Cloyce Adrift

There was once this good ol' boy, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who considered himself the neighborhood innovator. Some of his ideas, to be fair, were kind of clever. But most of the time all he did was jury rig. That's okay too so far as I'm concerned, if it's a decent enough adaptation.

Cloyce had an old Chevy Bel Air, I believe it was a '65, and it needed a wheel alignment. The old rattletrap drifted sharply to the left (this is not leading to a political joke I assure you) and really needed front end work. But ol' Cloyce didn't want to put that kind of money into the car. So he looked around in his garage for what was handy and found an old snow tire. He put it on the car on the left front.

That stopped the drift. His theory was that the snow tire, having deeper tread, made up for the amount of space which had been created by vehicular wear which led to the drift. Based on the results, I'm inclined to say he was right, as he drove with that winter tire for about six months before he got rid of the car.

It was a jury rig. But hey, it worked for him, and considering the types of cars I drive, who am I to argue?

Reinventing the Wheel

There was this drain snake customer of ours, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who might have been the penultimate re-inventor of the wheel. There wasn't a drain snake which was safe from his passion to do things different under the guise of making them better, which to my knowledge he never actually managed. His improvements tended to make things harder rather than easier.

Ol' Cloyce had a large plate installed atop a snake to turn the motor a hundred and eighty degrees around because it would then magically give the machine more power. It didn't, but it sure made working on the motor a greater chore. 

He welded the power feed onto a machine, backwards too by the way, because that made it easier (he argued) to access the actuator handle. Not in the least, I tell you, but replacing bearings was then a true challenge because you had to take the entire feed apart to do it. Normally you take the unit off and set it on a work bench where, trust me, putting in new bearings was much more readily done. 

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was retrofitting a thirteen horsepower gasoline engine to his electric drain machine because he was absolutely going to destroy any root bed in any sewer which came his way. Those roots would never know what hit them. 

There wasn't simply one thing wrong with that approach. There were many.

A typical electric snake has a 3/4 horsepower motor. Cloyce increased the power nearly twenty times the necessary strength. Overkill much, Cloyce?

Then the unit was too heavy and bulky to get into a standard basement in a private home. But that was probably just as well because, you know, toxic fumes from the exhaust just might be a problem in a small enclosed area. Maybe.

Professor Cloyce took care of that with an intricate series of detachable piping which could be run from an open basement window to the drain access. Of course, that put you as much as forty or fifty feet away from the job and left you blind to the work. I guess progress doesn't absolutely require that you see what you're doing, but still.

I'm sure he did rip those roots to shreds. I'm sure he destroyed a good many lengths of sewer pipe too. Ah well. Here's to Cloyce, the Thomas Edison of the snake world.

Or more honestly, the Rube Goldberg. But I'm sure the old boy had fun tinkering in his laboratory. Uh, garage.

Think Inside the Box

Another phrase of which I think little (here he goes again) is when we are told to think outside the box. The fact is that there's nothing outside the box to think about.

Oh, I know what they, the infamous they, mean. They mean for you to be innovative and creative. That's all well and good. We need innovation and creation. The trouble is that there's nothing you can innovate or create without using tools and concepts which preexist your changes or inventions.

The artist cannot paint without a knowledge of the tools and practices of art. The inventor cannot invent without knowing the background of whatever field in which he is making something new. The atomic bomb wasn't made without making use of the existing laws of physics and the knowable rules of mathematics and mechanics. 

To be sure, a painting or the bomb didn't exist as such before their initial manufacture. Yet no one truly thought outside of any box in making them. They came about through the use of materials and intellect which were already there to be employed. So we can go ahead and throw thinking outside the box into the dust bin with all those other useless phrases which I rail so much about.