IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

A Negative Personal Take on EVs - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please read this essay:

https://www.edn.com/electric-vehicles-my-perspective/

Then please see this news item:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/ron-desantis-said-evs-could-catch-fire-if-caught-up-in-hurricane-helene-experts-say-he-s-right-and-that-you-should-take-these-steps-to-protect-yourself/ar-AA1rwAiJ?cvid=f54f3150881943709d9a3b8dc0f0e7fc&ei=35

I have some neighbors who own EVs and I am quite ill at ease about that.

A Few Pet Peeves - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

1)         Restaurant / Diner Service

You are having dinner and gradually you consume your glass of ice water. When it's level runs low, a waiter comes to refill your glass from a pitcher bearing ice cubes but that pitcher is filled with tepid water that has just moments ago been drawn from a faucet. That water is only slightly cooler than room ambient and as those few ice cubes rapidly melt, it's like suddenly finding yourself with a glassful of warmish dishwater.

2)         Unconscionable Contract Terms

Check this out from a tree service:

My translation:  "You are hiring us to take remedial action(s) of tree pruning and/or tree removal, but if we decide for one reason or another that we don't want to actually complete the job, we can leave stuff behind and you agree to pay us the full price of the contract anyway. How you deal with whatever we leave behind and leave undone will be your problem, not ours."

3)         Buffet Table Manners

You find yourself on a buffet table line and ahead of you, two people choose some items to put on their plates and then instead of moving on, those two people just stand there and get into a chatty, extended conversation. ("Oh, yes! I think so too and you know I heard the other day that ......" etc, etc.) They simply remain standing where they are so that nobody else can move forward.

4)         Grocery Checkout Manners

The grocery store cash register clerk is ringing up your items, but you cannot get to where your items are accumulating to pack them up because the customer ahead of you is still standing at that same spot while reviewing their checkout receipt. (It’s rather similar to the buffet table thing, isn’t it.)

The Test of Time - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A good many years ago, the American Museum of Natural History had an exhibit of fossils on loan from China. China has access to the Gobi Desert which is one of the richest sources of fossils in the world. Protoceratops was first discovered there. Please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoceratops

Seeing that exhibit was one opportunity I was not going to miss.

As I was standing next to a glass display case with a dinosaur skull in view, this one woman came along with her son of perhaps eight or nine years of age who asked what the skull was. Her reply was: “These are animals that failed the test of time.”

Such hubris!!

I have read that humans in their modern form arose somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. I have also read that over the history of life on earth, the average duration of existence for all of the different species in fossil history is approximately one million years, ten times or more longer than modern folks like us have been hanging around.

Humankind would have a long way to go by comparison. I may have done a double take upon hearing that woman’s line.

Maybe a little modesty would be in order.

A Picketer - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When one of my sons was very young, he was in need of orthodonture. His orthodontist’s office was on the ground floor of a small office building in the neighborhood. To enter, you would come in from the sidewalk through a double glass door and then make an immediate left turn to go through a single glass door into the office.

At that time, there was also a Planned Parenthood office on the building’s second floor. To go there, you would either use the building’s elevator or take a staircase, both of which were situated somewhat further into the building.

When my son and I arrived one day for an orthodonture appointment, there were some protesters picketing the Planned Parenthood office. Some of them were carrying hand drawn sheets with slogans and declarations of their personal virtues. As we entered the building and turned to our left for the orthodontist’s office, one of the picketers (picketer #1) stepped in front of me blocking that doorway and said with a smirk “Where do you think you’re going?”

I looked this character in the eye and then in a quiet voice, I said “….Step……aside! ……”

Picketer #1 took a breath but just at that moment, picketer #2 took #1’s arm and led #1 off to one side and away from the orthodontist’s doorway. I then said to #2 “I think you better have a little talk with your friend and don’t be here when I come out.”

The appointment took a little more than half an hour and when the two of us emerged, there were no picketers in sight. This was many years ago of course and I was much younger. I am 6’4” tall and maybe I looked intimidating back then. I would not have used physical force of course, but what exactly went through any picketer’s mind at the time in that regard will never be known to me.

One thing however was quite clear.

Several wrong headed fools who imagined themselves as justified for this or that reason in attempting to inflict injustice on anyone else at random were instructed that they had embarked on the wrong course.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

A Car Insurance Snafu - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please consider the following cautionary tale. This dates back to 2005 but it’s still a vivid memory.

I had changed my auto insurance company at that time from Company 1 to Company 2 to secure less costly coverage. Company 2 notified my state DMV of my new policy arrangement with them and I thought all was well. However, my original Company 1 some months later informed my state DMV that I was no longer their insurance client which caused my state DMV to wrongly decide that I no longer had any insurance coverage at all and therefore, I was in violation of state law.

I would be subject to cancellation of my driver’s license and liable for a significant fine.

My efforts to inform my state DMV of the above were to no avail. According to that government office, because the last communication to them had come from Company 1, any earlier communication from Company 2 would have been discarded and therefore my coverage via Company 2 did not exist. To make matters worse, both Company 1 and Company 2 refused to communicate with my state DMV on my behalf to set matters straight. They had each done as much as they were going to do and whatever the consequences were was my problem and my problem alone.

I was fortunate that a letter I next sent to an auxiliary office of my state DMV led me into contact with one particular state DMV employee who stepped into the matter and successfully saw to making the necessary corrections.

My gratitude to that man knew no bounds.

I don’t know if that kind of state DMV bureaucratic incompetence would be the case today, but I cite my experience here just so that others may be made aware and on the alert.

About Teaching - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My mother was a math teacher who was working in 1970 at a private business school. She had two adult classes, one in “Remedial Arithmetic” and the other in “Business Arithmetic”. In July of that year, her sister in Milwaukee, my aunt, was in the final stages of terminal ovarian cancer and my Mom went to Milwaukee to be with her. I was astounded that Mom went there by air as she’d had a lifelong fear of flying, but she went.

Mom arranged with the school to have me temporarily replace her in those two classes. There were two one-hour class sessions each day and let me stress that those two hours were the most exhausting two hour stretches of my entire life even to this date.

Most of the students had some issue or another that had held them back academically.

One woman from Panama was sixty years of age but looked like she might have been thirty. I found out later that she had extremely severe heart disease. Her attention in class was totally focused and her every homework assignment was done to perfection. If she had any question, she would ask and was then adept at understanding absolutely everything!! A few years later, she was on the phone with my Mom when I happened to be there and she told Mom that she was going to go for heart treatment at the Mayo Clinic in “Rochester” but didn’t know how she was going to travel. I volunteered to drive her there thinking that it was Rochester, NY. When I found out it was Rochester, MN, we all realized that driving was out of the question. I never heard anything further afterwards.

There was one young man whom Mom told me had epilepsy. I had to be ready to deal with a possible seizure although that never happened. She told me that he would sit in class without looking up, only looking down, he would not speak and he would look like he wasn’t paying attention, but I was not to be fooled. He would hear every word, he would learn every concept and he would turn in perfect homework assignments which is exactly what happened.

There was one young woman who wore eyeglasses with extremely thick glass lenses. I once had to wear thick glass lenses for being nearsighted (I have plastic lenses now.) but this woman’s glasses made my own look like nothing. She had a question to ask before class one day and as she spoke, she was reading from a page that was held very, very close to her eyes. Suddenly her head turned abruptly from right to left and she then looked upward. She explained that she had a vision problem in which an image, such as on that paper, would suddenly flip to mirror image and her eyes would reflexively dart to where what she’d been looking at seemed to have gone which of course, it had not. She would then have to consciously stop until her vision flipped back again to normal. As one can imagine, class work for her was an intense struggle.

There was another young woman who suffered from extreme insecurity. One day she arrived in the classroom a second or two after a classroom bell rang to officially begin class time and she went into a panic attack. She launched into an energetic monologue of how terribly sorry she was for being late and that she would never be late again and how terrible she felt about being late and on and on and on. I had to calm her down with words of reassurance that everything was okay, that nothing was wrong and so forth. That alone took several minutes out of the class session time.

Another young woman was handing in homework pages with almost nothing on them. I might find a pencil mark or two but nothing more. I spoke with Mom by phone about that and she said I needed to have that woman redo the homework assignments from the very beginning. The following day, I asked that woman to stay in the room for a moment after class but she left and never came back. Never! Mom told me not to worry about it and just let the matter go. I did.

There was another woman of Russian descent whose name was “Mrs. Voloschevitz” but whose name I had trouble pronouncing. I wanted to get it right so I had her instruct me and after a few tries, I got it. She was delighted!! However, the school administration always mis-pronounced it as “Mrs. Wallasowitz” and one day when I had to refer to her by name in the front office, nobody knew who I was talking about. Ooops! I clarified the issue with everyone.

There was more too but you get the picture. I put in two weeks doing that until Mom returned to New York. I had used my two weeks of vacation time from my regular job to do that. That was a work-cation if ever there was one and oh boy, did I ever learn a lesson.

My mother was a math teacher, my wife was a fine arts teacher, my mother in law was an elementary school teacher and my father in law was a high school music teacher. Add to that one aunt in law and one cousin in law who were also teachers and a close family friend who was a high school principal. A pattern emerges. How they all managed to deal with the kinds of stresses they each endured in light of what I had happen in those two weeks of my own still leaves me in awe.

Employee Retirement Income Security Act - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

While idly net browsing on my phone  one day, I just happened to come across an item of which the following screen shot was a part:

This really rang a loud bell in my mind. Doing a Google search for “ERISA” led to the following, also taken from a screen shot:

I once knew of a company which, prior to 1974 at least, made it a regular practice to assign a pension to an employee in which vesting would be set for twenty years of employment and to then lay off that employee shortly after the nineteenth anniversary of employment in order to deny that employee the promised pension benefits.

I personally remember one such vicitim of this pernicious practice. Around one month past ninteen years, that person was laid off and the pension evaporated.

Finding the first screen shot above suggests to me that despite any illegality, the abuse is still being committed. If you or anyone you know is in such a situation, rererence to ERISA as in the second screen shot may be warranted.

Instrumentals - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I don’t consider myself in any sense to be a musician. That level of achievement goes way past my history or abilities. I did once sing in a chorale called The Armand Sodero Chorale here on Long Island and it was both an education and a treat at every rehearsal. I learned a few things about music per se, but I never achieved musician status.

Having grown up thru the 1950s and later though, I’ve noticed the almost complete disappearance of instrumentals in popular music. The stuff I hear for the most part these days is a real turn-off for me. Maybe I’ve reached the fogey part of life, but take a look at this list of instrumentals and their performers.

Crank them into YouTube and see what you think. I think you’re going enjoy yourself.

Afrikaan Beat	Bert Kaempfert
Apache	The Shadows, The Ventures
Classical Gas	Mason Williams
Green Onions	Booker T. and the M.G.'s
Java	Al Hirt
Love Is Blue	Paul Mauriat
Music Box Dancer	Frank Mills
Pipeline	The Chantays
Stranger On The Shore	Acker Bilk
Telstar	The Tornados
That Happy Feeling	Bert Kaempfert
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly	Hugo Montenegro
Walk, Don't Run	The Ventures
Washington Square	The Village Stompers
Wipe Out	The Ventures

Fakery and Panic, Part 3 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

You would think in this day and age (an admitted cliché), the following would be obvious but from stories I see in the news, for many people, the following is anything but.

You are a target. I am a target. Every single person on this planet is a target of verminous persons who want to take whatever assets you have by whatever means they can. The key traits that they hope to exploit in their intended victims are greed and panic.

In the greed area, this e-mail came to me one day. The sender wants my reaction to be “Three and a half million dollars??? For me??? Oh wow!!! I gotta see right now what I have to do to get that cash.”

By the way, did you notice the grammatical error? There’s a red flag for you!!

Also, look closely at the e-mail address in the “From” part of any incoming message. Bloopers like the following are often obvious. Then there are the typing errors in the message contents plus, here, the hope of inducing your panic with the phrase “account deactivation”.

 

Here’s another one with a bogus e-mail address and another intended panic trigger.

 

Here’s still another one that looks like the one above in that the “From” e-mail address is fake but do take note that this fake is made to resemble an address that might be for real. It isn’t.

In short, if you see anything come into your in-box that seems to provoke an emotional response or upset or which tries to induce you into any kind of immediate action lest you pay the price, DO NOT fall prey. You will be looking at the handiwork of someone who wants to harm you.

Just erase that incoming message and move on to better things.

By the way again, for Parts 1 and 2, please see:

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/05/fakery-and-panic-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/05/fakery-and-panic-part-2-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

Lottery Addiction - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

After graduating from college, my first engineering job was in New Hampshire where I was not aware of the New Hampshire state lottery system. At the time, I think it was unique in the nation. I was astonished to learn that it was the only funding source for the local school system and, again I think, for the state school systems.

In a few years, I moved back to my home state of New York where I settled down in Long Island. In 1970 if memory serves, the State of New York established a lottery system of its own. Funds that the state was supposed to acquire via the lottery were supposed to go toward supporting education. I had my doubts about that being so and those doubts were subsequently reinforced by later current events. However, that's is a different story.

What I noticed from time to time when I would go to the store was seeing how some people interacted with the lottery system. This man below was a case in point.

One day, this one particular man attracted my attention. I watched him as over and over and over he would go to the store counter, purchase a lottery ticket, take that ticket over to the side somewhere, read it, write something down and then repeat that cycle. I watched him repeating that cycle several times over which I found very disturbing.

I had read articles about compulsive gambling and my impression was that I was seeing a case of exactly that. The state was willingly victimizing vulnerable residents in order to commandeer their cash.

Decades later, the state is still doing it. I have stood for long periods of time behind and watching other customers purchasing a whole glittery and colorful constellation of different lottery tickets using utterly incomprehensible (to me) vocabulary with the store clerk.

In my own case, I have been a winner in every lottery since 1970 because I have NEVER made a lottery purchase and it is my full intention to NEVER do so.