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COVID-19: Riding the Bus!

COVID-19 riding the bus

COVID-19 is no laughing matter but at GraveResults we think of everything as a chance to learn and laugh. We recently had to send the shop truck out for a new motor. Old cars don’t have lots of places to get the best care nowadays. Our chosen shop is MJM engines in Escondido, about 35 miles from the home office. Everyone else was out hoarding the last few cans of Spaghetti-O’s and Dinty Moore beef stew so Derril was left without a ride home…

Yeah, that’s me, the car guy that never goes anywhere without EXTRA POWER, riding 48 minutes on a double-dutch bus on the eve of a massive nationwide virus lock-down… but first…

About the shop…

We found MJM Engines online because they have great prices on complete engines and the mechanics and machine shop is all in one place. This is really important to car crazy people because it shows a comprehensive understanding about how cars work. Some people think cars have a soul and even name them. Those people are weird but it shows how a car is really a complete system and not a group of modules. Additionally, you can see in one place all the efforts good or bad to create a good working environment. MJM is a typical “good” shop.

Drew was polite and quick to give the little truck a look over and provide an estimate. The counter had the required scorched piston from some detonation issue. There were some fresh machined sub-assemblies stacked here and there and it looked like they had a good workflow – forklift in front, machinery in back, cars in the middle. All good and head for the bus stop…

You’re on the bus or off the bus…

….I see the bus driver getting out for his break and ask him when he’s leaving. “A few minutes. We leave at 11:35.” No one’s standing around so I’m thinking “…empty bus this could be good.” Just then, the Amtrak train from Oceanside shows up and the line is 14.

I eye every one, searching for symptoms… They’re all nuts to butts and we are supposed to be standing 6ft apart!

All seem healthy and everyone’s got their 6 ft of space once they sit down. (if the bus burts into flames everyone will probably get out). I boarded last so I could sit as far from everyone as possible. I’m not anti-social. Remember, it’s the surgeon general’s orders!

The rub…

We take off and 10 seconds later the bus driver coughs or sneezes and I hear a dry cough in the back!! Ha!…really?? A dry cough? Isn’t that one of the symptoms?

45 minutes of fear and loathing later, I walk the last 1/3 mile home carefully shuffling my feet through the puddles of 12% bleach solution they squirt on downtown sidewalks to combat that Hep A thing. I make it through the gate and back door using the key as a probe so I never actually touch any door knobs then wash my hands thoroughly, dump all of my clothes straight into the laundry with two Tide-pods. This includes my original gore-tex jacket that has never been washed with anything but Ivory Snow per manufacturer’s instructions. I wipe everything from my pockets with an alcohol wipe the take a scorching hot shower…

The Dark and Evil COVID-19

I got to thinking…it’s all so dark and creepy. I rode the bus to work as a kid; two hours each way through the worst neighborhoods. Grafitti, hookers, crack dealers; school girls getting off and on so they could walk by the jail and listen to the hooting convicts in the morning. Three card monty and strangers sharing the weirdest stories on the way home at night. This one totally benign 48 minute trip took the cake. Thanks Coronavirus!

Stay sane people! And hug yer housemates ’cause that’s all yer gettin’ for a while!

I survived COVID-19 epidemic SWAG coming soon – just not too soon…

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Hello world!

monster energy jump

Hello world is the first term a student programmer adds into a program to see it appear on the screen. According to Wikipedia, the tradition of using the phrase “Hello, world” as the test message was influenced by an example program in the book “The C Programming Language”, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. It is an easy phrase to remember for an instructor to tell the class.

Superstar Pro Golfer Tiger Woods used the phrase in the press tent after his first PGA Tour Win. Woods attended Stanford University in California; the same neighborhood that spawned Xerox(PARC), Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Cisco, Windows and Apple Computers. Tiger probably heard or saw the phrase often. For him, it was the perfect time to use it.

For us, it is a glad-handing introduction to our site and products that may seem a little rough around the edges. It is our exposure to the binary system of success or failure in engineering. So often, engineering projects include a big BANG! Sometimes it is the sound of success and mostly it is the sound of failure. We want to wish everyone success in their efforts. Most importantly, learn from failures and BE SAFE when you are jumping that pickup truck over a helicopter!