It's late-ish in the evening and this one of the Revere troop has pulled his/her/its new-ish car (funny, it doesn't look newish) into the Best Western parking lot and gotten online for the first time since this morning. First about the car. It isn't brand new. It's a couple of years old but we bought it to replace the infamous 15-year old Volvo sedan shit box I've been complaining about for years here. I finally got someone to take it off my hands for $340. I was asking $800, we settled on $600, but when he drove 100 miles to look at it (he'd seen pictures and I had described it with brutal honesty on Craig's List) he pulled a long face and said, "Gee, I don't think I can take this. It'll cost me too much to fix it." Now he just drove 100 miles to get exactly what was described and he had agreed to $600 but he was doing what any sane car buyer would do, trying to get it a little cheaper. The thing is, this guy didn't know whom he was dealing with. He probably thought I was a normal used car seller. "How much will you offer me," I asked. "How about $300?" was his opening gambit, assuming, I am sure I might say something like, "How about $500?" or even, "I couldn't possibly let it go for that. Have a nice 100 mile drive back home." But I faked him out completely. "How about $350," I said, hopefully. "$340," he countered. And that was that.
To say I am not the sharpest businessperson would probably be entirely fair, but the story didn't quite end there. He had to drive it back to his house but he didn't have plates and I had lost the title. The last thing my insurance agent said to me when I asked how to sell the car that afternoon, was "No problem. Just bring the plates in and we'll take the car off your insurance. But whatever you do, don't let him take the plates!" But then how was he going to drive it back home again? So I let him take the plates and spent an anxious 4 days waiting for them to come back to me by mail. In other words, I not only let him take the plates, but paid for insurance for several days when he had possession of the car which he got for a third of the cost of the parts alone. And although it looked like hell, it ran great (except for the exhaust system which was audible throughout the Eastern seaboard). And he called me later to tell me how much he loved it and he had put the plates in the mail.
But now I've got another car that I bought used from a dealer. I like the car a lot, except the guy who sold it to me didn't tell me until after all the paper work was done that the second pair of keys was lost (replacement available for $140, which he told me was dealer's cost to make up for the fact that the car didn't come with a full set of keys); and it also didn't come with an Owner's Manual. He assured me he would get one from the Manufacturer immediately. I said I hoped so as we were going on a 2000 mile road trip in 6 weeks and didn't like the idea of not knowing what half the buttons in the car did or how to change the tire or open the hood. Well, we're on the road but the Manual isn't in the glove compartment. It's on the way, we are told. Unfortunately so are we, and as we were driving 60 miles an hour in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic on the turnpike the dashboard started beeping at me and giving me a cryptic error message. What was wrong? Beats me. I pulled over and called the Dealer from my cell phone. What did I find out? I found out that my "call was important to them" but they were helping other customers and would be with me shortly. They assured me of this every 30 seconds. After ten minutes I hung up.
So we drove on and here we are at the Best Western and it has WiFi and there are hundreds of emails in my Inbox and I'm exhausted because it took us 10 hours to drive 300 miles as a result of some of the most horrendous traffic jams I've seen in a long time. And I'm thinking to myself, "what the hell am I going to blog about tomorrow morning?"
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Jesus, Revere (note the comma)! Here in Slovenia traffic jams are banned by law (except in the captal, Ljubljana, where they are mandated by law). Anyone causing a traffic jam outside LJ is immediately frogmarched to the border and exiled to Italy.
I hope your Best Western has a bar.
Best to Mrs. R
Ah, how I envy you the many unexpected joys of acquainting yourself with your brand new used car. The manual would totally ruin it!
Anyway, you can find it all on the net if you insist on being such a spoilsport.
:P
We drive our cars into the ground too. We practically had to pay someone to take our last car and I suspect we will the next one too.
If you need blog ideas please, by all means blog about this: http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/guidance/rapid_testing.htm
Maybe you can clarify for me what has long mystified me about medicine....why test at all when the test is a)practically useless and b)doesn't change the recommended TREATMENT?
Reading this "guidance" reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago with a specialist. She convinced me to do an invasive test that required anesthesia & time off from work "because it would give us a definitive answer before settling on a difficult to follow treatment". The conclusive answer was *negative* (no you don't have this disease). At the follow up exam she stated that she wanted me to continue the treatment because she thought I really did have the disease. I felt angry and betrayed and ripped off and most of all confused.
So now when I read the guidance for using the crappy rapid flu tests I think....why bother? Save the money that the test cost and treat the ILI like...an ILI. Is this not at least part of the problem of out of control healthcare costs? Out of control "testing"?
Gawande's June article in the New Yorker hints at yes. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande
Hey Revere...Dammit ! You are on vacation.. Dont blog tomorrow. Novel virus, novel concept is to just do nothing. Hang with the homey's and enjoy the beach. Plenty to blog about when you get back....
Hoorah for the Spaceballs reference!
The 15-year-old Volvo shitbox, she will live on in our thoughts. *wipes tear*
Revere, for the rest of your vacation, your blogging should consist ONLY of THIS each day:
Log on, and type
"Having a good time, wish you were here." Then log off.
You deserve a rest, now go and get refreshed. Time to chillax.
Randy, Carolyn: Thank you for encouraging me to have a vacation. I guess I'm not built that way (I consider myself extremely lazy and Mrs. R. says I'm a workaholic; we're probably both right). Maybe every day is vacation for me because I get to do what I want -- science. I have worked on my science every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year without missing a day for well over 20 years (I've been an active scientist for much longer but didn't get into the every day work obsession until 22 years ago). Oh, I'll join Mrs. R. at the beach and walk the dog and we'll go out to eat and I've got lots of books to read, but my vacation/work keeps going. Part of my day, now. These days it's taken up with quantum mechanics, for reasons, believe it or not, having to do with epidemiology. But Hilbert space is also a pleasant place to spend my mornings in, so I do it for enjoyment. Mrs. R. thinks I'm warped. We've been married 37 years, so I guess she'd know.
Kay: We've posted on flu tests a bunch of times here (try searching for "test" in the search bar; I'd point you to the posts but I'm in another renamed Best Western with WiFi, still on the road, but here's a recent one The rapid flu test was mainly used to see if flu A and/or B was circulating in the community, not as a diagnostic test for individual patients, although it came to be used that way. For other kinds of tests there might be other reasons (including liability protection for the doc). One of my good friends whose been a doc since the days of Hippocrates always says, "If you order an unnecessary test, you'll get an abnormal result." Then you are stuck with following it up. That's the conundrum of getting 20 tests for virtually the same cost as one with automated machines. You only one want, you get 20 and if some are abnormal, you and the patient are screwed. You got follow-up. But that's another story.
Revere, some truly lay questions for you while mess around looking for America:
1) Where do old influenza viruses go to die? What will H1N1 do when it can't do any more? Or do they keep circling the globe looking for new hosts. I mean, with so many people in the world to possibly infect, what happened to the 1918 virus? Why didn't it stick around for a decade or more, or did it -- and is it the foundation of all our existing troublesome influenzas, or just Type A?
I understand they mutate, but with millions of people, why do they need to mutate at all?
You can go tell me to read a book if you'd like; but heck, which one? (I'll tell you, you should never have given up the old Volvo, probably one of those great '94 940s).
downeast: It was a 1995 940 sedan. It replaced the 84 240 sedan which my son took and drove another 100K.
I'm not sure I understand your questions. But anyway, viruses are bits of genetic material and proteins. They aren't exactly alive at all. They are just self reproducing units that depend on live hosts. When they can't find a host any more or their old hosts change to defend themselves, that's it for a viral particle and all its "progeny." And although we talk about H1N1 as an entity these self reproducing units are such sloppy reproducers they make lots of copies that are defective or different. The ones that wind up in a host that works for them are the ones that are around. They don't "have" to mutate. They just copy themselves badly and the copies that work are the ones you see.
Most or all of the H1N1s probably came from H1N1s that were so successful in 1918 but the ones that survived are matched to the hosts they wound up in. they are like little computer programs whose codes changes because of sloppy copying. Sometimes the new code works as well or better than the original, most of the time not.
Got it. That's why son laughs at me when I call a virus a bug (last laugh; he's driving my old Volvo with the door handles falling off).
So when we wash hands, use alcohol hand wash (which remains practically sold out in stores) we aren't killing the virus, just dismantling/destroying it.
Thanks. enjoy quantum reading!
So it was your POS Volvo boat engine that I heard and kept me up for a week, and all the way to NJ to crying out loud!
Hope you sold it to someone in Fairbanks....
FYI: Local community parade drawing thousands today. Doctors, nurses in parade tossing out thousands of hand sanitizers all along two-mile route. Suddenly, people washing hands everywhere.
I absolutely LOVE it!!! We're passing out Non-DEET insect repellent wipes by the hundreds at fairs here, along with West Nile info. I like the handsan idea better.MoM
the dealership asked $BIGNUM to replace a spare key for my chevy prizm, too. they claimed the thing had an RFID chip in it, without which the car would positively not start, and threatened dire consequences if one attempted to start the car with a key lacking said chip.
got a spare key cut for $25 by a local locksmith out of a plain-jane key blank with absolutely no electronics of any kind in it. car's been starting fine with that key for years.