Cars, Boats, Airplanes

Not Having A Car

6 April, 2019

We checked out a Zipcar and drove it to Jamestown RI on Thursday to visit the in-process refit of Confetti, my father-in-law Ron’s boat. Beautiful weather, lovely day for a drive, and I find I actually enjoy driving more than I used to mostly because I never do it I think.

On the way back Friday morning, I found myself reflecting on how easy the whole process has become. If I decide I need a car for some reason, I can reserve one within two or three hours of needing it. I walk up to the car with my special card, the car reads the card, lets me in, and off I go with it. I have no idea why the big car rental companies haven’t adopted the same model, honestly — why do I need 15-30 minutes of human interaction for something that is apparently possible with a few clicks on a website?

It’s true that Zipcar is expensive — we spent $100 for the privilege of taking this car to Rhode Island overnight and returning it the next morning. Compared with the actual cost of owning, insuring, and parking a car in Boston, however, it’s a serious bargain. And that doesn’t factor in the time and worry that come along with owning something (you may own things, but they also own you).

I guess our recent decision to rent rather than buy in Boston is based on the same logic. I like being unencumbered, even though in America it is costlier than owning a place. (This is not true for example in Europe, where there is no subsidy to the home-building industry in the form of a mortgage interest tax deduction, and as a result many more people rent.) I wonder if one day renting an apartment will be as easy as checking out a Zipcar? Will the differences between a hotel and an apartment and a house continue to blur?

Now that I think of it, we’re going through the same thing in our Boston office at Red Hat right now. We’ve been blessed with strong growth there, which means that we are outgrowing our current space, and that means that some of us — managers like me, in particular, who spend much of their time on the phone anyway — will switch to “mobile desks.” This doesn’t mean the desk is actually mobile, which is too bad because that would be hilarious. (Especially if motorized… imagine managers wheeling around the office while talking on the phone…) What it means is that there are decent well equipped desks available in the office that no one can “own.” You just walk up to the thing and use it, and leave it clean when you’re done. I’m actually looking forward to this because it will mean I can’t pile useless junk on my desk.

I guess what all of this leads me to is, isn’t it interesting that I am moving into a world where there are fewer and fewer barriers to me moving around as much as I like, wherever I like? And what exactly is it that is making that possible or comfortable or desirable even? Is it that I have a strong network of “neighbors” that I do neighborly things with, online? Is it just that transaction management is so much easier in a computerized world?

What I find even more interesting is that the moment all this is happening is the same moment we find reactionary forces trying to rebuild the old walls around “nations” and “cultures.” I wonder if there is a measurable difference in car ownership rates, between folks who want more walls, and folks like me who want fewer?

Things You Hear Around Airplanes

12 March, 2019

This announcement will serve as your final boarding call… (Why “Serve as?” Is the actual final boarding call on a bathroom break?)
The flight attendants will be passing through the cabin… (I hope somebody opens the door for them first or it will be a very messy business.)
Please place your carrion items in the overhead compartment… (Yes, please do, before they draw flies.)

… And so many others. I love to take a step back and listen to the “routine announcements” as though I had never heard them before. It’s amazing how funny they are.

What Makes Us

9 March, 2019

I’m with my brother and sister this this morning outside Philadelphia, waiting to go to my uncle Benson Brock’s funeral this afternoon. I have written elsewhere in this blog about his passing, but I want to go into more detail about who and what he was to all of us.

Benson was born eleven years after my father, so my image of him as a boy was of a much more glamorous and interesting person than my parents were. Benson dropped into our lives from time to time with tales of learning to fly an airplane, tuning pianos for a living (this seemed impossible to me), playing jazz in nightclubs. Living in Philadelphia, he represented the Northeast of my early childhood, left behind when we moved south to Atlanta. If I was lucky, he and Dad would sit down together at the piano and read through duets together — a four-hands arrangement of the William Tell Overture was a favorite. Sometimes he would play Scott Joplin rags for us or tell ridiculous jokes. I knew he was not married, had no children, drove a 280Z, and lived on a house on an airport where he kept his airplane. I think I thought it was impossible anyone could do all these things — whatever they wanted, apparently — without any obvious negative repercussions.

As I grew older and started thinking about my path through life, Benson continued to loom large in my imagination of what I could be and what I wanted to do. When I felt lost in my first year of engineering school at Rice, Benson’s example — switch to music school — was an option in front of me, and in fact what I ended up choosing. When I decided I wanted to learn to fly, it was because Benson had done it so I knew it was possible. As my brother Jeff reminded me last night, Benson’s example was always there as we became men, showing that there was a path for us outside of conventional wisdom, outside of what was expected, and that we should believe that path was something we could achieve even if we didn’t have the skills or the background that other people on that path did.

Somewhere along the way Benson found his way into commercial flying, and over the years he followed that career to a number of different places. He particularly loved flying for Air Wisconsin in Colorado — the routes were short and the pay wasn’t very good, but he loved the mountains and the airplane he got to fly in them. Later, Air Wisconsin moved to Philadelphia and Kim and I found ourselves seeing a lot more of Benson. The highlight of this time was that we finally got to play some jazz together — more than once Jeff brought his bass down from Rhode Island and all three of us played on piano, bass, and vibe. Jeff’s son Sam even joined us on sax once.

Benson retired a couple of years ago, maybe a year after we moved to Brno in the Czech Republic. I was distracted with work and living abroad and I didn’t make as much effort as I should have to stay in touch, but we did still connect every so often. I thought of Benson as young, compared to Dad, so it never occurred to me that he was already older than Dad was when he died — Dad only made it to 64. I was confident we would have time to catch up again, play some more music, talk about flying, tell some more lousy jokes.

Fate proved me wrong on that point last week and closed the last chapter of Benson and Dad’s generation of Brocks. I’m bitter with it, and with myself for not treasuring and caring for that connection a little deeper. But in truth I already learned, long ago, the most important thing I could learn from Benson. It’s quite simple: Remember that there is always another path to the one you are taking, and if you want that other path, a little hard work is all that’s required. Also, don’t be afraid to tell absolutely lousy jokes.

Knowing Where To Aim

7 March, 2019

In 1984 I wrote an essay for my college applications that became for a long time the “example essay” for the various sessions my high school did on how to write a college application. I’m not actually sure it was all that great but it did hit an important topic: I wrote about my own experience of having thrown myself into achieving a goal in a very driven way, achieving it, and then discovering it had not in any way been worth the effort.

I was a total car nut when I was a boy, and my fantasy land about what kind of car I would drive was vivid and populated with all kinds of wonderful four-wheeled creatures. I think the common thread among all of them was a deep-seated longing for social acceptance, which I was certain would come because my ride was so bad-ass. Why? I was a not-wealthy kid in a private school full of rich kids that was still trying to maintain the illusion that it was a Quaker-leaning classless utopia. I think my classmates and I were all too naive to realize the status games we were playing with each other, but we certainly were playing them. Anyway I was sure, I think, that the awesome retro chariot I was going to restore with my own hands and no money would make me an instant hero. I was, of course, wrong…

Now in retrospect spending all that time working on that car was not a terrible idea, I learned a ton including a few things about what I am actually capable of doing if I put my mind to it. On the other hand I would have been much better served spending the time either studying or practicing. And the car itself, that I put all the effort into… well, it was simply the wrong car. A big, heavy ’53 Ford coupe with a weak straight-6 motor and a column shift is nobody’s idea of a bad-ass ride. Had I chosen, say, a ’60s VW Beetle as my platform, things could have been different.

So, I made two mistakes, really: I chose to put a bunch of effort towards a goal, having a restored car, that was not a great goal; and, having made that choice, I picked the wrong car to restore.

It occurs to me that these two mistakes are actually qualitatively different. You can make the mistake of choosing the wrong thing to shoot for, and I think that mistake is actually really common because we are really really bad at predicting the future. Then you can also make the mistake of choosing the wrong way to achieve your goal, which I think depends a lot more on your environment, the quality of the advice you have, and the resources you have on hand. Note that the more important choice — what to aim for — is not something you can get help with. Only your own experience and your own desires can tell you if it is worth putting the effort into raising a family, or learning a language, or changing careers. Once you’ve made that choice, however, you can get lots of help with the how if you have the good sense and humility to ask.

Here’s a thing, though. Sometimes I don’t think it matters where you aim. Take my college essay, for instance. If I hadn’t had the wrenching experience of putting a crapload of time into restoring something that, once restored, was entirely uninspiring, then I wouldn’t have been able to write about it, and I might well not have got into some of the colleges I got into. It was worth having had the experience, even though the result turned out to be not what I wanted. My attempt at a PhD in English falls into roughly the same category, I guess — I quit the program after two years and left with a Master’s, but I wouldn’t trade the experience of those two years for anything. Wrong goal, for sure, but major growth trying to get there.

I guess this means it is always better to be striving for something, even if you’re not sure it’s the right thing. Some faith that it will wind up being worth it is in order. This is a bit more difficult to swallow when you’re leading a whole group, of course. It’s probably better not to admit to them you’re not sure this is the right direction.

The Moon Landing

25 February, 2019

AS11-40-5927
**Aldrin unpacks experiments from LM**

I was just reading a bit about a new documentary, Apollo 11, that apparently uses all original NASA footage to document the launch, the landing on the moon, and the return to earth. Apparently the film is quite something — it includes a lot of never-before-seen 70mm footage that has been sitting in archives for the last 50 years. Anyway, the review reminded me of a weird thing I used to always think when I was a kid — that I was born before the moon landing, and therefore experienced it, even though I was too young to remember it. I felt quite some satisfaction that I was around for it.

There are a few other events that fall into that category that loomed large in my childhood mind. I guess the biggest one was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which happened in April 1968, three months after I came into the world. Martin Luther King was a towering figure in our household and I think I felt his loss keenly, once I was old enough to realize what that meant.

It seems odd to me, even today, that those two events should be such a part of my personal history, to the exclusion of other major things that happened around the same time. The assassination of Bobby Kennedy, for example, didn’t register, although it was certainly significant. Nor did the riots at the ’68 Democratic convention, the election of Richard Nixon, or the fall of Saigon make any splash in my consciousness (I never thought “Hey I was alive for the election of Richard Nixon!”). In fact, the only positive event I thought of as being part of my early childhood, was the moon landing. Everything else was doom, gloom, and disaster.

I know this must say something about my worldview today. The fact that I am inclined to believe there is an engineering solution to most problems must come from my sense of ownership of Apollo. Maybe my continuing belief in the power of non-violent protest comes similarly from my closeness to MLK’s death. And if this is true, I wonder what my nephews and nieces think about what happened around their birth? Does my niece Nora think to herself “Hey I was alive when Obama was elected!”? Maybe… and that’s a good thing, if it’s true.

What I doubt any of them are thinking about, is technology. We engineers don’t have much to show off since Apollo 11 — nothing so flashy, anyway. Maybe it’s time we put some real effort into flying cars.