem, and we went to bed. When we returned from Christmas break, the problem only got worse. We discovered giant winged insects with huge antennae had been growing inside the log and had become large enough to gnaw quarter-sized holes in the bark and escape to torment us. This insect invasion was finally enough to convince Igloo that maybe having an enormous, rotting log in our room wasn’t the best idea. We got rid of it.
After Igloo graduated that year, I inherited the structure and many of the items used to decorate the room. I have been able to enjoy the benefits of extra storage space, extra seating, and most importantly, a room that has felt like home for the last two years. This year I will graduate, and I look forward to giving the structure to someone else who I hope will enjoy it as much as I have.
Hi there. My name is Curtis Hawthorne, but most of my friends call me Fjord.