The Threadless Nut

So this is a little story that (mostly) happened to me a while ago. There’s an update today, but since I never posted the original story here, here it is, skip to the bottom if you must:

The Toaster Revolt of 1997

So, I’m getting a bagel this morning. Little did I know I was about to witness the worker’s revolt of 97.

I get my nice sesame bagel, head over to the bagel biter, slice it in half and and turn to go to the toaster. This is one of those commercial conveyer-belt toasters. Anyway, there are about 10 people around the toaster, this 1 woman, whom I’ll refer to as Norma Rae, is pontificating to the cafeteria guy, (we’ll call him Jimbo), on how much of her precious break time is being wasted dealing with this toaster. People are putting their bagels, bread, muffins, puppies, etc into the toaster, staring at it for a minute and taking their item out, looking at it and shaking their heads. It seems the toaster isn’t so much as toasting as it is warming.

Ok, so normal person would say, “Oh, darn” and run the bread product through again until the desired toastedness is achieved, but not your average corporate citizen, no! The folks are standing around, ganging up on the poor cafeteria guy, “What’s wrong with this thing?, “Why aren’t there 2 toasters?”, “Why do my shorts keep riding up?”. Poor Jimbo is just trying to get to the knob to turn the thing up a little, but Norma won’t let him get by. She continues her assault on defenseless Jimbo while one of her compatriots, whom I’ll call Brain Donor, is repeatedly PRESSING the temperature adjustment KNOB. So Norma is quizzing Jimbo on why there is only 1 toaster, Jimbo is mounting his only defense, “I’m just a contractor, the corporation supplies the equipment”, Donor is continuing to press the knob, wondering why it is having little effect.

Meanwhile, another party, whom I will name MacGyver, swoops in to retrieve his bagel. Mac discovers that his bagel is being blocked in the output tray by another. Being the resourceful guy that he is, MacGyver grabs the tongs, removes the offending bagel, placing it on a plate to the side of the toaster, and takes his own bagel, slipping away stealthily. Well, Mac had no idea what he had done. You see, this bagel belonged to Norma, she had finally disengaged from Jimbo’s jugular to get her tasty bagel. Much to her horror, someone…or something had removed her bagel from the toaster and placed it on….a plate! “Did someone take this out?”, Norma demanded. “Who did this, did it fall?” “Is this my bagel? Who’s is this? Mine was a sesame? Is this mine? Who took this out?” My mind was reeling from the assault. It was all I could do to weakly mutter “that’s mine” when Norma pointed at my bagel, which was on its second trip through the toaster.

Well, I got out of there just as Norma was looking for something to make protest signs with and Donor was wondering what the pretty red things inside the toaster tasted like. I heard a distorted scream of pain as I left the cafeteria.

Cut to this morning. I’m wandering around the same cafeteria, with the same (or reasonably the same) toaster. There’s a nicely printed and laminated sign hung next to the toaster. This sign reads:

“Please do not butter item before placing in toaster”

Really?

A while ago purchased 2 stripped AR lowers from Cavalry Arms. I’ve finally gotten around to putting these together.

If you’re not familiar with the AR rifle platform, the traditional lower receiver is forged aluminum. The action parts, grip and stock are added to this stripped receiver to form a complete lower receiver.

The Cavarms lowers differ from the traditional in 2 major ways. Most obviously, they are 1 monolithic piece incorporating the lower receiver, grip and stock. The other way is not so obvious until you pick it up. They are molded from an advance polymer, (ok, plastic). This results in a significant weight savings over the traditional lower, a full pound lighter. Another benefit is the ability to mold them in any color imaginable. They have done the obvious blacks, greens and tans, but also yellow, pink, blue, neon green, and even glow in the dark!

Even with this radically different construction, the Cavarms lower uses standard AR action parts and assembly is mostly the same. There are a few minor differences, but anyone who has assembled a lower will have no problem with the Cavarms assembly. It took less than 30 minutes to completely finish each one.

I won’t bore you with the step by step assembly process, but just a couple of pics to illustrate. Here is everything before assembly, lower on the, uh, lower. The parts kit is above:

And here we have the parts from the normal lower parts kit that are leftover due to the Cavarms construction. Trigger guard, pistol grip, and some assorted pins, fasteners, detents, and springs.

And, finally, here’s a shot of the 2 completed rifles. The one on the bottom is my “ultralight” and I know it has no sights, it’s a work in progress.

Sorry for the less than stellar pics, it’s actually pretty hard to take a decent photo of something that’s all flat black.

I was recently riding through Rosendale on a pretty hot day. If you’re not familiar with Rosendale, they have these large caves there and they open up right near the road. They spill out large amounts of very cool air, even on the hottest of days. When you go through in the car, you get a little blast of cold on your arm if you happen to have the windows open. On a really hot day, you don’t even get that since you’ve got the AC on and the car buttoned up tight.

Riding through here on the bike, where buttoning up isn’t really an option, you get the full effect. It was literally like riding through a waterfall. A quick second of the icy blast and then it’s back into the heat. Immensely refreshing.

Just something about being IN the environment and getting (nearly) the full affect of whatever’s out there. If it’s hot, you’re hot and you have to deal with it. Maybe it’s a bit of a return to simpler times when we weren’t so insulated from everything. I’m sure when it gets to be 20 degrees out, I won’t be so appreciative.

So we have one of those “rewards” credit cards like I’m sure 143% of you do. Since it’s free money, we use the card for most purchases and get a not insignificant amount of “reward” back. It used to be nice and simple. Every year our friendly banking conglomerate would send us a check with whatever we had earned. It was an easy to understand 1% thing. Spend $100 get a buck back! And we didn’t have to do anything to make it happen. How could it go wrong?

Well, here’s how.

A couple of years ago they changed it. Now, instead of cash, we get “reward points”. 1 point for every dollar spent. You can use 2500 of these points to get a $25 gift card to various merchants, or even a $25 check. So, on the face of it everything looks OK. It’s still the same rate of return, they’ve just abstracted the idea of “dollars” to “points”. I’m sure this is a multi-step plan to slowly increase the number of points it takes to get a dollar, but that hasn’t happened yet, so I’ll save that rant.

Anyway, there is a bit more hassle involved since instead of just sending us a check every year, we have to go through the web site and cash in our points. Not a huge deal, but here’s where it gets dysfunctional. I just cashed in our points, we had 74,000ish points accrued, which if you do the math, works out to 29 $25 gift cards or checks with some points left. Not seeing the benefit of committing to any particular gift card when there is cash as an option, I took the check route. And you know what they’re going to do? Do you? I bet you can guess.

They’re going to send us 29 individual $25 checks. I know because they did it last time. Anyone want to bet if they optimized this process enough to not send us 29 checks in 29 separate envelopes?

UPDATE

Well blow me down, corporate America is not completely brain dead. It seems that someone realized what was going on and fixed the insanity. I receive a single check for the entire amount. Sorry to disappoint you.