Re: A Problem To Solve :-)

On 4/13/24 01:50, Physfitfreak wrote:

After that, Physfit said, "Cheers." and left and came home. Grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, and began thinking about how he could make a rectangular cross-sectioned lumber out of a log with a certain diameter, resulting in the maximum strength for the lumber.
 An hour later, he had the answer.

He peeped through the kitchen window to see if the neighbors' cars have come back. Pendulum clock now was showing almost noon time, and none of those "true Americans" worked. So whatever booze and drugs buying escapade they'd embarked on that morning should've ended by then. They all had! So he took the paper with the sketch of the correct cross-section on it, and got ready to go there and knock on their doors.
As he came back in the living room area it happened that he surprised the only male cat he had who wouldn't let him touch him, let alone lift or hug him. This was a black and white cat who in the hierarchy held among them, occupied the lowest position. Even the miserable gray cat at the second to lowest position, who always got bullied by the two other male cats, would sometimes get a bit of respite in bullying this black 5and white one. And when that happened, the gray cat was ferocious toward that cat, literally trying to make up for all the humiliation and stress he was always receiving from the other males.
Physfit had not resolved that situation yet.
And when the black and white got surprised, he ran to hide somewhere, which triggered the gray one to run after him, and the two other cats run after both gray and the black and white cats. So suddenly a huge noisy quarrel began and all four began running and jumping and fighting and hitting stuff around the living room, throwing them down, etc.
When this happened, which it did about once a week, nothing would work to stop them but water :) Physfit had to take one of their water bowls and empty it on as many of them as he could at once. He did that, and cats quickly dispersed and hid silently somewhere, with the female ones still where they were, except were now watching this madness intently; and probably getting yet a bit more feminist as a result. Physfit could read their faces, "These lunatics..." they may've been thinking.
Physfit took a look around to estimate the damages. Other than all that extra cleaning up added to usual daily chores, only one item seemed to have suffered real damage. The pendulum clock. It had fallen down hitting the hard floor underneath it when one or more cats had jumped away from it. Its front door was unhinged and thrown off, and the clock's both hands were missing. It was a piece of shit to begin with. He'd bought it years back from a thrift store for something like $9. And for some time he'd messed with it to make it work at all, forget the accuracy.
The clock was prone to all sorts of disruptions. It was not designed to automatically correct for any of them. The manufacturer, some fucking CHINK, had left all that work to the buyers to toil and adjust. Its functional window as far as being vertical was concerned, did not include the 100% vertical direction! Right there you could see what type of _Chink_ had designed it. Someone who'd left the rice fields not that long before changing jobs.
Physfit had discovered that the pendulum would keep oscillating only when the clock was held on the wall slightly tilted to one side, and only to that side, and only to a certain degree, not more. There was not a way to turn the clockworks part of it itself against the wooden body of the clock. More than one screw had been used, and they weren't regular screws either, you'd have to damage them to remove them. Not wanting to go that far in the repair of the thing, Physfit had decided to correct for it by tilting the frame itself. It wasn't showing that much though. But it sure was, again, the hand of a fucking rice field farmer showing. Or that of an equivalent little Code Monkey wannabe, begat under some stone somewhere across this land of the brave, thus turning into a "true American" for us who came and built the USA.
And there were all sorts of other problems with other parts of the clock. For one, the slider on the pendulum bar for fine tuning oscillation frequency was way too light for that job. You could move it all the way up, and clock was still slow, or all the way down and clock was still fast. Physfit had had to wrap rubber bands around the slider to make it play a role... imagine what THAT did to the "interior design" of the living room after the fucking think was tuned and done with, giving the correct time at last. He'd messed with it so much in so many different ways that he didn't even want to change the rubber bands with something more appropriate. He wanted that Chinese _sin_ to exhibit itself each time you'd notice it; or that stench of a "true American" type parasite.
It had several other problems. The gears were sharp, showing that clock was quite new, yet one wind beyond the second, and PRRROPP!, they'd slip and turn back to the unwound position. There were at least three pivot points where you could reduce or increase the distances between gears, both sideways and in a planar way, and yet with nothing that Physfit had tried, you would find a combination that eradicated the slippage of SOME gear in there. Result was that this motherfucking thing could only get safely wound two turns of the key, and never more. The little user manual said 5 to 7 turns is best. So winding had to get repeated every week, and not every month as it was supposed to.
The damn thing was also susceptible to temperature variations. The material used, and the design of it both, were at fault. And this was Texas! Where temperature often varies 30 to even 40 degrees within the same 24 hours, repeatedly, in most periods of the year. So this thing was accurate only in certain hours of each 24 hour period. It was the mark of China in that house. The mark of rice field workers. A "true American" thing.
The clock had been knocked down by cats once before, so Physfit carefully placed the clock back on the wall, adjusted the position as best as he could (he had marked the wall itself for it), and reinstalled the detached front door of it whose glass was fortunately not shattered or cracked.
He then looked for the hands and found them and inserted them back on the face of the clock. He chose, for now, to position them at 12 o'clock noon and adjust the fucking time and the clock itself later.
Unbeknownst to him, he had inserted the hands in wrong order, effectively interchanging the roles of the two hands.