On fixing a fan

Two years ago I tried to replace a broken ceiling fan.

I had a little trouble fitting the cable clamp, and figured I crimped the wires too much.

Sometimes the voltmeter showed something, sometimes it didn't. I feared a short, cut off the circuit breaker when I wasn't home, and pondered.

And pondered and pondered and pondered. I may be the world's greatest ponderer. (Pondering gets you nowhere, by the way....)

I once worked in Port Newark, on the docks at the water's edge, moving tons of scrap metal day after day after day. Some men had cranes. I had a shovel.

I worked as a longshoreman when men still mattered as much as machines. We had a saying.

"If it don't fit, don't force it, turn it over and try again."

That's carried me for well over four decades.

I have always focused on the black wire, the live one, the one with the power and the glory. The neutral one, not so much.

In the States, our power is AC--electrons go here, then scamper quickly back to there. While the black wire has, at its peak, 120 volts more than the neutral, its strength relies on a differential, not an absolute. After two fucking years, I took the abstract and put it in the real world.

If the black wire is live (as it was) and nothing is happening, maybe it's because the electrons have nowhere to go. (If you're a first year electrician's apprentice, no, I do not need to hear from you.)

Pretty much every circuit has a switch, and switches are ridiculously easy to grasp. But people make mistakes.

I had assumed that the problem I had was at the point I was focused on--where the wires fell through the ceiling, the point where I had crimped them together a tad too much two years ago.

I opened the switch box--and there it was--the neutral wire connected to, well, nothing but air.

So now the fan and light work again, but that's not the point. The sun will rise tomorrow, the wind will blow. I can live without a lamp and a fan.

The point is this--the neutral wire matters every bit as much as the one that could kill me. Power makes us all drunk.

The folks making all the noise, controlling the money, hogging the airwaves, well, yes, they can make changes.

But the rest of us, the neutral wires, decide what flows and what doesn't.

Throw your shoe into the machine. 

Science on the docks

I had a brief career as a stevedore. I had met Leslie the year before, she was the one, and she wisely counseled I get my ass out of Port Newark.

Shoveling on ship in July with a late adolescent body can be joy; doing the same in November in my 6th decade would have sucked.

Leslie's rarely wrong.

Still, I was there long enough to learn some science.

***

I worked for M.J.Rudolph, based at Starboard and Export Streets in the port. We loaded ships.

We loaded piles of metal turnings on ships headed for Japan; across the way we could see Port Newark, where our metal returned as Hondas and Mitsibushis.

I shoveled. A lot. I worked with metal turnings, shreds of old cars, old refrigerators, old wheel barrows, old metal tanks. I stood on huge piles of this stuff.

Despite wearing thick work boots with wool socks, my feet would get uncomfortably hot from the heat rising from the pile. Oxidizing lets high energy electrons slip down a state or two. When electrons relax, the energy has to go somewhere--in this case, it went to my feet.

The heat is not trivial--ships have been threatened by oxidizing scrap metal.

I can talk about oxidation all period in science class, but no reason to expect it to stick. Standing on top of a mountain of oxidizing strips of metal, however, grabs attention.

May be time for a field trip.

***

Steel can kill you several ways on the docks.

Occasionally we loaded transmissions or steel ingots onto ships. The crane operators used magnets to lift the steel.

Now and again an ingot would fall. And bounce, and bounce, and bounce some more. Turns out steel is phenomenally elastic. A steel ingot will bounce like a massive rubber ball. Transmissions will bounce off a ship's deck like a tennis ball off Venus' racket. I once stood mesmerized as several transmissions bounced around me.

Hardhats are useless when tons of steel dance around your head.

Elasticity is an object's ability to quickly return to its original shape after a deforming force is applied to it.

I can talk about elasticity all period long in science class, but it won't stick. A few moments of terror dodging huge chunks of dancing metal, however, forge the concept in one's brain.

Tiggers bounce, ingots bounce more.

May be time for a field trip.

Photo from the Star-Ledger.