I worked Saturday noon to five. No computer training this time, all on the floor. Five hours less a 15 minute break on my feet. They were fine: the ankles were not happy. But a hot shower and footrub helped. I just need to drink more water on the job to keep from getting dehydrated, which leads to foot and leg cramps. Hey, I’m learning!
Speaking of learning, the paint system was down for about half of my shift. From what I was able to glean from other associates making phone calls to HQ, there was a problem with the servers and DNS – does that mean they maybe got hacked? Or maybe it was an update gone wrong. In any event, we had to turn lots of people away until the system was at least partially restored. That’s because the formulae for paint is in the system, and a label must print out in order to know how much of which components go into that shade. It can be manually mixed, but only if the system tells us what to mix. See the codes on the label? But that’s a good thing to know. J says the system only goes down every couple of months or so. Here’s hoping that is so, and I know how to manually mix paint next time it does.
Just finished watching the last episode of Season 2 of All Things Great and Small, a terrific remake of Herriot’s wonderful stories on PBS. It was set at Christmas, with small crises but major togetherness, all combined into a terrific send-off for that season. At the very end, Mrs. Hall looks out the window to see a plane flying over in the snow. This is the verge of World War II, and she has a son out there somewhere that’s of fighting age. I immediately had a flashback to a similar situation we experienced at Christmas in 2007. Here’s what I wrote about it, relative to our son Erik the Younger.
We have Christmas, and I gather as much family as I can to say goodbye before he leaves. He’s full of stories and pictures of his own – of himself and the guys with whom he will deploy. It’s a three man unit: he’s the team leader. There’s the driver they call Granny because he’s slow and careful. Then there’s the gunner, an impetuous, somewhat goofy young man. They nickname him Jethro and, thus, they become Team Bugtussle. Recall that Bugtussle was the Tennessee home town of the Beverly Hillbillies. The three of them apparently thought this was funny.
And then it’s done – he and his daughter return north, and the clock starts ticking down to departure day.
I’d been going through the stages of dealing with death & dying that Elizabeth Kubler Ross detailed. I’d already been through denial, anger and depression. I was angry at Bush for starting this mess and then for not knowing how to fix it after it broke. I had a special, burning anger for Dick Cheney, who appeared to mastermind and control the whole debacle. I was depressed at the prospect of not seeing or hearing from my son for the eight months his deployment is supposed to last.
Then it was time for some bargaining. Maybe he’ll get to go somewhere safe and nothing bad will happen. Four days before he left, he called to tell me he’s going to a place called Rustamaya. I did some research, and it appeared to be relatively safe, according to the New York Times reporters in Baghdad. I felt relieved. Then, two days before deployment, he called again to say Team Bugtussle’s assignment location had changed: had I ever heard of a place called Sadr City? Indeed I had. It was the least safe place in Iraq, along with Basra in the south. Erik and his little band of brothers would go to Sadr City. They would return home ten months later, alive but profoundly damaged.
The gunner Jethro killed himself last month.
As we read daily about the potential for a Russian invasion of Ukraine, I think about the folly that was our invasion of Iraq in 2003. Putin mentioned that as some kind of rationalized justification for his own actions. Apparently he didn’t think things through, as he forgot how things turned out for us before we finally left in … 2010, wasn’t it? Things won’t go well for him either. Sorry to end on such a down note, but Good Lord: don’t we ever learn?