June 15, 1989
Dear Everyone:
GREMLINS!!!
They’re everywhere.
Last year, almost to the day after the one-year warranty ran out on my condo, a gremlin moved into the cold water tap in the kitchen faucet. Nothing serious, mind you, just annoying. If the water came out at more than a very small trickle, the gremlin would start banging on the pipe, causing the water to come out in thumps (thump, thump, THUMP!) until you turned the tap so that the water came out at a high enough pressure to splash all over everything. No big deal. I could live with it, even though it made filling the ice cube trays a two step process (fill a measuring cup, then pour into the tray). It just wasn’t worth bothering with; plus I didn’t know if anything could actually be done about it. I figured when I was ready to sell the place, I would just make sure that no prospective buyers tried to turn on the cold water.
Then last week, exactly two years after I moved in, and one year after the warranty ran out, a new gremlin moved into the bathroom faucet. This could, of course, be an offspring of the kitchen gremlin, or it could be a cousin. At any rate, the bathroom faucet has started to drip.
OK, I told myself, you’re a homeowner now; you can’t just pick up the phone and complain to the manager. You’re going to have to learn to take care of these things. Go to the bookstore and buy a book on fixing-things-up. So I went to Stacey’s (the bookstore next door to my office building) on my lunch break and bout a Time-Life book on How to fix Things Yourself. Pus another $40 worth of good looking books (I try to stay out of bookstores because I know I have no control where books are concerned).
I took the books home with me last Friday. Saturday morning, I prepared to tackle the drips. When I looked at the faucet, the drip was gone. Completely. The basin was as dry as a bone.
What a great book!!! All I had to do was bring it into the apartment and the problem disappeared. Even the kitchen gremlin went into hiding. So I went to the movies instead of fixing the faucets. Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. Also the new Star Trek Movie.
Needless to say, as soon as the weekend was over, the bathroom gremlin came back. I plan to wave the book at it one more time, then I’ll get down to actually repairing the thing. The kitchen gremlin, on the other hand, is still in hiding. It probably knows that there is a wrench out there somewhere with its name on it.
Meanwhile, in CRMIS (“Company” Records Management Information Screw-up), the computer system that we use, the gremlins have been running rampant.
Schedules that weren’t supposed to be “moved” are “Moving” by themselves. Series are vanishing. Sections of “Melanie’s” London work have disappeared even though she had printouts that prove that the information was there before.
CITC’s “Tom Harrison”, in the regular Thursday Morning Meeting That Will Not Die, when we presented him with the problem, replied: “Document it.” This is what CITC always says. (Patient: “What does it mean, Doctor?” Psychiatrist: “What do YOU think it means?”)
“Tom’s” theory, based on the fact that many things that used to work OK in the past aren’t now, is that each of the small changes that they make in the System to cure one problem, may be causing other problems further down the road.
Put in more scientific terms: Each time they “fix” something in the System, it opens a back door, or a window, for a gremlin to slip through. Slowly, stealthily, they have been congregating, breeding, squeezing through the cracks (CRMIS is full of crack) and now BANG!
They’re on the rampage! CRMIS has become a veritable rat’s nest of gremlins.
I think we’re going to need something a little stronger than Raid to clean this one up.
Love, as always,
Pete
Next week: Adventures in Plumbing!
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