The Old Coot cuts the line. June 12, 2109 Article

The Old Coot solves a line problem.

By Merlin Lessler

I don’t think architects get out enough. They don’t visit the buildings they’ve designed, to see if they are meeting the needs of the people who inhabit them. Take the restrooms, as a for instance. If they visited any public facility, they might pick up a few tips on design fundamentals that apparently aren’t taught in architect school. They would see a long line of women waiting to get into the bathroom and a tiny, or no line at all, in front of the men’s room door. It wouldn’t be hard to adjust the design to eliminate this flaw. Make the ladies room twice as large as the men’s room. Equality is great, but not as a design fundamental. Not, when it comes to rest rooms. Unequal square footage should be the norm.

Architects also need to go inside the rest rooms. Years ago, some engineering marvel decided to replace paper towel dispensers with electric hand dryers. “How can it go wrong? It solves the trash removal issue!” It did that, I’ll grant you, but over the years the machines have been ramped up and now sound like a jet engine revving up on the runway. They’re louder and harder on the ears than a rock concert. I’m lucky, I’m usually wearing jeans and denim is the perfect material for drying your hands. I hustle out the door while wiping them on my pants. It’s a skill I picked up when I was six years old and got my first pair of Levi’s. I just wish I had a second pair of hands so I could cover my ears at the same time.

Architects might also notice, if they stopped by one of their creations, that the paved walkways into buildings are seldom used, as evidenced by well-worn dirt paths through the grass to building entrances. It might be smarter to plant grass and see where people walk. Then, pave the worn-down paths. (Not my original idea; I stole this from someone; I forget who.)

Maybe, when they are at one of their creations, they can try to open their car door without dinging the car next to them in the parking lot. The spaces get smaller and smaller, yet the cars get longer and wider. It’s especially hard on old coots like me. We have to fling the door wide open and then work to unfold and extricate an uncooperative body that wants to stay in the car. They must have picked up their design principles in the same college course that airline designers learned to squeeze more people (sheep is more like what they think of us) into airplanes. And, just like the car and parking space phenomena, the passengers boarding planes are getting bigger, but the seats, aisles and headroom are getting smaller. Somebody in the design business needs to do the math! PLEASE!    

Comments? Complaints? Send to – mlessler7@gmail.com

Tho Old Coot wants closed captions - June 5, 2019 Article

The Old Coot complains yet again, #827.

By Merlin Lessler

This is the 827^th Old Coot article that’s erupted through pen & paper (and keyboard) over the past 15 or so years. Most of them have voiced some sort of beef about the world we live in, the world I live in anyhow. By the time I’ve finished scribbling & typing I’m laughing at the complaint, and more importantly, laughing at myself. More than six of these eruptions have aired my ongoing gripe with the “Weather” people. One article earned me a call from a US Weather Service meteorologist, to defend their warning system, that at the most inopportune times, interrupts my TV screen with irrelevant (and annoying delivered) alerts that don’t affect my area, or if they do, are what I would call, normal weather. I complain that they have made us afraid of thunderstorms, snowstorms, winds, rain, heat and cold waves, making the latter seem even more severe by replacing actual temperature measures with wind-chill and heat index numbers, adding to the fear factor.   

Even more of my complaints have focused on the big three - politicians, bureaucrats and corporations. A corporation, by legal definition is an “artificial person,” but it seems all three entities often fit that “artificial person” description, producing rules, laws and policies that defy common sense.

I’ve complained about people who clog up and slow down lines due to their inability to follow line protocols. I’ve thrown my gender under the bus endless times for our lack of ability to fold cloth items (T-shirts, sheets, blankets, etc.) for our inability to notice obvious things in the world around us, to make a bed without it looking like a dog chased a cat under the covers and an inability to come to terms with the good-bye process that our wives employ, taking ten minutes or more to say goodbye when leaving a gathering of friends. Often, with us standing at the side and chomping at the bit to just GO!

My complaint today is rather mundane, but it raises my blood pressure when I encounter it. I’m hoping it irks you too. But who knows? Maybe it’s just an old coot thing. I go to a sports bar or restaurant to consume unhealthy food and an adult beverage or two where there is a wall of TV’s.  No sound is coming from the speakers because they are on different channels and would only add to the din in a place that is already noisy. But most often, not a single TV is in a closed caption mode. You get a picture but little idea of what is going on. If you ask the waitress, waiter or bar tender to turn on the closed captions, all you get is a blank stare and are then told, “Only Joe knows how to do that, and he’s in the back. I’ll tell him when I get a chance.” This, form high tech young people who grew up in the electronic device era and yet, can’t or aren’t allowed to mess with the TV remote control.  And, it’s not just sports bars that are closed caption challenged, health care waiting rooms, airports, train stations and many other lobbies as well. The customer used to “always be right” but now we’re left out in the cold, the cold of silence.

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I'm afraid of my chair! - Old coot article of May 29, 2019

The Old Coot is afraid of his chair.

By Merlin Lessler

The U.S Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) collects statistics on injuries and deaths caused by consumer products. A dry, humorless collection of data, at first blush. But when you really examine the numbers, they are quite thought provoking. Astounding, is more like it.

I’m looking at the data for senior citizens (65 and older) because that’s the team I’m on, like it or not. We are a stumbling bunch and some of our stumbles take us to the emergency room. We’re beyond the “Go walk it off” stage. Or, as my mother dealt with my injury complaints when I was a kid (as did most mothers back then), “Here’s a popsicle; go out and sit in the back yard and you’ll be fine.” If I didn’t have a bone sticking through my skin; I wasn’t really hurt. (I only had one trip to the ER as a kid, and that was because a pitchfork got stuck in my foot.)

CPSC numbers, from the most recent report I could find, show that seniors had over two million ER visits that year caused by consumer products. The rate for us old folks is 5 injuries per 100 compared to 3 per 100 for the 24 to 64-year-old group. OK, we’re more accident prone, and at a rate nearly twice that of younger people. No one knows this better than we do, but what surprises me, are some of the consumer products that send us to the ER. Blankets, for example. Blankets caused 4,700 ER visits. I can only guess how a blanket caused a trip to the hospital. Maybe, if you get tangled up and throw your shoulder out of joint as you struggle to get free? Or, if you get a leg cramp and smash your toe into the footboard trying to kick it out? Anyhow, it does happen, and nearly 5,000 times a year.

The products that cause most of the injuries are more understandable: 785,600 ER visits due to stairs, ramps, landings and floors, 128,200 due to bathroom structures and fixtures, and 44,300 from old coots like me, climbing on ladders or stools. There is no data to cover one of my ladder mishaps. I climbed onto the roof and accidentally kicked the ladder over, stranding myself until a good Samaritan (Damen Tinkham) came by and set the ladder back up.

We are a clumsy bunch, us old coots (and cootessas); we’re so clumsy that 6,200 of us had to go to an ER after using sound recording equipment! 11, 000 visits as the result of a golfing mishap. We keep the ERs in business. I think we should get a senior discount.  

I’ve got to stop my examination of this consumer data. If I get any further into it, I won’t dare to get out of my chair. Which, I notice, isn’t as safe a place as I might have thought since chairs, sofas and sofa-beds caused 46,800 (ER) injuries. Even if I get out of my chair without an accident, I still have to navigate across the room to type this handwritten mess of scribbles into my computer. A dangerous journey across a throw rug. Dangerous, because rugs and carpets cause 64,200 injuries a year, according to the CPSC. I’ll have to risk it, but it’s a jungle out there.

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The Old Coot has sixty kids (May 22, 2019 Article)

The Old Coot has sixty kids?

By Merlin Lessler

I'm an old coot; my children are grown out in the world, and every so often I find myself ruminating in my head, or looking through a stack of old pictures, wondering how that time with them could have passed so fast. It’s the kind of wool gathering that brings ones mortality into sharp focus. This isn’t something new for me, this ruminating; I did it at each passage in each of their lives: bringing them home from the hospital as a newborn – hearing their first utterance of Da Da – witnessing their first time sitting up, crawling, standing, walking, getting a tooth, off to school, teenage-hood, driver’s license, high school graduation, college and on and on and on. And, through all of it, I was aghast at the warp speed that time uncoiled. So, “BIG DEAL,” you say, “Everyone has encounters with, and surprise at, how fast time flies by, how fast life flies by. 

Well, here’s the big deal, if you have kids of your own, or you are an aunt or uncle, or just were able to watch neighborhood kids grow up, you get to see them in many variations: baby, toddler, kindergartner, teenager, young adult and off into the world for additional transformations. But they just get to see you (us) in an unvaried state – an adult. That’s what we’ve been all their lives. Even when the kids were little and I was in my twenty’s and thirty’s, I was the old man, their old man. Every father, mother, aunt, uncle, and neighbor is an oldster to them as well. If you're twenty, thirty, forty (which is young from an old coot perspective), that’s old to a kid.

We’re lucky; we get to observe all their different “person-hoods” as they grow up. Just look at a few old pictures and you will see what I mean. They really are different people as they move through the passages of life. It’s sort of a rebirth, every few years. Their underlying traits show through, but they’ve become new people with each passage. I was lucky enough to co-parent six children and to know each of them as 10 different people. That’s 60 people I have a history with. But they’re stuck with just one of me – “the old man.” Figuratively back then, literally now.

The next time I’m in the doctor’s office and am asked if I know what month it is (and my answer is two months off) or who the president is (and I say, Bill Clinton.) I might get a pass since I at least knew the name of a month and the name of a president, but if I was asked how many children I had, and I said, “Sixty,” it would be the loony bin for me. I don’t care; it’s the truth. And, I have the pictures to prove it.

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Old Coot has many, many dogs. (May 15, 2019 Article)

The Old Coot has gone to the dogs.

By Merlin Lessler

I visited the dog park at Hickories Park the other day. I’ve been going to the main part of the park since 1986, to jog, walk, picnic, X-country ski, read and doze in my canvas bag chair, to rest after padding from the Village in my kayak and once a year to the Rotary Picnic. I was also there to watch my son’s soccer games, hit golf balls and visit friends in the camp grounds. But, never to the dog park! Hickories Park is the greatest public asset in our town. And now, the dog park makes it even better.

The entire park was a dog park when I first started going there. Our little cocker spaniel, Jezebel, loved to run free when no people were around. She’d like it even better now if she were still alive. To run free with other dogs and never fear the arrival of the dog warden.

We don’t have a dog these days; the circumstances of our lives at present isn’t compatible with dog ownership. Darn it! But I found out I don’t need a dog of my own, the people with dogs let you enjoy theirs at the dog park. Actually, it’s not the people who allow it; it’s the dogs themselves that roam free and stop by for a head rub. It’s so nice to sit on a bench or walk along the path surrounded by dogs running free, chasing each other in a game of tag, establishing the pecking order when new arrivals come to join the pack and doing all the things dogs do when allowed a little freedom.

No, I don’t have “a” dog these days; Instead, I have “dozens and dozens” of dogs, thanks to the dedicated volunteer members of ODOG, who created the dog park with a generous donation from Adam Weitsman. It’s a wonderful memorial to the memory of his sister, Rebecca, and her love of dogs. ODOG volunteers also help maintain the park and keep it user and dog friendly.

Don’t have a dog? Need a dog fix? Stop by and get your fill. And when the ODOG organization asks for help to sustain the place, give it some consideration. Any donation will be greatly appreciated and will get, and keep, a lot of tails wagging around town.

For more information about the dog park and ODOG (Owego Dog Owners Group), to become a volunteer or to donate financial support, you can visit their web site at – WWW.owegodogs.com

The Old Coot doesn't line up. (May 8, 2019 Article)

The Old Coot is out of line.

By Merlin Lessler

I was in a crowded deli the other day. It could have been a coffee house or a fast food restaurant, they are all about the same when a crowd shows up. Some give you a number or set up a rope barrier to guide you to the counter in an orderly fashion; some don’t. I like it when they don’t; I sit off to the side, sipping coffee and watching the show. I’m a student of the queue. Queue is a corporate word for line. CEO’s think we don’t mind waiting our turn if it’s in a queue, rather than a line. I love to watch people in line; it reveals so much about them. 

Lines wouldn’t be a problem if the fictitious “Soup Nazi” from the Seinfeld sitcom ran things. If you wanted soup from him, you conducted yourself by his rules: money in your left hand, step to the counter in one swift motion, speak your order clearly, quickly step sideways to the cashier, pay, keep your mouth shut, pick up your soup and leave. He would never allow the undisciplined, sprawling, disjointed lines that take place at delicatessens, fast food restaurants and other places that often have customers backed up in a mass of humanity.  

Some people who join a queue seem to have a psychological disorder, like the guy who keeps a four-foot distance between himself and the person in front of him. I guess it’s a phobia about bumping into another person. I hate being behind these guys. I’m afraid someone will come along and take the spot behind the person in front of him. It happens a lot.   

Fussy people with complicated orders are fun to watch – “I’d like a small coffee but put it in a “large” cup. I want it with two and 1/2 sugars, 1/2 sweet & low, 3 squirts of milk (not half & half), a cup of ice on the side and leave an inch between the coffee and the top of the cup. These people are painful to be stuck behind, but fun to watch when you’re just observing, almost as much fun as the people in Dunkin Donuts and other places who order in a zigzag fashion, giving the clerk a workout: a jelly from the lower right shelf, two steps over to a glazed on the upper left, three steps back for a plain in the next section. On and on they go, putting the poor clerk through an aerobic adventure and taking twice as long as they should. They do the same thing at a deli counter.  

The worst customer to get stuck behind is the one who doesn’t know what he wants. He’s waited in line facing a giant picture menu and has a panoramic view of the display cases, yet when the clerk asks, “How can I help you?” he gets a blank look on his face and replies, “I don’t know. What’s good?” The clerk starts rattling off suggestions; each is discarded; I don’t like jelly, I can’t eat chocolate, I have a bad tooth so I can’t chew a bagel. The game continues until he finally makes a selection. The clerk quickly throws it in a bag, hoping to get rid of him but it doesn’t work. Now, he changes his mind. “No, take this back. Give me the breakfast sandwich, but put the cheese on the bottom, don’t warm up the bagel, and make sure the egg is not too hot,” proving he knew what he wanted all along.

The list of queue performances is endless: customers on cell phones who have to discuss their selection with a friend - parents with four brats who insist the kids order for themselves but then veto their selections – absent minded shoppers who have to run back to their car where they left their wallet, low talkers, who order in a whisper and then get indignant when asked to repeat their selection. Queue watching is a pleasant pastime. You don’t even have to be an old coot to partake. All you have to do is pull up a chair or lean against the wall and watch the show.

Comments! Complaints! Send to – mlessler7@gmail.com

The hand rail surprised me. (May 1, 2019 Article)

The Old Coot is singing a new tune.

By Merlin Lessler

I noticed something the other day as I was walking down a set of stairs from a third floor to ground level. I’ve walked this same staircase for ten years or so. The thing I noticed, is that I was using the hand rail. I wondered how long I’d been doing that. I was almost sure I hot-footed it down, oftentimes two steps at a time. I suddenly realized that isn’t so; I go slow and use the hand rail.

Like most men, and all old coots, I don’t notice things, at least right away. Like the “new” curtains in our kitchen I commented on only to be informed they’d been there for several months. Or the “new” hanging plants on the porch that had gone from seedlings to full bloom. OK, that’s a flaw, not noticing things of that sort, but not noticing how I travel up and down a set of stairs? That takes the cake. Who would notice, if not me?

It got me thinking, this dealing with old age adventure that I’ve been on for nearly two decades. When I look back at the starting point, I laugh at myself for thinking I was old then. Hopefully in the future, I’ll feel the same thing as I look back to this moment and my use of a hand rail epiphany.

I started to take a little inventory to see what else I hadn’t noticed. I came up with several; I’ve stopped hopping around the room trying to get into a pair of pants, trying to avoid crashing into the sinks or the bathtub or the wall and putting myself in peril. I sit down to do it now; while I’m there, I slip on my shoes and socks. No sense bending and stretching to perform that chore.

My list is longer than I thought, but the real eye-opener was the number of strings on my guitar. I’d taken off the two lowest ones years ago; they add to the richness of a chord but aren’t essential. Now, I’m contemplating the removal of another string, because the index finger on my chord hand gets an attitude at times and won’t bend, preventing me from playing a chord that is essential in thousands of songs that can be played with just four chords. Three chords won’t do it; the only way I can get back to a four-chord level is to lose a string and play enough notes in that chord to “fake” it. I guess that’s what old age is all about, losing the music, one guitar string at a time. And then finding a new way to sing a happy tune.

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