August, 2002
By Tom Snyder
Did I go too far? You be the judge. The date was June 1. I was sitting in my apartment, unable to tolerate the two meaningless days until I was to depart on a cruise. I stared at my empty dining room table, ready to do more preparing, but there was truly nothing left to prepare since I had been over-preparing since February.
OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder. The O refers to my thinking through way too many details about the journey, the boat, the weather, etc. The C stands for checking way too many things that I had already checked several times. The D stands, in this case, for distressed that I had run out of things to O and C about.’
When my son walked in on me to ask an innocent question, I snapped, “Not now!” He said cautiously that I didn’t look too busy. I snapped again, saying, “Yes, but if you’ll leave me alone, I might think of something!” He backed quietly out of the room.
The great thing about life is that when you least expect it, you might just find something perfect to perseverate about. For absolutely no reason, it occurred to me that I did not know how to re-arm my self-inflating life jacket. This was perfect. I ran to the basement and unpacked my carefully packed seagoing duffel. I removed my just-purchased life jacket plus one inflator replacement kit. How could I have forgotten to do this before? Had I actually been planning to go to sea without first learning how to re-arm one of these things?
I experienced a dramatic mood swing as I ran upstairs, high as a kite. This is why I don’t need drugs. (My friend says he doesn’t smoke pot anymore because he can get that same feeling by just standing up too quickly.) I love my friend. God was I happy. I passed my wife on the stairs and said to her, “I love these stairs. Do you love these stairs? Remember when we first got these stairs?” She also backed slowly away from me.
My evening was saved as I planned my three-stage course of action. First I would test my new life jacket in simulated emergency conditions. Then I would deflate it. Then I would repack it and re-arm it, following the instructions in the replacement kit.
STAGE 1: I removed all my clothing and put on my life jacket. Then I stepped into the shower and turned it on. I braced for the violent inflation, which would come when the water-sensing unit sensed water. I stood in a very tense posture for about 20 minutes until I realized that the product was designed to ignore rain and sea spray. I was overcome with affection for the design team, wherever they were.
I closed the plug in the tub and stood for another 5 minutes as the water rose about 12 inches. Then I lay down in the tub. The water was not yet high enough to activate the water sensor, so I pressed myself as far down into the tub as possible and waited. The sensation of waiting was not completely dissimilar to watching a horror movie when a defenseless woman is walking backwards down a dark hallway with very tight camera angles.
Bang. It happens very quickly. It took less than a second for my fully inflated water wings to wedge themselves between the narrow sides of our ancient tub. The water level quickly rose as a couple thousand cubic inches of carbon dioxide displaced whatever had been in the tub. My face was held securely in place about an inch under the water. I enjoyed a few moments of satisfaction that the product had worked as advertised, and then I turned my attention to the problem of breathing. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe how I became unwedged, but readers with an engineering background might guess that it did involve inclined planes.
STAGE 2: I deflated it.
STAGE 3: I opened the four-page instruction foldout that explained the simple steps to replace the exhausted CO2 cylinder and the dissolving water-sensing tablet. That part was pretty straightforward. But the refolding/repacking part was more challenging, since the instructions were apparently written in Turkish before they were translated into Japanese and then into English. The top line hinted at some untranslatable idioms. It said, “We are happy to meet you our product with our entire face.”
The handy diagram with dotted lines and curving arrows was confusing, so I just bunched up the plastic wings as tightly as I could and locked them in their Velcro sleeves. My life jacket no longer had that smooth, factory-packed look that only hydraulics can achieve, but my task was complete.
I was tired and went to bed happy with only one more long day to kill. And I already had a plan for that. Tomorrow I would test my repacked life jacket.
Cool.
