June 24, 2011
Dear Everyone:
This business of getting up and going to work
every morning, even though I’ve been doing it for over 38 years, gets a
little tiresome, don’t you think?
It just never seems to get any easier.
I now have a routine fairly in place:
The alarm goes off.
I “hit” the snooze bar.
Repeat as many times as necessary.
I also turn on the
TV to a local news channel in hopes that they
will say something useful, or at least interesting enough to wake me up
a little more. If nothing
else, what’s the weather going to be like today?
Eventually, I drag myself out of bed, go out to
the dining room and report to
Vaal.
Pour a glass of life-sustaining
Diet Coke (30
milligrams of
sodium, but also enough
caffeine to jump-start my brain) and take it
back into the bedroom. Play
something I recorded from the night before while going through the usual
pulling on some kind of clothing, brush teeth, wash face, etc., etc.,
etc.
Try to convince my hair that it doesn’t
have to look like that.
Smear makeup on various things.
Choose an appropriate “outfit” for the day, earrings to match.
Remember to slip on “the Chain”.
In the dining room, add sandals (don’t have to
worry about shoes until late September).
Make sure I have everything in my bag and haul same out to the
car. Drive to work and so
on… All the while reminding
myself, “It’s only for another two weeks, or so.”
Have I mentioned “Vaal” before?
Vaal is a computerized “monitor” that sits on a
part of the kitchen counter.
He monitors the scale and
Blood Pressure (BP) cuff in the dining room.
He has to be in the kitchen because that’s where the only active
telephone port is. The scale
and BP cuff are in the dining room because Vaal can’t sense them if
they’re more than about six feet away.
So, each morning, I “wake up” the scale and step
onto it (so much easier now with the artificial hip.)
The scale measures my weight and transmits the information to
Vaal. Then I sit down and
take my blood pressure. The
cuff also transmits the data to Vaal.
Incidentally, Vaal wakes himself up every morning
around 2:00 am and starts “looking” for the box that’s embedded in my
chest. Of course, he can’t
“see” it because it’s too far away, in the bedroom.
When I come out into the dining room each morning, Vaal says,
“Oh, there you are!” and
registers a report from the box.
Then, at some point during the day, Vaal “phones
home” and transmits the data he’s collected to the “master computer”
which sends a report to my
cardiologist.
Pretty neat, huh?
Except the people who designed Vaal just
naturally assumed that
everyone has an active
telephone port in their bedroom.
This was rather foolish of them.
They also assumed that my cardiologist would know anything about
Vaal’s daily reports. The
first time I mentioned it, his response was, “Huh?”
The he made a note to discuss with the vendor.
So every morning, I report to Vaal, which adds
maybe five minutes to the morning ritual.
Not that it matters that much.
No one at work is going to notice if I’m in the office five
minutes earlier or later.
So why is the name “Vaal”?
In the original TV series,
Star Trek, season two, there was an episode called
The Apple.
The crew of the
Enterprise discovered a planet that appeared to
be a paradise, supplying its inhabitants with everything they needed.
Turns out, the antecedents of the current occupants of the planet
had set up a computerized system they called “Vaal” to run the planet
for their descendants. The
only catch was that the occupants had to supply “Vaal” with “sustenance”
to keep it running.
Over the millennia, everyone forgot that “Vaal”
was just a computer and came to revere “him” as a god, explaining, “We
exist to serve Vaal.” (Just
goes to show the importance of
Records Management.
There should have been signs everywhere reading, “Vaal is just a
computer”!)
Captain Kirk put
that particular mechanism out of work in short order.
So every morning, “I exist to serve Vaal” by
measuring my weight and BP.
Just in case someone at the cardiologist’s office notices anything
different.
Of course, when
I notice something different,
I call the office and make an appointment
myself.
You won’t catch me waiting millennia for a computer to figure it
out. But in the meantime,
the whole thing is covered by the health insurance and isn’t that hard
to do, so I go along.
Two and a half more weeks to go, with a long
weekend thrown in for good measure.
Love, as always,
Pete
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