The Sears Experience -or- The End Game of Privatization

It’s interesting what you learn from your parents when you sit back — you now being late in your 30’s — and take it all in.  Or, to put it another way, it’s easy to put your parents in perspective when you’re responsible for making your own decisions.

About the time I was old enough to understand the concepts of work and money, I was tasked with mowing the lawn.  Our first lawnmower, a Toro, lasted from the late 1960’s through 1983.  We bought a Honda in 1984 and to this day (yes, 2009!) the mower lives — and it still works!  Since there was a clear difference in quality (I know this because I had been tasked with lawn care) between the Toro and the Honda, I made a mental note to buy a Honda mower someday when I was in the market for a quality mower.  I bought one in 2002, adding to note that I bought it at a premium price, and was beside myself that its power drive was dead by 2008.  The power drive can be replaced, but at a premium price.

Same goes for Sears.  We used to almost exclusively buy Craftsman and Kenmore brands for home improvement and home management needs.  We had these items for years and years.  If I’m correct, my parents still have power tools from Craftsman that are more than functional, but perhaps sitting on a shelf because they have been replaced with more modern ones that function without cords, with added features, or without the explicit threat of electric shock.  Still, that’s not a knock on Sears.  It’s just an understanding on everybody’s part that safety and regulations have changed over the last 38 years and maybe some replacement with new technology would be in our best interest.

It’s strange that as you grow older you act as you envisioned your parents as having acted when you were a child.  In my case I went with brands that were “family friends” and in this case it was Honda and Sears.  In my experience, we didn’t buy that much unnecessary stuff.  We bought things here and there, but when we bought things we paid top dollar because we expected them to last.  And given my lifelong experience with these items, I can say that empirical evidence lead me to put faith in the previously mentioned brands such that I put thousands of dollars of my own money into purchasing these brands — as I envisioned myself being able to influence my future childrens’ buying biases in the same way. 

A funny thing happened on the way to bragging about brands 30 years from now: super-capitalism.

Bellyache all you want about government spending and the supposed ineffectiveness of services handled by government.  Attend as many “free-stater” meetings as you want.  Ignore history even though its most negative aspects are repeated constantly by businesses in our country.  Believe FOX News if you really have nothing better to do.  In the end, you are left to wonder why this country is where it stands today: “we’ve demanded too much and now we’re getting too little in return”.  It’s not the government (or its relative size) that’s killing us.  It’s corporate mismanagement and misbehavior.

Now let’s talk about Sears.

I spent $1000 for a snowblower in 2002.  It was a “top of the line” model from Sears/Craftsman with a Tecumseh engine, 29″, 9hp.  I live in NH and I’m sure we easily get 130″ of snow per season, so this model seemed to take me where I needed to go.  I could see myself using it for years to come and maybe even leaving it to the next owners of our current home, that is, until it broke the first time: in 2002.  Thankfully, it was under warranty, and after a couple of weeks Sears had a tech come out to repair it.  It worked until 2008 — when it started to misbehave again.  As of 2009, it’s in dire need of service again since it’s practically unusable.  I figured “fine”, after all I didn’t expect Sears to service an out-of-warranty product for free, and called Sears for a service appointment.  They were scheduled to arrive last Saturday at 9:30 for a service appointment.

I woke up at 6:30am last Saturday and waited until 9:30am.  People, I am a Unix System Administrator.  I wake up at odd hours for maintenance all the time — like 4am, 5am, 2am, whatever.  I’ve been living this kind of lifestyle for at least a decade — in real true blue industry — and I’m totally used to it.  As such, there was no way I would’ve missed a Sears tech who was scheduled to arrive at what I’d estimate as a totally reasonable time.

As of 9:45am, there was no sign of a technician.

1. I called their 800 number and was told that a technician would be here between 8-5.  Really?  That’s not what I was told two weeks ago, but whatever.
2. By 2pm I hadn’t seen a tech.  My wife urged me to call Sears.  I did and they claimed that a tech was at our house at 8am but nobody was around so they left.  No call the night before as promised.  No call the day of the appointment as promised.  I was aghast.  I asked them to send a tech out right away as it was impossible that I missed the tech, and they claimed that the “dispatcher” claimed it was impossible to do so.
3. After my first escalation they claimed that the tech had left a note and after I walked around my yard like a dumbass while talking on my cordless phone to a Sears “manager” while looking for a note on every door.  The manager claimed that I probably just couldn’t find the note!
4. After escalating to another manager I decided that I wanted to speak to the dispatcher directly.  Upon waiting another 15mins (it was 3pm now) they hung up on me.  I was irate and waited another 15 minutes on hold before I reached another manager who told me that “our records indicate that you hung up on us”. Our “records”?  You keep records about my call but can’t track why your technician can get to my house at 9:30am as promised or where he might be now?  What is this: Seinfeld?  Is the AMA going to deny treatment to me next time because my eyebrows look too “aggressive” to them?
5. I unleashed a fury (like it was going to do any good) and the manager asked me if I wanted to “file a complaint”.  I asked what good it would do me, and they claimed it would help cure the disconnect with the service shop.  I was incredulous and after more ranting asked to speak to their manager.  They claimed that their manager could not be reached: directly or indirectly (do you work for the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by chance?).  At this point I just hung up the phone.  What good would more talking do?

I ranted a bit to my wife then wearily headed upstairs to shower.  She called Sears back while I was in the shower and according to the escalation path she was on, she spoke to a nice woman who not only registered our complaints, but claimed that “Sears Corporate” would call my cell within 48 business hours and that it would be possible not to be charged for our service call based on a conversation with corporate.

As it turns out Sears publishes PDF service manuals for all their products online.  I perused the manual and spoke to a friend who knows this stuff like it’s nobody’s business.  The end result is that I probably need to buy a rubber disc for like $15, and this should cure the problem with the blower’s power drive.  Great.

Fast forward to today, 96 hours later, my wife called Sears again.  The “Sears Escalation Line” refused to accept her complaint or request for remedy.  In fact, they claimed that they did not accept complaints at all.  Seriously?  You’re a business and nobody on your end is willing to be accountable for anything?!  Are you people the real socialists?  My wife ended up getting sent back to customer service who disavowed all knowledge of our service problem, accused my wife of hanging up on them, and further refused to give us any relief as a customer.  I strongly suggested that we should let the tech come out on Saturday, claim that we were granted a gratis service visit from Sears, and that if they didn’t agree we would send them on their way.  There is some disagreement about this suggestion of mine between the two of us, but on the other hand I’d hate to have to explain to Sears why we don’t owe them for a service call that never actually took place — given how “effective” our results have been with Sears customer service up until now.

Remember, Sears was a small and private business back in the day.  100% privatization always seems like a good idea: until you realize that it’s terrible in practice.

Budget: Barely Even Knew It!

I’m more than a bit amused with Republicans these days. Lose big on election day. Sit quietly for a month. Complain a lot on national tv and through the press.  Thing is?  It’s more than a bit lame because you and I both know that you don’t have a plan, a new plan, something not retarded like the economic policies that you thought were a good idea in 2002 or thereabouts.

Oh, I’m certain that it’s miserable to be a Republican these days and I’m being honest when I say when I know how it feels (to be in the minority as I have been for most of the last 8 years), but really, if you have the guts to trot out McCain and Jindal on political shows to criticize the president and Democratic leadership you might actually have the decency to show us your plan to get America out of financial hell.  If you have the time to critique “the boss” on cable talk shows, wouldn’t you be able to spare a few moments to share your budget plans with America?  Show us the full and comprehensive plan that the Democrats failed to pay attention to.  Show us specifically where the Democrats are being “irresponsible”, and by “irresponsible” I do not mean “attempting to avoid 10% or worse unemployment across the country”.

Oh, you don’t have a comprehensive and workable budget plan to share with the working class of America?  Then, what are you complaining about, Republicans?  Just trying to catch some face time on network TV between now and 2010?  Sure sounds like it to me!

Like a Record

You hear it all the time from rock stars: “well, we listened to lots of our old material while we were making this album.” U2 did just that a few years ago and the end result was that U2 started to sound like they weren’t washed up anymore. Their music was fun to listen to again as it was true to form, focused, and purposeful.

When W won the election in 2000, I was disappointed. Over the following years I’ve been disappointed, sad, angry, indifferent, and curious about why this country has been in a tenuous state. When you look at the neocon, you realize that they are the conservative equivalent of a 60’s era liberal — and when the scale tips too far one way or the other, this country doesn’t fare so well. Achtung, Baby!

As for election night, wife was moved to tears over Obama’s win (he’s from her home state and all) and I found myself delighted with McCain’s concession speech, because, really, it was great and it reflected the McCain I’d thought we were going to see in the 2008 presidential race — but never really did. I think I’ll remember the speech forever.

As for why I’m glad Obama won, I’d been feeling the same way for years: that our government has been out of touch with us, we’ve lost our way as a country, that “U.S.A.” is an artist past its usefulness and prime. We could create another epic like Joshua Tree through sheer dumb luck — but with our current level of effort it’s more than likely that we’d just produce another Pop or collection of “B-Sides and Rarities”. More than likely, given our gross financial state, it’ll take approximately Chinese Democracy years before we’ll be able to recoup the costs of cleaning up this mess.

The Libertarian movement is indicative of this apathy because while it’s big on individual freedoms it seemingly has no concept of social responsibility. Libertarians are like college rock bands: boring songs, poor engineering, loud noises, and rough edges. I decided long ago to steer clear of the Libertarian ideals and stick with the Democrats because while songs about malaise and dropping out of college may have their merits works like Unforgettable Fire and Joshua Tree are incomparable, masterful, and beyond engaging. You can get endless mileage from them.

I’m a firm believer that our success as a nation has been about perseverance, responsibility, accountability, hard work, and pride. At various times in our history we’ve produced a Joshua Tree or an Unforgettable Fire and as a result built up a lot of credibility in the industry. I think the last time this happened was in the years that followed WWII.

Unfortunately we’d swiped the card a few too many times over the last 4+ decades and it’s really worn down that magnetic strip. At some point you realize that if you just paid attention to your old material people would keep buying your albums.

If U2 can do it, so can we!

But we’ll get to that in just a little bit -or- Slash wrote a book?!

I doubt from a quick glance of my web server logs that anybody reads this weblog anymore. That’s alright, tho. I was really sick of writing it for awhile in 2006. And 2007. And, well, until recently. I think I was a bit illiterate for a period and that gross lack of input lead to a lack of output. Then, and more importantly, I had lots of things going on my life that made for great stories that I chose to keep to myself.

Quickly, then.

1. I got married last month.
2. We bought 38 bottles of wine on our honeymoon to Sonoma.
3. Over the past two years, we’re pretty sure that Emerson the Wonder Dog nearly died at least once. He’s fine at this time.
4. I’ve started making music again but this time on my own schedule.
5. I left Unix administration for engineering only to return to Unix administration last fall.
6. We stalked our local Toys ‘R’ Us until they got the Nintendo Wii in stock. The only thing more fun than buying the first one was buying the second one. We gave the first to my sister in law and the second, well, we haven’t opened the second one yet. But we will!
7. Our friend AW bought me the “Slash” biography for Christmas. KLP may have been jealous because her gift was the “Joy of Cooking”. At first I was really thrilled with this ironic gift.

Let’s talk about this Slash book. While I’m a sucker for pop culture, there are certain things I’m wont to avoid. At the top of that list is “rocker biographies”, mainly because:

• I’ve probably already heard everything I need to know about Ozzy Osbourne’s snorting of ants on VH-1’s Behind the Music.
• The stories lose their punch when written by a ghostwriter.
• I mean, really, even if he wrote the book himself, why would you expect anything even half decent from some guy who may have written a song called “Rattlesnake Shake”?

All this said, of course, meant that I ended up reading the Slash book. I think before I was going to put it on a bookshelf (so that people would visit the house and ask excellent questions like: “You have the SLASH BOOK?! DID YOU READ IT?!”) I thumbed through it if only to get a glance at what I was missing. Then I saw a picture of a young Slash riding a BMX bike. So I read a few pages. After reading about 50 pages I realized that I had committed myself to finishing this book.

So, dear reader, think of this blog entry as a public service announcement and its message is really simple:

Please don’t waste your time on the Slash book like I did mine. Instead do something more productive like hitting a rack of breakable dishes with a cast iron pan. You will thank me for this.

In case you need to know why, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you:

• The Slash book is really, really poorly written. You can kind of tell that Slash wrote a lot of it. I guess he gets a point or two for not clearly hiring a ghostwriter to do the dirty work but since the book is also lacking in insight or — as a reader I came to settle for as little as possible — even half-decent stories.
• Nothing in the Slash book is all that interesting. He seems like a pretty boring, aimless, lazy guy overall. I’m not really into the “drugs are cool” thing at all, so reading about Slash’s drug problem got really tedious after 5 or so pages. Unfortunately, he wrote about it for a large part of 300 pages.
• Slash was a little drunk or bored while writing this book. Often times he’d end a paragraph with the phrase “but we’ll get to that in just a little bit” and would never quite return to what he was “getting to”. This happened more as the book progressed.
• I theorized that this book may actually be Slash’s implementation of an elaborate drinking game by page 8 (every time you see the words intense, intensity, or bohemian you have to drink). By page 9 I was convinced (every time you see the phrase “I can’t imagine why” you have to drink). Slash’s use of the words intense, intensity, and bohemian was never ending. At some point, I kind of felt that he was beginning to interchange them.
• Slash’s story about how he got the nickname “Slash” was pretty boring overall. I expected something much, much cooler, like how he gained a reputation as an adept sharpened-toothbrush-fighter during his stay at the county jail. No such luck. Unfortunately, if I recall, his nickname came from “slashing” through the room, like at a party.
• I really wanted to hear some dirt about the GNR breakup, because after all, I’m still (not really) waiting for that Chinese Democracy album to come out.
• Outside of being a seemingly useless fellow, Slash seems to be humorless as well. Guys like Ozzy are funny and self-deprecating, even if only unintentionally, and this adds to their charm. Guys like Slash throw around words like “bohemian” for 400 pages until you’re left hoping that the next page you read contains the liner notes.
• It’s a miracle that GNR released one GNR album, must less two albums and an EP. Seriously, they really wasted lots of Geffen’s money.

To Serve and Detect -or- I’ll Cut You!

I’ve been working with UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems for 15 years. It’s thrilling yet infuriating. Challenging yet arcane. Sometimes like riding a crosstown bus, you just want UNIX to hear the bell and let you off at the next stop.

*ding*

Lots has happened over 15 years. In its earlier form, UNIX could handle lots of tasks while offering the poorest interface possible. In its latter forms, UNIX has tried to steal the hearts of desktop users away from Microsoft — while not necessarily evolving in terms of acceptible interfaces, usability, or compatibility. 15 years later I find myself running applications under a Microsoft platform while interfacing with UNIX systems through Microsoft-based terminal software. After 12 years, I had done enough projectile vomiting over half-cooked UNIX “desktop productivity” applications that I could no longer muster the energy to use — much less to justify their existence.

At the tip of the iceberg, of course, is supporting UNIX which means that I have to deal with people. And by people, I mean non-technologists. I’ve realized that about 60% of my job is non-technical. I spend it answering pages, lending an ear to complaints, lifting heavy things, or sometimes just offering psychiatric help, because sometimes UNIX just makes you want to jump.

Of the 40% of my job that is technical, probably 90% of that involves being a detective. User A comes to my desk and asks me why his UNIX system is shafting him. I put a whole bunch of yellow tape around their UNIX system, take some pictures of the crime scene, there’s a manhunt, and later there’s a capture. Whether it’s a mail system or some kind of other server, it’s always the same.

Or maybe that’s not true.

Things go haywire when systems are totally broken, or when people are unnecessarily conniving or mean. This happens a lot, too. I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to be the bad cop, and came up with a global response to people who rub me the wrong way:

I’ll cut you.

“What?! What’s wrong with you? Isn’t that mean?”, you’re asking yourself.

Not really.

“I’ll cut you” is almost a perfect thing to say. How?

User A: Hey, how come I can’t send this gigabyte-sized email message through the email server. It bounces.
Me: (knowing that we never allowed gigabyte-sized messages to be sent via email) Because that’s not what mail is there for. You should use a public folder instead.
User A: Well, it worked up until now. If you don’t fix this for me, I will escalate this all the way up to the president of the company.
Me: (shrugging) I’ll cut you.

Or apply it to pager duty…

User B: Hey, sorry I paged you, but system X seems to be down.
Me: What happened?
User B: I rebooted the server and it didn’t come back up.
Me: I’ll cut you.

Or for hilarious incidents of human error:

Me: Why is Server Y offline? We really need it.
User C: Hey, sorry. We were doing maintenance in the data center, and it looks like the system was packed up and placed in a shipping crate.
Me: What?! Why?!
User C: Do you really need this server? Is it urgent?
Me: I’ll cut you.

Rice, Rice Baby

kl and I are fans of cooking and eating. Each weekend will usually feature some kind of grilled food or something we’ve concocted indoors. Most recently I’ve taken a liking to this rice pilaf dish. Your mileage may vary
Rice Pilaf
Required ingredients:

• 2-3 medium (yellow) onions.
• 1 large tomato.
• 12 oz garbanzo beans.
• 2 cups brown rice.
• 2/3-1 cup chicken stock (or veggie stock).
• 2/3-1 cup white wine (or water).
• 1tsp cayenne pepper (season to taste).
• 1tsp Kosher salt (season to taste).
• 3Tbsp Olive Oil.
• 2Tbsp unsalted butter.
• 1-2cups cold water, as necessary.

Instructions:

1. Dice onions fine.
2. Slice tomato and set aside.
3. Set burner to “medium”. Heat olive oil in no-stick pan until it bubbles. Do not allow oil to burn.
4. Cook onions, stirring regularly, until they start to brown.
5. Add salt and cayenne pepper. Stir for 2-3 minutes.
6. Decrease burner to low-medium heat.
7. Add whole tomato and cook until tomato begins to breakdown (5-10 minutes).
8. Add rice and stir. Allow rice to “tan slightly” for 2-3 minutes.
9. Add stock and white wine.
10. Turn up burner to high and bring to a rolling boil, stirring regularly.
11. Once mixture has reached a boil, turn burner down to low. Cover pan and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring regularly to avoid burning.
12. After 30 minutes, add garbonzo beans and stir.
13. Add butter and cover pan. Simmer for 40 minutes, stirring regularly.
14. Over the next 45 minutes, your rice should cook thoroughly, until it is soft. If you find that your mixture is drying out, add more water, 1/2 cup at a time. When you are done, the rice should be moist and soft, but you should see no evidence of liquid.

This Season on 24 -or- Why Do I Even Bother?

kl and I started watching “24″ while I was recovering from surgery back in January. You see, it all started out great: terrorists, missing gas cannisters, a conspiracy. Neat! Once kl realized the powers of Tivo, we started to record each episode and watch it at our leisure.

In retrospect, putting “24″ on Tivo and not rushing home for it was a superb idea. Why? Because every last second of “24″ sucks. Alright, so I understand plot and conflict and throwing in a couple of twists, but when you look at master works like “North by Northwest”, you know that paying careful attention to its storyline will lead you to a conclusion. Not so with “24″! “24″ has the undeniably awful habit of pulling its plot out of the air. How dare I slam such “riveting” television drama like “24″? It’s easy when you consider the following:

Wonder what happened to those gas cannisters? It was a conspiracy, and the president didn’t know.

Fine, so following the plot, it would seem like terrorists were to blame for the missing gas cannisters. So, six wasted hours later, the viewers learn that:

The president did know about the gas cannisters and that he’d murdered the previous president to ensure oil supplies for all Americans.

*Rolling eyes.*

This is not to say that I haven’t been paying close attention here. Simply, a casual viewing of “24″ should lead anybody to conclude that the show’s writers are making things up as they go along. I can picture a writer’s meeting for “24″ now:

Writer 1: Okay, so we tied the terrorists to the gas cannisters and Jack has saved Los Angeles by thwarting a terror attack. Problem? We only have enough material for 11 episodes, and we need material for 22 episodes.
Writer 2: So? Why not have the president be a conspirator?
Writer 1: How would that work? We already outed his chief of staff a few episodes ago.
Writer 2: I doubt anyone would even notice.
Writer 1: Whaaaat?!
Writer 2: If 400-pounders, mousey guys, and Chinamen can attain superstardom by performing their renditions of “Tears of a Clown” to a national audience, do you really think they’d notice if the president pulled a 50-foot garden hose out of his ass while engaged in a monologue about “oil supply” and “patriotism”?

Apparently, kl and I are suckers for this kind of divestment (of time and energy). So, each week, we watch 5-10 minutes of an episode on Tivo. We catch the “last week on 24″ introduction and the first couple minutes of the show. Then kl jumps on the “fast-forward” button and narrates:

“Okay, so Jack is chasing after someone, and there’s an explosion. The president is chatting with someone on his cell phone. He looks kind of maniacal. Jack is chasing the president. There are terrorists chasing the both of them. Oh, a commerical! I want to see that movie. Now, scenes from next week!”

I managed to avoid every last second of the first season of “American Idol”, but I wasted 5 months of my life on the second season — while I wrote a book with “Idol” in the background. I heard all of the hype about the first season of “24″ but avoided it completely. A bout of scrotal pain sucked me into the third season.

At least Fox understands its audience.

Of Bees and Dogs

I’ve often felt that my labrador retriever is like a bee, a yellowjacket. While he isn’t yellow, he does flit from place to place, he’s tried to “pollenate” (on a few unsuspecting victims), and he does like garbage. So? His nickname is “Bee”. He even answers to it!

Imagine my delight when kl pointed out a website that’s dedicated to bee costumes for dogs. Not to say that I’m going to buy one, but apparently my observation of my dog acting like a bee was more apt than I’d originally thought. And the website is a riot. Consider the following:

No Photoshop! Beedogs.com is about pictures of actual dogs wearing actual bee outfits. I’m not interested in pictures of dogs photoshopped to look like bees, nor do I want pictures of bee costumes photoshopped to look like they’re being worn by dogs.

Speaking of yellowjackets (or specifically of the color yellow), I have to take Bee to the vet’s today. While Bee is a pretty well-behaved creature and he’s housebroken, he has these bouts with UTI such that he becomes un-housebroken in the short-term. This is a bummer. This time around, the vet threw me off by asking for a urine sample.

How on earth does one get a urine sample from a 60-pound animal who flits around like a yellowjacket?

Is it akin to milking a cat? Time will tell. This afternoon, before 4pm, kl, Bee, and I will head to the backyard. I will be wearing rubber gloves, holding a plastic tub in my hands. kl will be controlling the leash. I can only imagine that I’ll be writing another entry about this one. Stay tuned.

I Rock (When I’m Not Shy)

Anne dropped by for some session work with her (now former) band last October. Joe and I did the engineering work for the sessions. We crammed three songs into two days’ worth of tracking and Joe quickly put together some rough mixes on the third day before the band hit the road.

When Anne left the band, she had some material that had been “orphaned” — which was to say that it had been left undone. Joe and I decided to create new instrumentation and mixes for Anne’s work. Last weekend, Joe engineered some sessions where I’d tracked bass for one of Anne’s songs. This song was of the interesting variety: kind of Motown-like, which meant that you had to play a precision performance on top of a bouncy beat. While I’ve been involved with music for a pretty long time, I’ve also played lots of music where precision isn’t really the object of the performance. This meant that our sessions weren’t without peril.

While we got an early start on Saturday morning, I was just not feeling the song and kept obsessing about a perfect performance, so things weren’t going very well. After a few hours of redo’s, Joe and I decided to take a break. He had a sandwich and I had a buffet of other stuff, like wasabi peas and hummus/pita. After our break, we started to track again, and during the course of this, Joe brought up a maddening tendency in my playing; I get shy.

When I’m confident with my performance, it’s loud and even. When I hit trouble spots (tough tempo or phrasing, etc), the performance practically cowers in a corner or hides beneath a bed. Horrible. Take after take I worked on evening out my rough spots. And then I started feeling the song. Takes were getting it easier. It clicked. I wasn’t as shy. We actually got a pretty decent performance… after 8 hours.

Having a Ball (or Not)

A few months ago, I’d started to experience swelling of my scrotum (at the time, my scrotum was the size of a softball or slightly smaller). At first, I’d believed it was normal because there was no pain, no discharge, nothing else out of the ordinary, except for frequent urination. I’d had a test for STDs, and I was clean.

After all, my body had undergone other changes. I’d lost a lot of weight three years ago. I’m almost completely bald. I have hair growing everywhere (except from my head, of course!). I had perfect skin throughout my teen years and suddenly developed weird, oily skin in my 30’s — along with acne. I developed more in-grown hairs than I believed were ever possible. Things were happening. If my scrotum had begun to grow and it wasn’t hurting me, who I was I to worry? Maybe I was just becoming some kind of majestic creature, like a lion king in one of those Animal Planet shows? Sure, I’d be happy to let the younger ones snare and kill a gazelle while I sat there in the not-so-hot Northeastern sun showing off my impressively-sized testicles!

I started dating my girlfriend last summer. A few months after we’d started dating, she’d noticed the scrotal abnormality, and we’d had a conversation something like this:

She: This can’t be normal.

Me: I don’t know what’s up with it.

She: Does it hurt?

Me: No, not at all.

She: You should really go and get it checked out.

Me: Well, I mean I do have hair growing out of my ears and all this other stuff. Maybe it’s perfectly normal?

She: (looking at me in disbelief) Dude, just go to the doctor’s! Make an appointment! Go! Seriously, while it was kind of shocking to see you like this at first, now I’m getting concerned: really concerned.

I made an appointment with my PCP in October 2005 and, as I expected, I was in perfect health… until he examined my abnormally large scrotum. He was very concerned, noted how testicular cancer was very treatable these days, and sent me immediately to a urologist.

I was fine until I found myself sitting in the urologist’s office. Not only was I — by far — the youngest male there, I realized that I was totally in love with my girlfriend, had already considered a future with her (if she’d have me), and in it there was no place for testicular cancer.

Many things were going through my head, and I don’t feel like discussing them here.

The urologist noted my (young) age and otherwise perfect health, chided me for being a smoker, and took at look at my scrotum. A medical school resident was by his side (this hospital is a teaching hospital for Tufts University as well) and when he saw my scrotum, his eyes grew wide. He apologized, and I told him not to worry about it. After shining a flashlight through my scrotum (which is a spot check for testicular cancer), the urologist began to poke and prod, until he nicked one of my testicles. I winced in pain.

(You see, since my scrotum was so swollen, my testicles had become misaligned and were severely out of place, so a testicle was not where anyone would’ve expected to have found it.)

Since I had experienced pain, the doctor was concerned. He sent me immediately for an ultrasound. For nearly an hour, I laid on an examination table, looking up at a picture of a “peaceful” bird on the ceiling, while a technician ran an ultrasound device over my scrotum time and time again. I was very nervous, since I had no idea what was taking place. I could not stand to look at the monitor where my scrotum and testicles were on display. I could not look past the pretty bird on the ceiling. I kept answering the same questions over and over, like: “have you suffered a blow to the groin in the past?”, or, “have you done any heavy lifting on a regular basis?”

After the ultrasound was done, I had to urinate like you would not believe. I pulled up my pants and ran to the bathroom. When I got out, the doctor informed me that I did not have testicular cancer, and that my testicles were alive and had a pulse. Instead, he told me I had a condition known as a “hydrocele”. I had three options:

1. I could leave things alone so long as the hydrocele did not grow substantially.
2. He could drain the fluid from the scrotum right away, but it would return in a month or so.
3. I could have a hydrocelectomy to abate the hydrocele entirely (there’s a 2-3% recurrence rate, which I found to be acceptable).

I did further research about hyrdocele, and concluded that I would have surgery. Based on my reading, if untreated, a hyrdocele can (but not always) strangle the testicles due to pressure in the scrotum. I did not want things to get worse. I wanted my scrotum to be back to normal. And I wanted relief most of all. I scheduled the surgery for January 2006, and had two months to reconsider.

I had my surgery on January 16, 2006. While I would receive a general anesthetic, the procedure would take an hour and would be done on an outpatient basis. My girlfriend and father came along for the procedure and by 7:50am, I was sedated and on my way to the operating room.

After they woke me up in the OR (did any procedure actually take place?), I was back in recovery by 9:00am or so (I forget exactly since I was “out”). I was walking by 9:45am and by 10:30am, I had reunited with my girlfriend and father. I had grown tired of this hospital experience, and felt it was time to leave.

When we returned home, I had some snacks and my painkiller. We all took naps. My girlfriend was a total angel by preparing meals and tidying up. She had to return to work on Wednesday, tho, so my father took over after that. He’s been stellar as well.

As for me, I am on the mend, even though I am kind of moody and depressed in a not-so-goth kind of way. I had extreme pain on Monday night through Thursday. I’ve had an ice pack on my groin every day, almost all day. The pain is much more bearable now, and I’m starting to walk like a normal human again (as opposed to the troll I’d been impersonating since Monday when I left the hospital).

I’ll be back to work next week, on 1/30. Still in pain. Still on painkillers. But it’s been getting better everyday, so I can’t complain.