Diary of a Mad Scientist

Oddly enough, as I’m about to leave my stint at the world’s most unique offgrid Machine Shop, I’ve finally enrolled in machinist school. I"m attending what I think of as “Concrete Community College". The architect who designed the school must have thought he was building a shrine to the god called ‘one part Portland Cement, three parts sand’. It’s a really urban campus on the south side of Chinatown. They seem to have an enormous budget for pigeon impaling devices so that the concrete stays fresh and birdpoop-free.

While I was a tenant at the Shop, I was too ill to get involved in the actual Machine Shop club at our shop, and I’ve been a bit afraid to learn safety practices from people who learned them third-hand from someone who was at one point an actual working machinist. Whatever energy I’ve had the past couple of years has been going to learning to weld, and to my silly dedication to those damn tanks at the biodiesel project.

At this point though machine technology seems like a good set of skills to pick up, considering I think of myself primarily as an ‘inventor’. Mills and other machine tools fall into that category of ‘crap’ that’s so huge that it’s sometimes sold off quite cheaply by hobbyists in cities like this one. The Machine Shop has outfitted itself primarily due to it’s willingness to take on Big Crap that others smartly get rid of due to the constraints of rental space in the city.

Concrete Community College machine technology program is kicking my butt- it’s something like 16 contact hours a week, evenings. I have no spare time now. I also stupidly enrolled in the welding class and three others. I havent’ really been in college before, and I"m having a blast remembering elementary school arithmatic. No, really, it’s been fun. I felt a little silly in my ‘math for the trades’ math lab on the first day- I used to be quite a geek as a kid, and my math skills have atrophied 110% due to disuse.

So here I am in remedial math. It was extremely funny realizing I’d forgotten how to divide by fractions- I just pull out a calculator for those arithmatic problems that aren’t in the “16ths” of my carpentry profession. Then I looked over at the kid across the lab, and he was literally counting on his fingers with a confused look on his face. And he was actually college age so ‘disuse’ wasn’t his excuse. Damn!

I’m actually learning a lot about how badly people ‘don’t learn’ and it’s been a great immersion course in teaching styles- things I never noticed when I was there in high school or trade school in my early 20’s, before I"d tried teaching people myself.

The welding class is particularly funny- I"ve been in a couple of different schools for auto mechanic classes before, and thought I had a good idea of what to expect here in a trades program. But no, I’ve finally found something that attracts stupid kids even more than working on cars does. Daytime community college auto mechanic classes are usually full of unruly 18-year-old boys who aren’t interested in academics (diesel school’s a bit better since it attracts people who know what they want to learn- they tend to be older, already work as mechanics, and tend to be focused). But even for the 18-year-olds, auto mechanics is something that they’re likely to have done before, and it takes a certain amount of thinking. Welding doesn’t.

So Concrete Community College is full of these kids who just CAN’T FOLLOW DIRECTIONS worth a damn. I started over a week late because of the East Coast trip at the end of August, so I"m still in catch-up mode in my classes. With me in ‘catch-up mode’ in my welding class are some of the young kids who started on time but just don’t get it. The other day we had ‘remedial cutting torch’ demo- all the kids who had flunked the cutting torch written safety test after practicing it in August, were getting the whole load of info all over again.

We had a long line of kids (sorry, ‘guys’- they were all doofy guys- not ‘kids’, which implies that the girls were flunking Cutting Torch along with the guys), standing around the cutting torch table. Each person, um, I mean guy, would get to the front of the line and pick up the torch. And I’d watch from the end of the line as a great big dial tone would go off in his head. Nothing there. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. And this stagefright comes right after watching the teacher lecture and demonstrate it (for the second or third time). So each guy would go up to the front of the Remedial Cutting Torch line, do everythign wrong, get it all corrected a few times, do it wrong, get it corrected again. Then the guy in line behind him would go up to the front of the line, pick up the torch and stare at it like it was somethign alien he’d never seen before. And proceed to do it wrong. Many times. Then the next guy would get up and pick up the torch wrong and not know what any of the controls did, again. again.