Okay, he was an Irish writer talking about England, but I’m going to apply his quote to Scotland. (If I can work in a Welsh reference, I’ve got most of the country covered.)
England and America are two countries divided by a common language
– George Bernard Shaw
Several years ago I travelled to Scotland to visit a good friend. He’s very traditionally Scottish, the proud member of an ancient Scottish clan. Although he lives in Edinburgh, his family is from the Scottish highlands. He took me on a driving tour along scenic winding roads. The sensation of driving on the “wrong” side of the road was heightened by his aggressive, yet very skillful driving.
We stopped at what we in America call a gas station. I was quickly discovering that trying to name things in Scotland was not an easy task. As we went in to pay for the petrol, the old gentleman behind the cash register started talking in either a language or a dialect that I completely failed to comprehend. Not wanting to appear as the “ignorant American” I didn’t say anything and let my friend handle paying for the fuel. Once we were well out of earshot of the people in the station, I asked my friend,
What was that he was saying?
I have no idea.
You’re Scottish, why don’t you sound like that?
Because I was properly educated!
Although to be honest, it sounded more like eshucadated.
The country was every bit as lovely as an Americanized vision of it would be. The heather was just starting bloom. We visited centuries old cemeteries that contained the graves of his ancestors going back for countless generations. We heard people playing the pipes. The weather, notoriously unpredictable, was beautiful. We drove past towns about which my friend retold stories of betrayal and unselfish kindness.
When did that happen?
Early sixteenth century.
We visited his parents’ home, Renton, which has been in existence since literally the beginning of recorded history in Scotland, the census of the thirteenth century.
I was thinking back on this trip and my friend’s obvious pride in his heritage as I noticed a story about St Andrew. He is the patron saint of Scotland and today (November 30) is St Andrew’s day. The title of this post “La Naomh Anndrais” is gaelic for the name of his day.
So, if you have a Scottish friend, go ahead and wish them a La Naomh Anndrais. Just don’t ask me how to pronounce it.
I have no idea.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I’m typically a pretty mild-mannered guy. I’m like Clark Kent without the secret Superman persona. My family has a history of drama. Some is little stuff: I went to five different schools in the fifth grade. Some is big stuff: I’ve watched family members appear in court in shackles to face multiple felonies.
A lifetime of drama has done two things for me. First, it’s made me very good at crisis management. Many of my family members are. In fact, I think our family motto could be “We are at our best when things are at their worst.”
The second thing it did for me was help me gain perspective. I’ve discovered that often a decision doesn’t really matter. Don’t get me wrong. There are decisions that matter. That are literally a matter of life or death. But, much of the decisions that occupy our day don’t really matter.
On Saturday I took a few hours and watched BYU’s last football game of the year. They beat Utah State. The game was noteworthy for a couple of things. One is that my daughter attends USU and my lovely wife and I attended BYU. So, bragging rights were on the line. The second was that USU for the third time in three years gave BYU’s quarterback a season ending injury. (Note to Taysom Hill: Never play USU again. . in anything.)
Brigham Young University is a private school funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the Mormons. And the tie between the church and the school is very strong. Church leadership takes an active interest in the running of the school, and two past school presidents are part of the church senior leadership.
As a practicing Mormon, I believe that God cares what happens at BYU.
I don’t think God was watching the game on Saturday. I don’t think God ever watches football. At least not in a “He wants one side to win” kind of way. I think if we were able to ask Him about BYU football’s season results, His response would be “What’s the worst that can happen?” BYU won the national championship in 1984. That unexpected result was a direct cause of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) being established. The major football powers didn’t want to lose the national title to a private university from Utah.
But, other than that result, the national championship was not a significant event in the history of BYU. By that I mean, it didn’t matter. If BYU were to finish the season 0-13, I don’t think the work of the university and by extention any good that God could bring about through the school would be impacted in the least.
In our lives, in my life, most decisions are about as important as BYU winning a football game. Where does the team want to go to lunch? I’m fine letting someone else pick. It really doesn’t matter. In our new office, is my desk going to be next to the window or next to the boss’s office? Again, with either decision, what’s the worst that can happen?
That question, what’s the worst that can happen, has a great amount of power. Because, once I’ve named the worst possible result, I can determine if I want to spend political capital to try to influence the decision.
We need a new backup vendor.
What’s the worst that can happen?
We could lose all of our data and go out of business.
Okay, THAT is an important decision.
Contrast that with:
We are repainting the offices and they want to know should it be blue or white?
What’s the worst that can happen?
You’d be in an office with a color you don’t like.
I’m good either way.
The drama and trauma in my life has helped me to realize that if I can stand the worst that can happen, I don’t really need to worry about the decision. It makes for much more relaxing life.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Dear Users,
This is a reminder to download any files that remain on Pogoplug. Thanks to the cooperation of our partners and investors we have been able to restart our hosted cloud service to give you more time to retrieve your data. Please understand that this is a temporary situation. We hope to have the service live until December 4th but implore you to retrieve your data with urgency given that this is an interim solution. We remain saddened that we must discontinue this service and we thank you for being one of our loyal users.
Best,
The Pogoplug Team
I used Pogoplug for backup. Last summer I wrote about losing 175GB of pictures because “Forever Isn’t That Long.” I’m no longer a Pogoplug user. (Burn me once shame on you. . .I’m going to Dropbox.) But, I’m still on their mailing list. They tried to get me back as a customer in July when I reported my problems.
Well Pogoplug’s new business model (subscription) didn’t work any better than their old one (buy a piece of hardware.) They sent out the above message urging their clients to Stop using our service ASAP!! If you ignore their warnings, after December 4th, your data will be gone for good. (Although, that should probably say, “Gone for bad.”)
Last weekend I gathered with my family to bury my uncle and celebrate his life. My mother found a bunch of old pictures. I’m not sure if they were actually in a shoebox, but they might as well have been. This is a picture of my great-grandparents, Paul and Inez.
It was taken on the day of their wedding in 1904. The date and names are written on the back of the picture. I took the picture to WalMart and made several copies of this picture and some other very old family pictures for family members who were attending the funeral. It cost about $0.50 to make a 5×7 picture.
At the family gathering after the funeral, the pictures were a big hit. So much so that the copies I made were quickly claimed.
You should scan this in and post them online so the rest of the family can see them.
This is, of course a good idea and a very, very bad idea. My cousins, especially those who couldn’t attend, would love to see these pictures and be able put faces with the names on our pedigree chart. And while $0.50 per picture isn’t hugely expensive, scanning and posting online costs almost nothing. And we could store them in the cloud. . just not on Pogoplug.
Dr. Vinton ‘Vint” Cerf is the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He is the co-inventer or the TCP/IP protocols. That’s the “language” that your computer uses to talk to other computers and the internet. He knows a thing or two about technology and the history and future of comptuers. He has advice for people like you and me who store our data in the cloud.
Print out your pictures or risk losing them.
Technologies change. Do you have copies of the papers you wrote in college? Maybe in some folder on your computer labeled, “Old Stuff”? If you wrote those papers more than 15 years ago, chances are you can’t open them today. Microsoft Word is the dominate word processor, but even it’s file format has changed over the years. Prior to Word, everyone used WordPerfect, which had it’s own proprietary format. And before WordPerfect, the cool kids used Word*Star to create documents. You might be able to recover a really important WordPerfect document. And Microsoft Word might be able to get some thing out of those old files, but Word*Star is a distant memory.
Just as document formats change, so do picture formats. And the storage locations where we’ve carefully collected and catagorized our thousands of pictures, don’t last forever. I have grandkids. That means that my mother is also a great-grandmother. When my grandkids grow up will they stumble across a 112 year old wedding picture of my mother?
If they do, the odds are they will be pulling a picture out of a shoebox rather than downloading a file from the cloud.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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My Editor Is An Idiot. However, he’s also pretty persistent. My editor-self thinks my writer-self is a lazy, procrastinator who gets by on a modicum of talent rather than any measure of hard work. (Staff meetings in my head are not pretty.) However, they need each other. My writer-self has to admit that editor-self comes up with good ideas. Earlier this week was one called “Call Help Line.”
In the post about the idiotic editor, I complained about how I had this great idea and couldn’t remember it because the note was too cryptic. Editor-self explained it (again!) and I have to agree it is still a pretty good idea.
One of the responsibilities in my job is to work with our engineering teams to do maintenance on our systems. Typically when you need to do maintenance on a system, you wait until a time when the systems aren’t being used. Unfortunately, my company takes calls 24×7. We have no down time. That makes maintenance a lot harder. But, that’s a big part of the reason I have a job; to make sure the process works smoothly.
Maintenance gets planned out weeks, sometimes months in advance. It’s very much like putting on a play. There are actors (engineers), a script (the maintenance task), rehearsals (testing) and generally a single opening night. Oh, and we also have reviewers. Those are the agents who need to verify that the maintenance was completely successfully and we didn’t break anything. My job is to be the director. I need to ensure everything comes together perfectly.
Often we will do maintenance during the least busy time of the day. Actually, the least busy time of the day is the middle of the night. It’s not unusual for maintenance to start at 9:30pm and run until 2:00am or 3:00am. When we are done with the maintenance work, and the performance is complete, no one gets to go home until the reviews are in.
Last week, I had a problem. It was 1:30am. The maintenance was complete and the engineering teams told me that everything had gone smoothly. All we needed to do now was get an agent to verify that we hadn’t inadvertantly broken something. The problem was that the agent that was going to verify for us, wasn’t on the conference call.
My normal contact at our site in Lexington only worked normal hours (5:30am-9:30pm.) She wasn’t available. The agent we had contacted in the week leading up the maintenance wasn’t on the call and I didn’t have a number to call him. The engineers were tired and wanted to go to bed. (We all worked from home, so they were already home.) And they were waiting on me to get the verification so we could be done.
I tried calling the numbers in our Lexington office with the hopes that someone walking by the coordinator’s desk might pick up. No luck.
I tried emailing the supervisors that were typically on the overnight shift. No response.
The engineers were trying to be patient, but honestly, this was part of my job and I wasn’t doing it well. Finally, I realized something. Our agents were working because we had to take calls for our client 24 hours per day. That meant that somewhere on Google was a phone number that would connect people to my agents. If it would connect customers, it would also connect me.
I dialed the 800 number.
Thanks for calling. How may I assist you?
This might sound like a weird question, but are you located in Lexington, Ky?
Ah. . .no. I’m in Los Colinas, TX.
Okay, could you transfer me back into the queue?
Sure. . .I guess.
I waited for the call to ring through again and another agent answered the phone.
Thanks for calling. How may I assist you?
Yeah, this is going to sound a little strange, but are you located in Lexington, Ky?
Yes, I am.
Great, could I please speak with your supervisor?
Are you sure there’s not something I could help you with?
No. It’s nothing about you. You did great. I just need to speak to your supervisor.
Okay.
…
This is Michelle, how can I help you?
Michelle, this is Rodney Bliss. Were you the one planning to help us do some testing for the computer systems tonight?
All of our calls are recorded. I can only imagine what the Quality Assurance person thought of that call. Michelle wasn’t the person scheduled to help us, she explained our original tester was out sick for the day. But, she was able to verify that all the systems were working fine and the maintenance had been a success.
Yeah, my editor is still an idiot, but he does occasionally come up with a good story idea.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Tools for talking when stakes are high
For this review, of course, I read this 228 page book. It would hardly be a proper review if I didn’t. And yet, I think I could have done a pretty good review without reading it over the past month. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read this delightful book. I wait long enough between rereadings that each time feels almost like the first time.
Simply put, Crucial Conversations is one of the best, and most important business books I’ve ever read. It’s wrong to call it a business book, although that is certainly what it is. It’s also a book for talking to your teenagers, to your spouse, to your neighbor, to the clerk at the store, to a car salesman, to that annoying uncle at Thanksgiving who wants to discuss politics.
We communicate everyday. Some of us have jobs that required us to talk a lot, some of us mostly work alone, but we all have to interact with our fellow humans at some point. And where there is interaction there is potential conflict. Most of us avoid confrontations. They involve pain and discomfort. And when it’s over, someone has won and someone is hurt. And they are even sometimes the same person.
Crucial Conversations lays out a roadmap for navigating that tricky area where two people come together. It lays out in bite sized chunks, how to prepare for and then successful get through those interactions. It would be tempting to think about “successful” in terms of winners and losers. It there is a loser in a conversation then no one won. Think about it, do you actually want to compete with your spouse? Do you want the most important person in your life to leave a conversation with you feeling like a loser? Of course, not.
Crucial Conversation introduces the concept that change starts with you. The group of authors, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler give you tools for how to make it safe for others in a conversation. Only after you’ve made it safe for the other person to share their opinions can you move on to mutual purpose. The process, using the venacular of the book looks like this.
- Start with Heart
- Learn to Look
- Make It Safe
- Master My Stories
- STATE My Path
- Explore Others’ Paths
- Move to Action
The authors ackowledge the temptation to take this book and hand it to someone else so they can fix their communication issues. In acknowledging it, they also address it. Start with Heart might just as well be titled Start with Me. We cannot change others. We can only change how we react to them. This book helps train you in a method of responding that allows you both to come together for common purposes.
What I Liked
The material is immediately applicable. This is not a book of theory looking for an application. Reading this book and applying the principles can have a real impact on the interactions and especially conflicts you are currently experiencing. And the steps that the authors lay out do not require you to make huge changes. The material is more like a minor change of focus that immediately brings the entire picture into focus. In other words, it’s very doable. And the results can be measured by “what’s in it for me?” You will get much more out of your interactions than you have when you were trying to “win.”
What I Didn’t
While the authors acknowlege that you must start with yourself, a crucial conversation is a two way street. They provide tools for both listening and talking, but the fact remains that if you are the only one changing your approach, the conversation might still not progress to a mutual purpose. You don’t need to get the other person to read the book to use the concepts and tools, but it would certainly help.
What It Means For You
This book is literally for everyone. But, if your job involves influencing others, peers, supervisors, subordinates, this book is going to help. In fact, it reminded me of the classic Dale Carnegie book, “How To Win Friends and Influence People.” The advantage that Crucial Conversations has is that it’s written more as a how-to guide.
My Rating
Four out of four stars. One of the best communications books ever written.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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The note from my editor was supposed to tell me what to write about today. Here’s what it said,
Call Help Line
That was it. No context. And yet, I know the context was perfectly clear to my editor when he wrote it. He wasn’t trying to be confusing. In fact, he was trying to make sure I didn’t miss out on a cool story idea. That’s the whole reason he wrote it down; so I wouldn’t forget it.
I know all of this because I am my own editor. Creating content daily isn’t as hard as you might think. We all spend hours daily talking, watching movies, making decisions, laughing at jokes. There are literally unlimited numbers of things to write about. Not all of them are interesting, of course. And the writing can take an exciting story and make it uninteresting: “George Clooney came into the store today, but I haven’t heard back from the carpet installers.” You can also turn a boring story into an interesting story, “The statistics showing why Trump won show the fascinating correlation between polling methodologies and the changing face of American diversity.” But, there are some topics that defy writing. You can’t put lipstick on a pig.
When I get an idea for a column, I know that I’ll forget it if I don’t write it down. Those idea are often like dreams. They seem perfectly clear in the moment, but even a few minutes later I struggle to recall the idea: “Something about elephants and computer keyboards, but I’m not sure what the connection was.”
I write notes so that later I’ll know. Interestingly, when I’m writing the note, my editor-self has to convince my writer-self that we should write this down.
What a cool idea. I’ll write about that tomorrow.
You should write it down.
I don’t need to write it down. I know exactly what I want to say about it.
If you don’t write it down you will forget it.
Not this idea. This is one of those that sticks with you.
Remember the elephants and the keyboards?
What about them?
Yesterday, I thought of an awesome idea for writing a post. It was so good, that my editor-self convinced my writer-self to write it down. Today, my writer-self was excited to tell the story. I didn’t bother trying to remember the details. I knew that I wrote it down.
I honestly don’t have any idea what I meant. It was less than 24 hours ago that the idea was so vivid, so clear that I wasn’t even sure I needed to write a note to my writer-self. And because the idea was so clear, I felt confident in simply jotting down a few words. You know, just to jog my memory.
Nope. I got nothing. Just the vague feeling that it was a great story that my readers would enjoy.
I’ll throw away the note from my editor-self. That well is now completely dry. I’m disappointed since I really wanted to write a post about that topic.
Like I said, my editor-self is an idiot.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I got stopped by a cop on my way to work this morning. Well, I didn’t actually stop. I sort of slowed down to about 5 mph and then once I got past his car, I sped up to 80 mph. The police officer didn’t bother to chase me. He was busy giving a ticket to some guy in a black Nissan Maxima.
I first discovered the cost of spam 20 years ago when I was working at WordPerfect Corporation. We had just moved to a true enterprise email system. It was about this time of year. (Late Fall.) I sent an email to the entire company with the subject line
‘Tis the season: Fa La La
Okay, now it looks like a stupid thing to do. At the time, in 1990, when I was new in business, it seemed harmless enough. A senior email developer explained it to me.
Our company has 5,000 employees in it. Let’s say that email took 30 seconds to read and delete. That’s 2,500 minutes or let’s call it 40 hours. That is a full time person for a week doing nothing but deleting your email. In other words, figure out how much you earn in a week and that’s how much you just cost the company with your little joke.
Technically, it was more than I earn in a week because I was one of the lowest paid employees in the company. But, the point was the same. I was stunned. I was so impressed with the lesson that two decades later I still remember the details.
Years later, I tried to convey the same message to my engineering team when I worked for a large non-profit in Utah. My team owned the email systems. We supported a user base of 30,000 full time employees and 50,000 volunteers who also used our email system. Our systems were well built. We had redundant systems. We had caching and buffering that allowed the email systems to keep working even if the backup went away. With all of that infrastructure, we still needed to occasionally reboot a server, or take a system offline. We were judged by our system availability.
Our stated goal for the month was 99.7% uptime. Over the course of a month, 99.7% meant we could be down for 2 hours and 11 minutes. If we pushed for 99.9% it meant we could be down for 44 minutes. If we wanted 99.95% we could have 22 minutes of downtime. If we wanted 99.99% uptime we could only be down for 4 minutes per month. And if we tried for “five nines,” or 99.999% system uptime, we could only be down for 26 seconds per month. Here’s a chart
Monthly Downtime Chart
- 99.999% – 26 sec
- 99.990% – 4 min
- 99.950% – 22 min
- 99.900% – 44 min
- 99.700% – 2 hr 11 min
Even though my boss held me to 99.7%, I held my team to 99.9% and pushed for 99.95%. Why would I do that? I wasn’t trying to make my team’s job harder. And I really wasn’t doing it so I could show my boss rosy numbers. With 30,000 employees, every minute of downtime was 500 hours, or about 3 months of work for a fulltime person. If we were available for 99.99%, that 0.01% of downtime represented a full year of employement for someone wasted. Put another way, for every four minutes I could avoid being offline, I gave the company an extra year of productivity.
All of a sudden a 5 minute reboot of an email server looks really expensive.
Yes, I know the math is a little fuzzy since people don’t use their email system every minute of every day. But, from a system standpoint, we had to assume that they wanted to. We had to have the systems ready to meet their needs all the time.
Interestingly in that job, my boss never had to worry about my team failing to meet the company standard of 99.7%. If we were down for multiple hours in a month, it was because our datacenter crashed (happened twice in five years.) but, for the day-to-day work, my team was trying to save minutes, they weren’t even looking at hours of downtime.
What does all this have to do with my commute? And how did I manage to run away from the cop and not get chased?
Typically, I take the train to work. But, the rainy and cold season has started in Utah. And given that it’s Thanksgiving week, I knew that traffic would be light. I chose to drive. It’s about 30 miles from my house to my work. the commute is generally about 30-40 minutes depending on traffic.
I was driving along at 75 mph in the carpool lane when cars in all six lanes of the freeway started hitting their brakes. As we came up over a little hill we saw the flashing lights of a Utah Highway Patrol car about half a mile ahead. There was no crash. Just a cop pulling over a guy who was probably going too fast. And yet, thousands of us we impacted. A half mile slowdown for six lanes? That’s maybe 250 cars per lane, or about 1500 cars. If the traffic stop took 10 minutes, and we were going an average of 30 mph, (meaning it took us a minute to get through the slowdown) that’s 15,000 cars that lost about 2 minutes each. 30,000 minutes is about 3 months of fulltime work.
So, the cop, or the speeder depending on where you want to place the blame, wasted three months of a person’s time today. I wonder if law enforcement considers the cost of a traffic stop when they are deciding to pull someone over?
In any case, that was how I ran from a cop this morning and got away with it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I’m one of those who eat breakfast at my desk. I have a box of cereal and plastic spoons in my office bookshelf. (Who has physical books anymore?)
Cereal without milk is just twigs and leaves. My company has a small self service kiosk that sells milk and juice and things.
I don’t need a full pint of milk for my cereal. I’ll often buy one of these bottles and keep it in the refridgerator in the break room for cereal the next. Day or later in teh week.
Question for you: Which bottle of milk should I take? Does it matter?
Yes. It matters greatly. I always take the last bottle in the row. Why? Because they restock the milk from the back. When the vendor comes to restock his milk, he puts the freshest bottles in the back so that people will take the old ones from the front first. You may not have ever even thought about it. And yet, now, you will probably look at it every time.
(This this cooler, the milk in front was dated 11/27/2016. The milk in back was dated 12/1/2016.)
We often look, but don’t see. Does a week’s difference matter? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how long you are planning to store it in the fridgerator. Well, and how fresh you like to have your milk.
The kiosk also sells cookies. I once had a terrible experience, years ago, with these pink Grandma cookies. The cookie was moldy. And considering how many preservatives these are made with, I didn’t know it was even possible for them to mold. Why did it mold? Look at the cookies and especially the date stamp.
The vendor stocks the cookies front to back. That means that often the cookies at the back are the oldest. When I choose a cookie, I always take from the front.
As a species we tend to accept what is placed in front of us. And even when we are not compelled to take the one we are offered, we tend to accept the first one.
Learn to not only look, but to see. It might save you from spoiled milk or a moldy cookie.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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On Friday November 18, I spoke at the funeral of my uncle, Tandy R. “Ted” Graff in Coeur d’Alene, ID. This is a copy of what I said.
On behalf of the family, I would like to thank you for coming today. My name is Rodney Bliss and I’ve been asked to say a few words on behalf of the family.
The man that many you knew as Ted Graff, my cousins and I knew as Uncle Tandy. Except for my cousin Colleen, who for some reason that none of us remember, called him Uncle Honey. I just this week learned that it was a name that he didn’t like: Tandy that is, he was disappointed when Colleen stopped calling him Uncle Honey. But, it was like him to simply not say anything.
I’m actually a little uncertain how to refer to him through the rest of these remarks. I think I’ll stick with Tandy because that’s how I knew him.
He died of a heart attack while out on his last ride of the year on his Harley Davidson motorcycle. And it became the last ride of his life. Harley Davidson owners, more than any other group of motorcycle owners or even car owners for that matter, adopt a unique perspective on life. That perspective can be summed up by the motto, “Live to Ride. Ride to Live.” That motto is particularly poignant considering how he died. My uncle was a man who lived.
His daughter Connie described him as living like a rock star. He had high blood pressure and diabetes and he still insisted on eating whatever he wanted and living life on his terms. He didn’t let it keep him from living life exactly as he chose. Even if it killed him.
My uncle was many things. He was a father, a grandfather, a husband, an uncle, a sailor, a welder, a mechanic, a Mason, a Shriner, a state trooper and a small town sheriff. He was a dam builder and a jeweler. And he could fix anything. He was a man who lived.
He joined the navy right out of his school. He finished up in 1963, which was a short time before I met him considering I was born in 1964. I know his service was very important to him. I’ve seen his discharge papers and it’s not clear, but it appears the record was amended to secure him his honorable discharge. Service was important to him.
I will never forget that he died on veterans day. . .and on his sisters birthday.
He was my uncle. And my friend. He also had a great sense of humor. He often told his wife Candy that he only had one grey hair. If you’ve seen him you know that is not true. When she pressed him, he’d pull out a gray rabbit’s foot and say “This is my only one.”
We all believed he had a magical talent to fix stuff. I took my family to visit him one time. I have 13 children. At that point they were all younger than age 12. When we arrived there were three of those push-cars. Just the perfect size for my 3 young boys. When I asked where they were from he proudly announced that he got them at the pick-n-save. I grew up in Washington and now I live in Utah. I figured pick-n-save was an Idaho thing. It’s not. It’s a Tandy Graff thing. It took me 20 minutes of talking to him before I figured out that the pick-n-save was the stuff that people left at the community dumpster. Nothing was truly broken if he decided to work on it. He lived to help people.
He came by his great mechanical ability naturally. I say he was a dam builder. Actually he was a mechanic fixing the heavy equipment that was used to build the dams. Any of you who have sent him email in the past twenty years or so, know that his email addresses included icatmechanic.
I remember on one visit we started talking about tools, specifically Craftsman tools. I love Craftsman tools. I told him how stupid it was that Craftsman was trying bring out a professional line of tools to compete with Snap-On. I carried on at some length about how no one would pay to buy high end Craftsman tools. He offered his opinion as he does, but I was unconvinced.
“Come with me,” he said. Out of the bottom of the moterhome he pulled a 200 piece Craftsman professional tool set; wrenches, sockets, screw drivers. He won that argument.
That motorhome was the subject of a story my cousin Colleen remembers. She and her husband, Joe, were thinking about getting a new piece of jewelry and of course, they asked Uncle Tandy. “Come with me,” he said. He took her to the big queen sized bed in the moterhome and reaching down he lifted up the bed. There in boxes was his jewelry collection. With one hand he held up the bed and with the other he started pulling out boxes of merchandise.
I remember visiting with him when he lived in Oceanside, CA. And he showed me “The Gold Room.” He didn’t have his jewelry in the motorhome at this point. He’d built a bunker in his house and called it the “Gold Room.” The house was built on a hill and in the basebment he cut through the wall and dug out an entire room to store the jewelery and gold. He then disguised the entrance as a bookshelf. I wonder if the people living there now know they have a vault.
He replaced the blue center stone that my wife and I, as poor college students, put in her ring. For our tenth anniversary, I stole her wedding ring and sent it to Uncle Tandy. He replaced the center stone which was colored glass with a genuine blue saphire
He gave me this ring, and that’s the last thing I want to talk about. For the last 46 years of his life, Tandy was a Mason and for much of that a Shriner.
I guess I always knew he was a Mason, but I didn’t know a lot about it. He never mentioned it. To me, it was just something he did. At one point I became interested in joining the Masons. I sent him an email one day, “Hey, could you tell me a little about the Masons?” I see some smiles from the Masons and Shriners here. See, Tandy was an old school Mason. You didn’t talk about it much until you were asked. I got back 3 pages.
He came down to Utah when I entered the fraternity and presented me with my Masonic apron. I think he was more excited about it than I was. . .and I was plenty excited. He told me one time the goal of Masonry was to make good men better.
He did question me when I first talked to him about it. “Are you sure those Mormons are going to be okay with you joining the Masons?”
“I don’t know, I’d better ask.”
The Mormons replied, “Are you sure the Masons are going to be okay with a Mormon joining them?” It all worked out. When I became a Master Mason, he sent me this ring. Being the sentimental type he is, he said, “If the ring falls apart. . .sell the gold.”
He loved the fraternity and the Shrine. I have a daughter who was born with an oversized birth mark on her forehead. Insurance said correcting it was a cosmetic surgery and therefor not covered. So, my wife and I looked for some other options.
I mentioned it to my uncle one time. A a few days later and she had a surgery appointment at Shriners hospital of Northern California. That’s just what he did.
He was so excited to be the Potentate of the Shrine. Through all his years in Masonry, he never “sat in the chairs,” which is what the leadership of the lodge does. Masonry is a brotherhood and there was never any disrespect for someone who wasn’t in leadership. But, being Potentate was really important to him.
He maintained the go karts for the Shrine. He told me about building the go karts and fixing up the trailer. He also got the Shrine to buy a big van to carry the men and pull the trailer. He insisted that the van have the darkest possible tinted windows. . . .because the Shriners occasionally wanted to enjoy a beverage out of view of the kids at the parade.
My uncle warned me that men in our family don’t live long. His father, my grandfather went to bed on night saying he wasn’t feeling well and never woke up in the morning. Tandy knew that you can cheat death foror a time, but that he was really living on borrowed time. After his last serious health scare a few years ago, I used to start our phone calls with “I’m so glad you’re not dead.” He’d laugh and say, “Yeah, me too.”
The Harley riders say “Live to ride. Ride to live.” I think that’s how he would like to be remembered. Tandy R “Ted” Graff was a man who lived.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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How can the scenery be so ugly between Pleasant Grove and here and yet be so beautiful at this spot?
I was standing on my brother-in-law’s porch in Blackfoot Idaho staring out at his fields of alfalfa and herds of dairy cows. Of course, it wasn’t the scenery. The sceneary in southern Idaho is what it has always been: plain, unadorned and with apologies to my friends and family in the potato state, it was ugly. The company was what made the view from his porch beautiful.
I believed that for a very long time. In fact, I took it as a tenet of faith: southern Idaho, eastern Oregon and Washington, parts of northern Utah. They were ugly. I should know. I’ve driven through them more times than I can count.
That’s what made yesterday’s drive so remarkable. I missed that ugly section of the state. I drove right past it without noticing. I drove 800 miles from Pleasant Grove, Utah, north to the Idaho border, through southeastern Idaho up to Montana, and then Montana west to the Idaho panhandle to attend my uncles funeral tomorrow. It was a ten hour drive. Originally, I was going to carpool with my cousin. then, her son and a friend wanted to join. And then my daughter and her two kids were going to ride with me.
The result? I drove alone. It gave me plenty of time to think about my uncle. He died on a motorcycle ride through western Montana last week. Not an accident. He had a heart attack on the side of the road. But, the last thing he’d done was to go riding many of the roads I was now driving. I also got to play my CD collection. Yeah, I’m that guy stuck in the 1990s who owns CDs. I have hundreds. I threw the two big binders full into the car and swapped out old Garth Brooks CDs while cruising along at 90 mph.
But, I noticed something odd about the landscape. Some time when I wasn’t looking, someone replaced the ugly parts. I left at 10am and had beautful weather as I made my way north on interstate 15. And it was gorgeous. The Wasatch mountains of northern Utah have always been beautiful to me. As they transitioned to the rolling hills of souther Idaho, I started to notice the play of light and dark as clouds played hide and seek with the sun across the landscape.
The thing about a desert, is that plants are very compact. In fact, when you are driving on the freeway, it’s difficult to tell if the wind is blowing. Of course, you are cruising along at 80-90 mph, so you are creating your own wind, but cross winds are difficult to detect unless yo pass something like a flag. If you look at the scenery, especially if you are passing a field of winter wheat, or grasses that have lost their green and are yellow and gold against the hillsides, it’s difficult, but possible to detect the bobing of their heads as the winds blow down from the canyons.
As the miles slipped by I discovered a whole section of the country that I thought I knew. I thought I knew it and had dismissed it as less beautiful than my native rainforests, growing up in the Pacific Northwest. Several years ago, I came to appreciate the beauty in Utah’s deserts. It took me a while. I had to look for it, but eventually I found it in the red rock canyons around Moab, in the slot canyons of Zions National Park. In the Alpine forests of the High Uintas. The desert is stark and often bare and has a raw beauty that is every bit the match for the lush greens of western Washington and Oregon.
But, when I fell in love with Utah’s desert, I forgot. I forgot that the geography between my home in Utah county and the forested Benawah of northern Idaho, or the evergreens of the Cascade mountains, is desert. Much of the same type of desert that Utah enjoys.
As I rolled across the countinental divide and the high plains of Montana and the sage brush covered hills of Utah and Idaho, I realized that this too was beautiful. The landscape hadn’t changed. I was the one that had changed. I looked through my car windshield with new eyes.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved