Month: May 2021

I remember when they instituted id cards entering some of the print laps at work, which was not the largest change to building security, but I felt it to be a bit stifling. I griped about it to my coworker. Well, Martin pretty much put everything back into perspective. It seems when he was much younger his job was working at a special Russian government research facility.

That was a serious place, where not only do you need to go through a special gate with a guard to let you in, but the entrances and exits were posted with armed guards. The guards were also located in a lot of other locations around the campus. Another difference between my situation and the research facility was if my badge gets lost I will get a stern talking to and then I get a new badge, if someone from Martin’s facility lost their badge they couldn’t leave the grounds until it was located.

The badges were kept at the entrance and given to you when you got there and taken away when you left.

I like to think that I am fairly technical and by extension reasonably clever, says the software developer. I can install Windows operating system, Linux, or even both of them side by side on a computer from scratch.

It took me a while to realize just what my problem was with the public transportation ticket machine in Stuttgart, Germany. The thing is that the machine has two numeric keypads, and when it is asking you for input you are expected to know just which one it is talking about.

It turns out that the machine manufacturer was either fairly clever or extremely lazy. The one keypad exists for answering mundane questions regarding your travel plans while the second one can only be used during payments.

I can only imagine that this did make the job easier for the manufacturer. They simply purchased some sort of payment subsystem from another company and without any integration popped it directly into the ticket machine. It is good for them, and it is tolerable for the locals, but a gigantic pain in the lower backside for any visitors to this region.

I was visiting my in-laws and so we also brought a USB stick full of photos of our daughters. Well my brother-in-law didn’t have any program for manipulating photos so I downloaded my favorite open source package from the Internet and installed it on his computer.

Installing a program is usually a matter of a double click, accepting the End User License Agreement and accepting the defaults. Well one of the question asked if all the photos from the computer should be added to the photo album – without really thinking about it I pressed ok, It was only when some of the “other” photographs that the brother-in-law had on his computer started flashing by that I had a chance to regret this decision.

I will never be able to un-see those images and now have learned a bit about about my brother-in-law that I never wanted to know.

Laura is a young adult and was moving out of her folks place into a new place across town. Germany is not like some other “housing” markets. It is often the case that when you get a new apartment the person who has to renovate the apartment is the new tenant.

However, depending on the degree to which you plan to renovate it may be a costly venture. This is one of the reasons why people in Germany don’t tend to move very often. I was speaking with my friend Martin about how the process was going when he told me about their initial visit after the renovations were completed. Laura went into one of the rooms and it simply did not seem quite right and it took a while for her to determine what the problem was.

The landlord had hired a couple of very clever handymen who were tasked with replacing the windows in the bedroom. The windows were actually directly next to each other but they were different heights. They didn’t actually bother to ask if this was correct instead they put in two different size windows. Martin did speak with the person who did the renovations to get this oversight corrected. The walls were painted, the windows corrected, the wardrobes built, then correctly built. It looked like everything was just fine.

This is Germany so the kitchen was just as empty as the living room. Laura and Martin went to Ikea to purchase a counter top and cabinets for the walls. I am not sure how long it took to assemble, but from looking at Martin it must have been all weekend. To the best of my knowledge everything was done and Laura should have been doing the unenviable task of unpacking and putting things away.

We were both sitting at our desks and it seemed like Martin was doing a lot of talking on the telephone about Laura’s apartment. Later in the day when the phone calls slowed down I found out that there was one more little renovation detail that was causing complications. Laura reported that the water pressure seemed to be getting less and less with each day. When the renovations were done molding was placed around the rooms where the wall meets the floor. It was a small decorative touch that in this case was the root of all the problems.

In the kitchen there was a small pipe in the wall at this junction and when the molding was attached with small thin nails, several of them actually punctured the water pipe. Thus the water was slowly leaking out of the pipe into the wall.

The problem was caught before it became a big problem for the building, but this unexpected damage did create problems with the renovations specialist.

I really don’t know how sex education came up but at a bar-b-que the topic came up and apparently what I experienced was the gold standard.

I don’t remember sex education in high school very clearly, but I do remember that the teacher actually asked the class if we should split into two groups. In retrospect considering the topic I guess that perhaps a mixed class might make more sense.

A friend of the family had gone to a catholic school and from I heard they learned about sex education slightly differently.

• Don’t let a man touch you.
• He will hurt you, give you diseases,
• He will leave you and you will be pregnant.

That was it. Learn these three rules and you know everything you need to know. I don’t think that this is entirely accurate but it certainly would prevent diseases and pregnancy.

There are a few differences between “the old world” and the “new world”. In the old world the coffee is much stronger, the content on the television has much racier content but violence is much rarer on public the television regardless of the time of day. In the new world a hot cup of tea is more heard of than drunken, extreme efforts are taken to ensure that no part of the human body is exposed on public the television regardless of the time of day, and alcohol is not tolerated on the street – unless it is in a brown paper bag.

It is this last dictate that is also somewhat different in the old world. It might not be a sign of class but it is not illegal to be walking around with a bottle of beer in your hand. I hadn’t been living in the windy city all that long when one night a bunch of us decided to go to a bar reasonably¹ close to my apartment. I guess I had one too many and it was actually fairly late, so I decided to walk home. It was summer and the area was safe. Yet I had forgotten to leave my glass on the table when I left so I found myself walking up the street with a glass in my hand.

I really somehow doubt that this would have been a problem if I had just kept on walking but there was a convenience store right there and I thought it might be a good idea to pick up a snack. It still wasn’t a problem, I stopped in and was looking for some beef jerky when a pair of policemen came looking for some beverage to keep them going through the night. It was only then when I had realized where I was and that this might be a problem. So I grabbed my snack and went to pay, however, I did have to set my glass down and that is when those nice policemen happened to be right behind me.

Perhaps it was the clink against the glass but then they asked me what exactly I had in my glass. I picked the best thing I could think of – I came up with lime juice. Well, there was no law against carrying around a glass of lime juice but we both agreed that perhaps I should leave this there and continue on my way.

1Well, walking distance if you find a mile to a mile and half a reasonable distance.