Ep. 596: "Enough of a Truck"
Do you have specifics on that?
See, I would allow just the concept of rain as being a kind of an existential rejoinder.
What's rain mean for you?
Well, when I wake up and the first thing I hear is rain, I'm going to need an extra five minutes.
Just because rain?
Well, yeah, just because rain.
I mean, I have to sit.
I have to listen to the rain.
I have to, you know, kind of snuggle a little bit more with my own blanket.
I think sometimes...
Sometimes the rain is telling one something, but not always.
And so part of it is realizing listening, especially if it hasn't rained in a few days or weeks or whatever.
Is the rain trying to tell me something?
You know, listening.
Am I right?
Shh.
Listen to the rain.
You know, we should listen to... Touch rain.
To rain.
Yeah, that's right.
Touch rain.
I like rain.
Listen to other voices.
Ever since our roof got fixed, I like rain.
Yeah.
Did you have a leak?
Oh, we had a long time leak that the person who owns the house didn't fix for a long time.
And now I'm practically courageous about rain at this point.
I wasn't aware that you were living with a leak.
That's terrible.
Well, you know, it's okay.
No, but I like it and I look forward to it.
Also, I have a weather station.
No, you do not.
Well, it's like the nth of many.
My latest weather station, which I really like a lot, sometimes has trouble registering rain.
That seems like a key competency of a weather station.
This is what I told Eric with a K numerous times in our conversations.
That a weather station should be able, among other things, among measuring the dew point and the...
the wet bulb, that it should also be able to measure if it is raining.
Yes.
I feel like, and I hope I'm not being a difficult consumer, but I feel like amongst the top seven things that you would want a weather station to report is whether it rained and how much.
But, you know, apparently there's a lot of factors.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, it's got a haptic or a taptic engine, and if it's too high up and it doesn't register, and I'm like, the thread with this guy, who's very nice, is hilarious.
Because I'm like, no, I've done all that.
Yeah, I did.
Is Eric with a K like a representative of the weather station company?
Yes.
I see.
I mean, that's what he claims to be.
Okay.
Unless he's gone rogue.
Sure.
Yeah.
Sure.
Did you look at his email address?
Is it at...
It's at payyourtoll.ru.
I don't know what that is.
I hate that so much.
Pay your toll.
Yeah.
Also, your warranty is expiring.
Would you like to file your Washington state taxes online?
Do it all and click here or else the government's going to come tonight.
Send me Bitcoin cards or something.
I am so always ready for the government to come tonight.
Like every night I look out the door and I'm like, are they coming?
It could be any branch.
It could be the FDA.
It could be the FDA.
They could be coming here to check my beef.
They want to come and check your, yeah, they want to look at your steer.
Yeah, they want to look at my steer.
Yeah.
You know, I have a water gauge here.
Oh, that is a, it's a, it's a gradiated tube.
That I stick in the middle of the yard.
Yeah.
Old school.
Yeah.
And when it rains, I go out there and I look and I see how much it rained.
It's raining right now.
You know, you still honor the old ways.
I do.
Those are the ways of my people.
And I just want to point out, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but like you did not have to go back and forth with someone who claims the name is Eric with a K in order to find out that and how much it rained.
So that's a feather in your cap.
but i do have to go out periodically because i think the squirrels knock over my weather tube that throws off the science and it does i have to go stick it back in the ground you have to control for squirrels they freaking squirrels around here i went i took my truck to the repair guy and i was like the thing isn't working and he was like well you know it's gonna cost i took it to the dealer because there was 60 things wrong with it and among those i said you have a car that's new enough to take to a dealer
Yeah, it's still under warranty.
It's not very new, but it had one of those 60,000 mile warranties.
And it's got 58,000 miles.
That's how they get you.
So, and I'm sitting there and I'm like, well, look, I didn't do anything to this thing that broke it.
It's like a mechanical failure on your part.
It's y'all's problem.
and he said well that's not covered under the 60 000 mile warranty and i said yeah but how did it break was your drive train john well so they did they replaced the transmission once and i that's why i'm bringing it in again i just remember that term from the drive train yeah it's a 60 000 mile drive train warranty yeah but so i take it in and i'm like while we're here
Can we get the blinker to work?
Can we get the seat to move?
And this and that and the other.
And he said, well, look, I don't know why it's not working.
Sorry, this is like doctor's appointments we fantasize about, which is like, rather than you yelling at me for homework I didn't do, here's three or four things I could use a doctor's help with.
Yeah.
Hey, Doc.
Quality of life.
Could you do this and could you do that?
And they go, oh, your drivetrain seems fine.
Call my assistant in six months.
This guy says, I don't know, man.
Maybe a squirrel got up under there and chewed the wire.
And I got real quiet because I was like, the fucking squirrels.
I bet that is what happened.
And the squirrel, just to be clear, we don't need to mention the brand name of your automobile, but the squirrels are not covered.
Squirrel activity not covered by the warranty.
It's probably in there explicitly.
Not covered.
Squirrel activity not covered.
And I did not want to say to the guy, why would a squirrel chew a wire?
Because I feel like it's a thing, A, he might not speculate on.
It's a non sequitur, John.
But then I also thought of the many times that I came out of the front door and a squirrel came out from under the truck and went on its merry way.
And I'm like, what are you doing under there?
This cost me a lot of money, this squirrel.
This squirrel's little fetish.
Right, right, right, right.
I know Syracuse a few years back sent me some amazing photographs of where if you get a critter in your car, like where he lives, it's pretty cold.
But he's showing me how these photos, I don't know if they're, I think they're his car, but photos of basically a critter who had gotten into some of the wires.
So I know that can happen with certain varmints or critters.
Yes.
I don't think of that as a squirrel.
I feel like I don't want to be too dismissive of this person because obviously he or she is a professional, but I feel like that's kind of like saying, how do you know the actor Billy Barty didn't gnaw on your wires?
Or whatever.
It could be Jaws.
It could be somebody who's alive.
It could be maybe Matthew McConaughey got in your wires.
It's that weird to me that you would just say something
Because it really is like, how do you respond?
He lives up here, too.
And maybe he's out.
Maybe he's got a fence around his car.
Maybe he puts his car in the garage.
So that wasn't that was an official remark.
I think he speaks to the company.
I think he might have seen this before.
Oh, and people are like, what the hell?
How did this happen?
You know, is my kid out there knowing on the wires?
And the guy's like, let me put your mind at rest.
I don't think it's your kid.
I think it's a squirrel.
Okay.
Well, he didn't want to get into it with me because I was also saying, can you fix this?
Can you fix that?
Yeah.
And they always seem very resistant to fixing this and fixing that.
They're always trying to like come up.
It seems like all the people who fix things come up with reasons why they can't fix stuff right now.
When that's the thing that's top of mind for me.
The thing that brought me in here.
You would think.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
What am I missing?
This place, the dealer, the dealer.
Sometimes they bring it in there to fix a thing and then they have it for a week.
They give me a loaner car.
I go back after a week.
They're like, okay, it's done.
I go back and they didn't fix it.
That's the one that I'm really curious about.
We cannot get into this.
What are we doing here?
This is too big and touches on too many things that I don't want to be famous for complaining about.
You're absolutely right.
You're
No, no, I don't want to constrain you, but like, this is, I'm gesturing broadly, John.
I know, I know.
This is so many problems.
Well, it's so many problems in one problem.
It's the, like people, I've gone through this certainly with trying to get stuff in my house fixed, stuff in my body fixed, and in a previous age, stuff with the car fixed.
And, you know, sometimes a blind hog finds an acorn and you get like a real good, like Jerry, who retired a few years back.
Jerry, our mechanic for a long time, who was imminently trustable.
You gotta miss Jerry.
You know, but the thing is, you get to know somebody, and Jerry, I've told you about Jerry.
Jerry's the guy, I won't go into it too much, but Jerry's the guy who's like, look, you gotta replace this timing belt, and if you don't replace it now, you're gonna have to replace, like, but Jerry would let us know, because we didn't have all the money in the world, and he'd say, like, well, here's the things, it would be irresponsible for me to let you drive away with this problem.
Here's the things that you should have fixed but haven't, and then here's all these other things you want me to, like, change your tissue box or whatever, you know, or
You have to be ashtrays or whatever.
But I just feel like I encounter this so often that it makes me believe that there's something I don't understand about help.
Because when people ask me for help, I tend to want to help them on the thing they ask for help with.
Although, as a part-time nerd, I do sometimes say, well, you know, you got a bigger problem than that, you know?
But, you know... Give me a bigger boat.
You get down here and chump some of this shit.
That's what he says.
And then the shark jumps into the scene.
But I'm sorry.
It frustrates me so much that...
So many of these things are understandably procedural and they have a way of doing things.
And when you're dealing with medicine, there's the way doctors work.
There's the way insurance companies.
Oh, I understand all that.
And I understand that dealerships like have the way that they do things, but like, I don't know why there has to be so much animus between consumers and the people they need help from.
And I guess I'm trying not to be cynical and say, well, it's just so like, so you'll stop calling and stop bothering us.
But that's kind of what it feels like sometimes, even with doctors.
I definitely feel like these people, these people.
Oh, I know.
If you know.
Oh, I know.
There's good ones and bad ones.
That's what my grandpa used to say.
I get the feeling that they are getting paid either way.
And I feel like in life, the situations where people are getting paid either way, where they're getting paid is not contingent on anything, apparently.
Um, that's where you get into situations where you're like, I've brought this to you four times.
And, um, and that is, is there anybody monitor it?
Like, have you, can you access the things that you've written down?
Does anybody who cares for my mother medically look at the rest of her medical record every time?
Is there anybody who has any idea what all is happening besides her and me?
You know, similar thing or another thing here, just torn from the headlines.
Let's say, for example, that you're a server or a bartender who racks up a lot of sales at a restaurant.
But at the end of the day, your job in a lot of ways, and boy, this keeps coming up in so many discussions.
Your job in so many ways is to please your manager above all.
Right?
So like, I mean, didn't we kind of touch on that in the last couple, Susan?
Sorry, Suki.
the nation.
Last couple of Suki discussions where it's like, I mean, at least I feel like what it comes down to is like your, your main, your main goal, if you don't know what else to do is to figure out how to please your manager.
And if you do that all the time, that might make you a good worker bee, but it won't necessarily make you a gifted and useful practitioner.
And maybe that's because I, maybe I'm not, I haven't been inside enough big organizations to think that's cool, but like it does, it does bum me out that I,
And there's so much left to, I say the consumer or the citizen, however you want to think of it, the person to like do all the project management on their thing.
And then like sort of like you and United or me and you and Delta or me and United, like how do I persuade this one person that I'm worthy of paying attention to and potentially taking pity on?
I mean, this was my whole journey.
The little one just got her braces off.
Oh.
And she had a tooth that didn't come in.
A tooth that was down here.
She's had her braces on for three years.
And for three years, the orthodontist, who's a real slick guy.
He's a finger gun.
Our orthodontist was a slick motherfucker.
He's slick.
Oh, I got stories about that guy.
In his parking lot, he's got one of those Mercedes AMG SUV things that's got all blacked out chrome.
I mean, it's a $180,000 car that he kind of just parks over to the side.
And you're like, hey, man, you know, if I were...
And if I were like catering to people whose teen kids were in braces, I would keep the, you know, the, I'd drive the beater car to work.
I'd drive the beater to work.
Right.
But so he's a real finger.
I've had the same dodge dart swinger since 1973.
So he says, well, there's a tooth down there and it had a baby tooth on top of it that also didn't come in.
So he's like, we gotta get that baby tooth out so the big tooth can come in.
So he took the baby tooth out and then had these braces.
Well, you gotta open up that space so the big tooth can come in.
Well, he did that.
And then he was like, well, after a year of that,
We're going to have to get down there under the gum.
We're going to have to attach something to that tooth, use the braces to pull the tooth up.
Okay.
That sounds like a regular engineering project.
It really was.
It's like, let's build a bridge across the, across the East river.
And after three years of going into this guy and every single time, because it's, because it's his world, not ours.
He deals with children.
And yet his office hours are 8 a.m.
to 3 p.m.
or something.
That must be so convenient for him.
It's really convenient for him.
Just to say, John, that falls nicely inside the working day for him.
It does.
It does.
It's like being a banker in the 40s.
We need to get her braces tightened, which is a 15-minute thing.
We have to take two hours out of school because we have to go get her, come bring her back, blah, blah, blah.
My kid had a doctor's appointment at 9.30 a.m.
today because that's when the doctor could see him.
That's when the doctor can see you, right, in the middle of the school day.
Everybody knows kids go to school.
But what doctor wants to have appointments at 5 p.m.?
Am I right?
Oh, are you kidding me?
I mean, if something gets way too complicated, they might not get out until like 5.17.
Sure, 5.17.
They're always going to linger a little longer and help out and make sure all your questions are answered about your braces.
They really do.
They love that.
They're so good at that.
but we went um we went into the into the dentist's office as a united family and and uh and my daughter sat in the chair and my daughter's mother slash partner sat on one side and i sat on the other and we said doctor uh
Give us the straight scoop here.
And he said, well, that gosh darn it, that tooth isn't coming in.
So what we need to do is we need to get out the band saw and we'll get in there and we'll yank it with a, with a, you know, like a car jack.
It'll probably be another year and a half of this, that, and the other.
And hopefully we can get, and I said, lucky we caught it when we did.
Yeah.
And I said, here's what we think we should do.
Take your braces off today.
And we'll let God sort it out.
If that tooth wants to come in, then God will bring it in.
And if the tooth doesn't want to come in, then God will leave it.
That's going to be so hard for him to argue with.
And he paused.
What would the phrase be?
God is my co-dentist.
God is my co-dentist.
God, you know what?
I did not make the rat.
God made the rat.
No.
And he sat there for, you know, for three beats.
And he said, oh, or we could do that.
you
And I said, I think that's what we're... And he kind of looked over at Ariella and she was like, I think we take him off today.
And the combined power of the two parents coming at him from either side, because there wasn't any, well, I need to talk to my wife.
There was just like, we both came in today.
Have you ever seen us both at the same time?
You never have.
You finally outnumber him.
And he was like, he went from, well, we could do...
30 000 more dollars worth of orthodontia on her over the course of another year and a half and surgery or we could just take the braces off today and then see you later and it was just like oh did he have any concerns i mean i don't want to i don't want to make this overly dramatic but in other kinds of medical contexts if you push back
You know, if it was something like more serious, like, let's say, you know, treatment for like, you know, stage two cancer, like the doctor would go, well, actually, I think you really probably want to proceed with that.
Here's your options.
But instead, he's like, okay, cool.
Was it really necessary?
If he went back that fast?
Medically?
That said... Is this medical?
Is this medical, really?
We're quitting our orthodontia before it is complete.
He made us sign a piece of paper that said that.
And I was like, I can sign that.
I had to do that in an emergency room.
But you know, when I think... So the reason this comes up is that I had braces for three years.
As a grownup and I've told you this story before tell me again.
Uh, well just that, um, you know, I knocked out that front tooth.
I went to my old dentist and she had the root of the tooth pulled for me by a dental surgeon.
That dental surgeon puts some bone meal in there to hold the hole or to, you know, to reinforce the bone.
then uh she wanted me to wear some kind of apparatus and i didn't like it and anyway there was a there was a young cool hip dentist and i went to her and she said here's what we're gonna do
We're going to get the braces on there to straighten it out.
Then we're going to have the surgery.
Remember the surgery?
They were going to cut my head apart.
This is still in the phase where you were not always having complete success consistently talking to different medical professionals about different things.
I feel like this is from that time where it was hard to feel like you got a straight story from people.
That's right.
And this dentist, this woman was a friend.
She was a dentist that went to shows.
She was somebody that everybody knew.
Rock and roll dentist.
Rock and roll dentist.
And I was in braces for three years.
readying myself to have my head sawed apart my whole jaw moved and Then finally I could get that tooth replaced once all of that was done Then they were all in from engineer from an engineering or building standpoint.
That was all like preparing the site It was preparing the site you got to dig out all these rocks before we put down the blacktop or whatever exactly and
And then after three years in braces, as a full-grown adult man, I played the Sasquatch Music Festival with braces.
My face was on a screen that was four stories tall, and I had braces.
I go to the surgeon who had a Porsche parked out front, like a 930 with a whale tail in his own personal parking spot that you could see the car from the chair when you were sitting in the chair.
That is a flex.
There was the car.
And he said, all right, we're ready to.
Oh, he pulled all of my wisdom teeth.
I told you that in anticipation of this giant circle.
Got to make some room, right?
Yeah, my wisdom teeth were fine.
And then he said, well, all right, we're ready to go.
You know, surgery's scheduled for Monday.
Just go talk to my receptionist about the insurance.
And I went out there, and in 20 seconds, she said, well, your insurance doesn't cover this surgery.
It's only going to be $40,000 or something like that.
And we have the payment plan all worked out for you.
And I said, what?
Like, did no one...
think about this this is this was the first thing to figure out and I went to my dentist and I said weren't you project managing this and she said well that's not my job the you're you should be project managing your own health and I I was I was absolutely flabbergasted that that I should have been
Project medication that you missed you missed a beat because you were not you should have been more proactive in managing How this stuff was going and that you're the person who communicates between people?
Etc that she said this is what I need you need this surgery We're gonna I'm gonna set you up with this doctor.
I'm gonna set you up with this dent this orthodontist, right?
but
I'm not going to check to make sure whether or not, although I have a receptionist staff who checks insurance all day.
She probably didn't say that's not my job, but that was the vibe, right?
That was really what, I mean, she was like, how was I supposed to know?
And I couldn't believe it.
I'm like, this is your profession.
This was your project.
I didn't want anything to do with this.
Like, those are completely disconnected.
I mean, like, they're completely disconnected.
Not to make it all materialist, but, like, it's so frustrating to me that doctors seem to act like they have no concept of, even within an order of magnitude, what something they're recommending will cost you.
Like, if you go to the emergency room and, like, you're there for a reason and they want to do an MRI or something...
The MRIs I've had were covered by insurance, but I have a feeling if they weren't, they probably would have been pretty costly.
And I mean, I don't remember having a lot of ongoing discussions with doctors about what my insurance would cover.
And I think that's something you should anticipate from people.
I think what I came up with eventually was that she in particular, but a lot of medical professionals, they think in terms of perfection, like what's the perfect outcome?
What is the, you know, like we're trying to make, yeah, particularly these sort of cosmetic, the cosmetic side of dentistry, but also I think all of medicine, right?
They're not saying, how do we patch this jalopy up and get it out the door?
In her case, she saw like this whole incredible project that in order to get my front tooth replaced, this was a four year project because if we did it half assed.
I wouldn't be perfect.
And she wanted, within the bounds of her profession, she wanted to achieve perfection.
But it was not presented as a negotiating point.
It wasn't presented the way, like if you were buying a house, it seems to me that your real estate agent would want to know what your budget is.
They're not going to show you a bunch of $20 million homes if your budget's $600.
That's a very good example.
That's a very good example.
It's part of the process.
I went into the orthodontist the next day, like very close to tears streaming down my face.
Oh God.
And said, take these braces off.
And they said, what?
No, we're so close.
And I said, so close to what?
So close to what?
So close to a $60,000 surgery?
To being done?
Yeah, that nobody...
No, none of no none of you anticipated did you think that this project was was a project unto itself and So I had them take them off and I've been walking around since 2011 with a tooth with basically a tic-tac that was scotch taped into that spot and About a year ago
I think I was telling you that story about my new dentist who somehow during the pandemic, she super glued a tooth in there that worked great.
It was like the best one I'd ever had.
It lasted for two and a half years.
I was eating apples.
I wasn't really...
And then it fell out, which they always did.
And I went back in and was like, just do what you did last time.
I was so proud of her.
I was just like, do it again.
And she put a tooth in and it fell out the next day.
Oh, geez.
And I went back and I said... That hurts your confidence a little bit.
It would be nice to think I found the good one.
I found the one who knows how to glue the chiclet in, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then that kind of upsets the, what do you think was different?
Well, this is the thing I went in, I went back and I said, Hey, um, the last time you did it, it was amazing.
It just lasted forever and it felt right.
And it looked good.
So just, you know, just do that.
Yeah.
And she was like, Hmm.
Okay.
And she glued it in and it lasted two days, broke, fell up.
And I went back in again and I was like, Oh,
So I don't know.
Um, it just felt like it wasn't, it just feels like you're not, um, doing it like you did.
Uh, I could even tell this most recent time that when you finished, it didn't feel finished.
Can you really do it?
Like just really good.
And she was like, look, man, I don't know what you're asking me.
You know, like she was, she was huffy about it.
Yes, which is not unusual at all.
It's weird.
So on the one hand, and again, we're not yelling at any one person.
The problem is lots of little different parts of this.
But on the one hand, you've got some people over here going, hey, go advocate for yourself and be a project manager and do all that stuff.
But then when you actually challenge somebody, challenge these authority medical figures even lightly,
They seem really like it's the first time anybody's ever asked them a question about something that they couldn't just dismiss.
Yeah.
She was bent out of shape.
And then she went in and she put a tooth in and did something that no one had ever done, which was she put a piece of Kevlar tape.
glued the tooth to the teeth on either side with a piece of Kevlar tape.
And I don't know if you've ever had a piece of glued on Kevlar tape.
Not that I recall.
No, I don't think.
But it's really like a piece of sandpaper.
It's a very intimate area, and you notice differences like that.
Yeah, you sure do.
It glued the tooth in, but my tongue, I have a very curious tongue.
I think like most people's tongues, very curious.
Really wanted to know what was going on with that tape.
Oh, it starts exploring.
Every minute of every day for a year, my tongue was like, can I get that tape off of there?
I wonder if I just fuck with it a little bit more, this piece of sandpaper, whether I can get it to peel off.
anyway she sent me to a dental surgeon who was this tiny little chinese and i'm gonna say little chinese gal because she's younger than me by a lot 30 years old and she came in and she was like oh yeah this is all fucked up uh what you need is a titanium post and i said i know i've been trying to get one since 2007.
She said, well, what was the problem?
And I said, well, they needed to break my jaw and put me in braces for three years.
And she said, oh, well, no, they didn't need to do that.
I can just put one in.
And I said, well, why couldn't they have done that 15 years ago?
And she said, I don't know.
And I said, you mean you can just put a post in there and then put a tooth on it?
And she was like, yeah.
And I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I've had similar experiences with all of the kinds of things we're talking about.
One that comes to mind is like with my shrink, who's a little unconventional.
But like there would be times where I would recite to him the things that I had been told by other people in different ways over and over.
And then he would just be like, no, that's not a thing.
Like you can just do this.
Because everywhere you go, you're constantly being told, I am resisting going ham on this, John, because it's your story.
I'm not going to go ham on this story.
What is ham?
Oh, hard as a motherfucker?
Oh, I didn't know that.
That's hamph.
I'm not going to go ham on your, I probably pronounced that wrong, but it is so frustrating to me.
On the one hand, it's great when that happens, but then you're like, oh, is this person like, didn't you have a thought for a moment of like, oh, is this person just not a professional?
Have they gone rogue?
Why aren't they giving me the party line that everybody else does about how everything that happens is my problem because I don't understand how to do the system?
Because that's kind of what's implied almost always.
Well, the reason it's cost $40,000 is that's the system, and you should have known that.
You should have advocated for yourself in this one case, and you didn't.
Oh, geez, if you told me that you only wanted dental and orthodonture for medical reasons, oh, I didn't understand.
You don't get a German car just doing medical stuff.
You create like our, like our orthodontist did.
You've got to fucking, this guy had like an assembly line.
It was a racket.
I mean, he had like five ladies doing stuff and he'd wander around and check on the work and everybody loved him.
But it was, it was a whole racket because once you get somebody a little bit anxious about anything and you make them feel like they might have that answer, you are on the hook.
And you tend to stick with them because they gave you what felt like an answer.
And then you keep doing what they say unless or until somebody else goes, you know, that's a really convoluted way to deal with this.
And there's no shortcut for any of that.
But you still have to sit there and, like, be a good German when somebody's saying it's okay that rain is not being registered on your weather device anymore.
Because sometimes it doesn't pick up drizzle.
And after like five days of back and forth with Eric with a K, and each time, I know how to do these things.
I think I'm pretty good at this.
So with Eric with a K, I was like, you know, just what it's worth.
I just love this product.
I'm a big fan of this.
I've done this testing.
Yeah.
You know, I was able to share with him all the things I'd done to try and troubleshoot this and blah, blah, blah.
And he was real nice about it.
But each time he's like, yeah, you know, sometimes rain just doesn't register.
You know, wait until it rains more and see if it works better.
And I was like, was there any chance?
Because I read up in places that they know this is a known issue.
And because some units just aren't working right at this one thing.
I was like, is there any chance I could get like a new unit?
He's like, no, no.
And then I got the email that says, would you like to give some commentary on how it went?
So now I got homework.
I still have a weather station that doesn't record rain, but now I also have a new assignment.
Yeah, that's right.
To decide whether you're going to flame Eric with a K or not.
Which I didn't.
One of the things I loved about the new surgeon, the little Chinese gal, was that she, the way she talked about what she was going to do,
is she was talking in a way where she was like, and then I'll never see you again.
When I do this, and then this, and then this, then it will be over, and it will be done.
I'm sorry, as you say that, that feels so unusual to me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like almost unique.
It's so unusual for somebody to say, here's the plan, here's the steps,
potentially here's what it's going to cost.
Jerry would have done that with our Jetta.
Yep.
Yep.
And, and what she was proposing was massive.
She was like, first we're going to do, uh, uh, like a bone replacement then because whatever you need bone.
And I was like, okay, I can hear that.
She was like, then we're going to do a gum replacement.
And I was like, okay, that makes sense.
and she said then we're going to put a post in and the whole thing is going to take a year
And then you'll never see me again.
This is your new gal.
Yeah.
And I said, okay, all of that makes more sense to me than the decade I spent being told that I was going to get my jaw sawed apart.
Or your kid will just keep having braces until you figure out that they never really needed braces.
Yeah.
Your kid will keep having braces until we all decide that God had a plan the whole time, which was that he gave her an extra tooth.
That it was going to live in her job.
Got out of plan the whole time.
Got out of plan the whole time.
And so I did last year go in and get a bone graft and live with it for nine months or whatever for it to heal.
And then went in and got a gum graft.
And lived with that and waited for it to heal all the time with a tic-tac glued in and or no No, no all last year.
I didn't even have a tooth I did all those big long winter shows last year with no tooth because My community accepts me as I am.
So you're doing all this groundwork like literally back to engineering I keep thinking of Disneyland for some reason or wherever like you gotta you gotta do all this stuff to prepare You didn't even get the thing you were hoping for which is like give daddy a tooth
No, just make me look like a regular guy.
I remember being surrounded by my daughter's schoolmates at the junior high because I was a regular there.
And at one point, there were no other adults around.
to monitor their their childish curiosity and this group of them a gaggle of them kind of surrounded me and the outspoken girl the like popular girl said why don't you have a tooth and I looked around and there were no adults around
And I said, honestly, life is fucking hard.
And they all like big eyes.
Listening closely.
Big eyes.
And they were absolutely delighted by that answer and completely satisfied with it.
They all were just like, huh?
Makes sense.
And we're just like, okay, right.
Yes.
And I was like, mm-hmm.
They've had days they thought were going to be a good day and then turn out, didn't turn out good.
They've seen the ups and downs in life and they understand life, life is fucking weird sometimes, you know?
Absolutely.
And every other metric by every other metric of a parent, I was clearly thriving in life, right?
I was like a good dad.
I was there all the time.
I had like, my clothes were cool.
Like I was a dad.
That had high status.
You'll grab a broom, but I also am missing a tooth.
And so how does this work?
Like this isn't all these things aren't supposed to line up.
And I was like, because life is fucking harder than they tell you.
And they're just like, but so I went in finally to my, to my dental surgeon and she said, now I'm going to put a post in to your well healed, uh,
like bone grafted gum grafted face and she did she put it in there
She said, don't screw around with it.
Also, you have to brush your teeth.
The post would be like the thing that they stick in that front area that would then have a tooth mounted on it.
That's a more permanent solution than the glue and the tape.
And this was the problem before.
All the 10 dentists before all said, if someone puts the post in, but you haven't aligned your face...
then the post is immovable.
Everything else we can saw apart, but the post is titanium.
Once it's in there, it can't be moved.
Everything else, if it was programming, everything else would have relative variables.
And in this case, that's hardwired now.
So if your face moves, that could be in the middle of your face.
You could look like somebody from Yo Gabba Gabba or something.
You could have one big pointy front tooth like Sigmund the Sea Monster.
That's exactly what it was, right?
That was the threat.
And my bite is bad.
Oh, no.
You're going to chew your own head apart by the time you're 90.
And I was like, yeah, but I mean, every 90 year olds has already chewed their head apart.
It's part of being alive.
And they're like, no, no, you know, like we're going to do this surgery on you with the assumption that you will live to be 400 years old and it will pay off in the end.
Cause that would be perfect.
That would be absolutely perfect.
And and this gal was just like, you know, you're 56 years old.
Like, who knows?
You could die any day.
Why don't we just put a tooth in there?
And I was like, this makes sense to me.
And so now so much more practical.
What I have right now is a fake tooth that she put on there in anticipation of going to now the dentist in its final form.
who is going to put a cap, a permanent cap that I can eat apples on this titanium post.
Once you've got the post, you're back to playing like a regular person with a regular mouth.
Now you can do dental things to that, but the surgeon first has to create the scaffolding to build that on.
Yes, correct.
And now I can do dental things on it.
So I broke that tooth out in 2007.
And here we are, almost 20 years of not being able to eat an apple, of having teeth break and get glued back in and break and get glued back in and braces and all this threat and whatever.
Tens and tens and tens of tens of thousands of dollars.
And all the pain and suffering and embarrassment and years with no tooth.
and now she has put a tooth she's put a thing in there and on our last visit she was like probably i'll never see you again unless you break another tooth and i was like amazing i like this amazing and i sat up on the chair and i said let me tell you i just want to say you're the best dental experience i've had since i was a kid
You have been the only person that I've left the chair feeling better on the way out than I did on the way in.
And I don't think she was used to being complimented in that way.
And I don't think her dental assistants were used to hearing it either because they all were just like looking at their shoes like, oh, well, thanks, I guess.
I mean, and I'm like, no, no, no, seriously.
Thank you.
So now I have this final mission to go to some other dentist.
Oh, boy.
Who's going to make... Oh, and the final wrinkle was, she said, the thing is that in order for the...
the new tooth to match the other front tooth yeah you should probably take the cap off of the other front tooth and have them made together otherwise one of them will look too new it'll look like it'll look like semen and crofts or whatever semen and crofts oh you mean like like sigmund sigmund like sigmund from seals and crofts yeah diamond girl they called him and uh yeah
And I said to her.
By the way, that's short.
By the way, that's short for this episode.
I'm working on it right now.
Sigmund.
Sigmund.
I said to her, but the other cap could break off like the one on this side.
And she and I said, and if it breaks off, then I have to go do this all over.
And she said, well, that is the risk.
That's a pretty straight-up way to put it, though.
Yeah.
Otherwise, the two teeth will probably not match very well.
Yeah.
And I was like...
All of this is against a backdrop of my mom who broke out her front tooth in 1968 and went in and the doc, the doctor put a stainless steel post in like the following day.
And it's still in her mouth to this day.
Yeah.
What was different?
What was different then?
I mean, it's a rhetorical question that you're free to answer, but this does happen.
Oh, goodness me.
I mean, again, with me, it's like, wasn't there a time when you could call somebody and they would...
In fact, fix an appliance rather than break it further.
Whereas almost every service call I have for anything involving appliances, and maybe I'm just bad at picking people, is that something ends up worse than when I called.
Is that right?
Oh, absolutely.
And you start to feel like, well, how difficult can it be to make an eight-year-old freezer freeze better?
Oh.
And I haven't even told you, like, I told Syracuse this whole story, but the thing I went through with just, and again, I'm not trying to change the topic, but it's common, I think, or, you know, I think it's in common with all of these kinds of stories, where by the time the guy was done, like, the freezer didn't freeze any better, plus he'd broken the dial.
The change is how the dial.
Yeah.
But he said, don't worry.
Cause in his, just so we're clear here, his English is better than my Russian and his grandparents were at Stalingrad.
We did talk about this, but he, um, Oh, but, but, uh, yeah, no.
And the call took like three hours because he got the wrong part and obviously broke something and was on the phone with somebody else speaking in Russian for like 30 minutes before he's like, I have to go out and get something.
and came back, and then when he came back, like, okay, well, it freezes about the same, but now the dial doesn't work.
And without getting too much into it, like it's a pretty primitive fridge by modern standards.
The dial for the freezer is attached to whatever it is that actually changed.
It's not sending like a message to a switch.
It's attached to the thing that controls how cold it gets.
And it was spinning freely when he arrived.
And I said, you know, that's kind of one of the reasons I called you was that, you know, this thing's, we can no longer, in other words, we can no longer tell what it sat at.
So, you know, anyways, and then by the time we were done, like, yeah.
And then by the time we're done, you're like, and he charged me $400 for it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
$400.
Yeah, I had one of those.
It was about $400 where I went in and I was like, this thing isn't working.
I mean, I can see that there's this broken wire.
So maybe that's it.
I think I was like, got it.
And I went back, and he was like, we soldered the wire.
And I turned the switch, and I was like, but it still doesn't work.
And he said, well, you told us to solder the wire.
He said, you told us to solder the wire.
And I said, no, I told you to fix the problem.
I just pointed at the wire.
Oh, see, that's what the Buddha said.
The Buddha said, you're staring at my finger, I'm pointing at the moon.
I'm trying to show you the moon, but you're just staring at my finger.
And I think in that case, that fellow might be staring at your finger, if I could say.
He was, he was staring at my finger and I said, now, wait a minute, you're going to charge me $400 to solder a wire and you don't even know what the water or the wire does.
And the problem I was trying to fix isn't fixed.
And he was like, well, it's, you know, you told us to fix the wire.
I'm deep into the kind of old man territory that I generally try to avoid.
But to get back to your point, how is it that in 1968,
there was interest, capability, technology, and materiel to cause a tooth that your mother still has.
What is different about you that they can't figure that out?
Is it so completely different?
Is it that, I mean, one starts to wonder if all of these like preceding medical procedures, because you know what my wife went through, like what you did, but like worse, like she had her jaw broken and reset and then got braces.
And it was like a whole entire thing.
And I don't think she regrets doing it.
I think it seems like kind of a lot, but, you know, it's her mouth.
It was a massive event.
It was a big disruptive event, medical event.
I mean, not so different from like 80% of like childbirth in terms of like the amount of like effort and time and recuperation that it took.
Anyhow, but I'm just trying to say- You get a baby at the end of that.
That's true.
Well, you know, come see, come saw.
But you know what I'm saying?
Doesn't that kind of go through your mind a little bit?
If we could just be old guys together for a minute.
How is it that your mom has a tooth from 1968, the year you were born?
No, wait, you're 68, right?
I'm 68, yeah.
Yeah, so she's had a tooth that's as old as you.
Why is yours such a problem now in this great age of technology?
Well, and this is the thing and I feel like this is now we're gonna get very Roderick on the line here in the last little bit But I do feel like there was also nothing wrong with the Ford F 250 in 1968 There were a lot of things in 1968 that were already fine that maybe were the perfection of the form
And yet we kept improving them and each improvement was incremental.
Each improvement was just one inch better.
But almost always moving in the right direction, if not in huge steps, but always moving in the right direction, right?
In the right direction.
That becomes important.
These cars are more efficient, more easy to manufacture, safer.
They have new safety stuff.
They have new this, that, and the other.
And then, you know, as we get to 1989, Volkswagen had perfected the climate system for a car.
It had two knobs.
One of them controlled the fan.
One of them controlled the heat and cold.
And it had like two sliders or four buttons or something.
It was perfection.
Any person could understand it by looking at it.
It had no words on it.
You could put your hand on it and know what you were doing.
You're saying it wasn't part of like a 19-part touchscreen on your wheel?
No.
On your square steering wheel?
You didn't have to program it.
You didn't have to look.
There was no menu.
There was no menu.
On my truck right now, there's a button that says rear climate control, like an actual physical button.
And when you push it, it calls up a screen.
of rear climate control options.
Oh, that's handy.
And then you have to interact with the screen as you're driving.
As you're driving.
That's important now.
What if you want to heat it up while you're driving?
I think in dentistry it's the same.
This stainless steel thing...
was fine and would last for 50 years and they just wanted to improve it just slightly by this and then they invented the and then titanium and then they could do this and suddenly they had microscopic arthroscopic super things and this and that and the other and each one of these steps is getting further although closer to perfection further from
the concept because there are still 1968 f-250s on the road and they aren't that much that's the thing they are less safe than modern cars they are less efficient than modern cars but they are not
They are not so less efficient and so less safe.
But there's two generations of cars that didn't run as long.
Well, there's 15 generations of cars between 1968 and now, and you don't see any of them on the road.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There are no 1989 Ford F250s on the road.
You never see one.
There are no 1994 F250s on the road, or barely, because those cars, every little improvement made them ultimately less reliable.
Fewer people could work on them.
So they stopped walking the right way in the same direction at some point.
At some point.
Toward gradual improvement.
So my mom's 50 year old tooth or 57 year old tooth, when the dentist put it in, the dentist made no promises about how long it was going to last.
The new stuff that they put in, they're like, man, that'll probably last about 20 years.
And
I don't, you know, our friend of the show, Ben King, we were talking about this just not that long ago.
They're like, you need a shoulder replacement.
Right, right, right.
You know, but you got to wait because they only last 20 years.
I think you got to get that timing right in 1968.
Dang it.
I got my shoulder too early.
You have a shoulder too early.
Now my slow pitch softball in my 90s is not good.
Yeah, I'm 78 years old and now my shoulder hurts again.
I think in the 70s they would have taken you out behind the barn and shot you if you had a shoulder that bad.
Although, I don't know, there are guys walking around that had shoulders way worse.
Shoulders that were, you know, they had a bullet in them.
Oh, you kidding me?
There's a little greeting from Hitler.
now now that's your shoulder and somehow people survive there's another part of this that's baked into this that i i just i'll just tease out my own thing here um so like there's the part that i keep calling project management because that's my you know the color of my crystal forte yeah yeah i mean and i ran into this cutting your jib that's that's how my jibs cut um which means it is ready and when it's ready um i
You know, I have two different plastic copies of Master and Commander.
I got the new 4K.
Is it because you're on the phone with Jason Finn all the time?
Not as much as I'd like.
I think he's been busy.
I miss him.
I know how busy he's been.
I don't know.
Okay.
So, I'm sorry.
I'm not trying to be cute about this.
But, like, I mentioned that concept.
And I don't know if that's a concept that resonates with people.
I think it resonates with people that it resonates with.
Who are like, oh, my God.
Yes.
Like, in one case with my mom.
She was on an opium patch on auto refill.
and nobody was checking in with her.
That was from a surgery months and months earlier, and there was nobody checking in.
Now, back to this other point, I'm not trying to drag anybody or say anybody's unprofessional, but like you said earlier, people, especially in a medical profession, seem very concerned about their little half acre and what their job is.
So maybe they don't mention that's a $40,000 procedure, or maybe they don't.
But that's why I keep saying, does anybody ever look at the records?
And like, or just the, you know, contraindications, the like, you know, drug interactions at a basic level, let alone how do you not notice in the middle of like the Oxy, like Rush Limbaugh loses his hearing because he's hooked on Oxy era.
Like my mom was on just this patch that refills.
Do you know what it takes me to get Vyvanse every month?
I need a physical prescription every single month to get ADD medicine that doesn't work.
So, but then the other part of it, and I just, I don't know, I'd like you to opine on this.
There's a soft skill here that I'm calling project management.
And there's another part, and I don't know if this is something that should be in a class or something, but like, you know, if I'm so fucking stupid about how airlines work, I'm so fucking stupid about how the medical industry and the insurance industry works.
I'm so fucking stupid about what it takes to...
to fix an appliance with hardly any parts to it.
Like, what remedial class do I need to be a better participant in all of these things?
And I'm asking it partly sarcastically, because nobody actually cares, obviously.
But there's another part of me, it's like, well, what am I, what am I fucking missing?
Like, who do you want me to be?
You want me to be somebody who's a good doobie about all these different systems that are very oppositional to whatever it is that I can see as a life improvement.
And then when you find a way, it'll be this circuitous method that's going to take years and surgeries and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And when the case of orthodontist, you just keep going until you go, you know, we're not going to come here anymore.
And he's like, cool.
Like, how medically necessary was any of that?
So, like, I don't know what kind of class I need.
What are we missing, John?
Why are we so out of step?
And how do we get brought up to date on what everybody else seems to have absolutely no problem with?
Well, I don't think anybody has no problem with it.
I think everybody is dependent on 100 eels now that are being presented to them by experts.
The experts are putting the eels on us way more than we're putting them on ourselves.
And they say this eel will make you safe and closer to the thing you think you want.
Exactly.
I don't know if I've ever talked about when my dad was dying, but I probably did.
We may have talked about it back in the day.
It wouldn't bother me if you talked about it again.
But, you know, he, in his final hours, was in the intensive care unit.
Oh, God.
And he had... He was... He had, like...
inhaled you know stuff into his lungs and he had been unconscious for the whole day and they had had to his blood oxygen levels had fallen beyond a certain thing and he'd you know he'd been in and out of the hospital for
for five months before that.
And he'd been living in a, he'd been living in a, no longer assisted living, but in a, in a care home where he was hooked to machines all the time.
Like a hospice, a hospice palliative.
But yeah,
But no, they weren't expecting him to die.
They were like, he could live here for 100 years.
But it's like, there's those steps where it's like, can you live alone in ACLF?
Now, you need assisted stuff.
It's got to be more of like a home.
But there's that weird range between like nursing home and hospice where it's like people who need more care than a lot of times their partner in particular or even family can give.
Yeah.
Oh, this was for sure a nursing home.
Okay.
And, uh, but then he had an incident, the emergency rescued him, you know, and he had, he had a DNR, uh, do not resuscitate that he'd filled out.
And he'd put it in a file cabinet between an old copy of Life magazine.
Some canceled checks.
Some canceled checks and his World War II pilot's license.
And then he put that, then he let my sister put that file cabinet in a storage space.
So I only found his DNR, you know, six months after he died.
And I was like, oh, dad, this would have been handy to have.
But they did, not having a DNR, they did resuscitate him.
You know, he had kind of,
for all intents and purposes was dying but they the aid car guys brought him back to life they intubated him they took him to the hospital anyway after a whole day of me sitting by his bedside where they're doing all these dramatic um efforts they took him into the icu
And they, and it was the middle of the night and I'm sitting there in the ICU and there's a doctor and he's a, a diminutive man, uh, but handsome and you know, and, and exactly the age and the gravitas you would want in an ICU doctor.
He was probably 60 in very good shape.
I'm sure he had a Porsche.
And he had a little team of of like residents around him.
And he came over and said, all right, your dad is stabilized and he's, you know, this, that and the other.
And so, you know, we can move him out of the ICU.
We can do there's, you know, 10 things to do and you need to tell us what you want to do.
And I said, well, doctor, you've stabilized him.
He's on these machines.
Is he, what are his chances of regaining consciousness?
And the doctor said, well, that depends.
And I said, yeah, I know it depends, but like, what are his actual chances of regaining consciousness?
And the doctor, you know, kind of, he's looking at me with very emotional eyes.
Like he has, he understands what I'm asking.
And he says, well, um...
There's an outside chance.
And I said, let me just, just let me stop you there.
Percentage.
Give me a number.
And he said, he's not going to regain conscious.
Yeah.
And I said, okay.
So what are the chances that he has any functionality ever from now on, no matter what you do?
He was like, well, it depends, but not much.
No, none.
His blood was too toxic for too long.
And I said, how long can you keep him alive on these machines?
And he said, indefinitely.
Indefinitely.
And I said, really?
And he said, yeah.
Like until he dies of like natural causes.
He would have died of natural causes.
Natural causes are all around him trying to kill him.
Yeah.
No, until whatever.
I mean, they're going to put oxygen.
They're going to put vitamins.
They're going to take away his, you know, they can keep him alive.
He's 87.
They could keep him alive until he was 97.
Maybe.
because he's there.
They've got all the machines on him already.
They can, you know, and I said, what would happen if we turned off the machines?
And he's, you know, he's looking down at his shoe and he's, you know, kind of towing the floor and he looks up and he's like, I mean, he'd die within an hour.
and i stood there and all the you know all the residents are standing in a semi-circle and and uh i said turn them off take the machines out pull the tubes turn the lights down shut it down and he said
wow, you're really walking your talk.
And I was like, what the fuck, what was all this?
What was all this?
And they went in and they took it all down.
And then I went in and I turned the radio on the jazz station that he liked, K-I-X-I.
and my sister and oh and the other thing is my one sister who's a doctor was there and my other sister who knows everything about everything was there and they were both like you decide like this is the last thing we want to deal with right now with the implication being we you decide and we'll back you up
yeah and the doctor said when i talked to him later he said we're living in a time when almost everybody that i see in my daily job here in the icu they they keep their person alive and the person never regains consciousness their brain is gone
They have no sensation.
Their body is a shell.
And when people come to that place, that decision, they just can't make it.
And they say, let's do everything we can to save them.
And he said, those people just sit next to a dead person, basically, whose heart is still beating, sometimes for years.
And we sat there next to him and he breathed and for about, I don't know, less than two hours.
And then he got harder to breathe and then he died.
And I couldn't think of anything that was more what he would have done.
Right.
And I did, I couldn't think of anything worse than sitting next to that bed for a year where he was just like, you know, like what an awful thing.
I've never regretted it.
Never, never once.
And the, and this doctor was so
He was so like prohibited by his code from telling me to do this.
But once I made the decision, he was so like, well, a hundred percent, like this is what not only you should have done, but this is what everybody should have done.
This is like what God wants.
It's time, you know?
And I think that's an analogy for so much of what we do.
Now, which is like, because the technology can do it because we have invented it, then we have to use it in every case we are now reliant on it.
And we're not the 1968 F two 50 is, was enough of a truck.
It was as much of a truck as any of us needed.
It's just so hard to stop.
Bye.