“That’s My Name, Don’t Wear it Out!”

March 12, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” was a sassy, cheeky way to respond to someone calling us out in the 1970s. Generations who weren’t on planet earth when this line was the thing can’t believe we were into it. When I put it in context and informed them that this was our playful way of saying that we did not fear confrontation. I told them it was the equivalent of, ‘Hey, I heard you the first time,’ when someone confrontationally called our name out a second time. When I told them that line could engender a “Woh!” from onlookers, they couldn’t understand it. “It’s not funny, it doesn’t sound effective, and are you sure this wasn’t just a you thing?” ‘No, it was all over the movies, the TV shows, and the commercials,’ I informed them. ‘We really thought we were onto something with this line.’ When I added that this line suggested to all parties concerned that we weren’t just ‘cool,’ in the face of confrontation, we were cooler than cool, they were ready to dismiss that entire time period as desperate, desperately confused, or sus.

When this idiomatic expression, or saying, first hit the streets, I was in grade school, and I either didn’t have the level of creativity or the intellectual heft necessarily to pull it off. It was too situational for me or something. I remember trying to use it, but it always came off as awkward. I didn’t have older brothers or neighborhood kids to teach and torture me into perfecting the nuances required to being cool. I was on my own, and I put far too much effort into it, I was always late to the party, and I didn’t know what to do once I got there.

Since I didn’t have anyone to teach me, when I’d hear the cool kids around me say the same thing more than once, I would ask them where they got it. How uncool is that?

“It’s just something I say,” the cool kids responded, and I’d drop it after that. I didn’t know how to be cool, but I knew the pratfalls to avoid to appearing too uncool, and I knew it was so uncool to try to figure out how or why something is cool. Cool is what it is, as they say. I knew trying to define the indefinable was not only difficult, it was self-defeating, but I’d obsess over trying to figure it out. As usual, with someone trying to figure out the nebulous and ever-changing, I overestimated my peers. I was always late to the party, as I wrote, but when I found out that the cool kids learned their favorite sayings from TV, movies, and music lyrics I couldn’t help but find that disappointing. I thought the difference between cool kids and me was their ability to organically create sayings. I wanted to be them, so I copied them, and I thought more of them. Learning that their sources were as simple as mine made it feel like all that I wasted a lot of time idolizing them. Then, when I saw one of their favorite sayings appear in a wiener commercial, it shattered my world for a while. It also left me in a weird place, because I impulsively thought less of them, but I also realized that it said something about me too, because they were my personal inspiration for what it meant to be cool?

Another huge inspiration for my definition was Danny Zuko, but when I heard him say, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” I was so late to the party that I didn’t know that all of the cool kids got it from this movie, because they saw Grease long before I did. I was also surprised to hear Danny Zuko say it, because I didn’t think he needed it. I thought he was so cool, so charismatic, and so everything that I wanted to be that I couldn’t believe he was saying what we were all saying to try to appear cool. It was the first time in my life that I thought someone was already so cool that they didn’t need to do anything to achieve that lofty title. I thought he was the personification of cool, and he had that it quality that the rest of us would never know. I wasn’t sure if I considered his effort redundant or overkill, but it tainted the character in a manner I couldn’t quite grasp.

I was an eight-year-old who knew nothing about screenwriters and directors. I didn’t know that the primary job of screenwriters and directors was to manipulate us into thinking their characters were cool, and I didn’t know that casting agencies were hired to hire supporting actors for the expressed purpose of further manipulating the audience into believing that Danny Zuko was cooler than we were. I didn’t even have a firm grasp on the idea that there was an actor named John Travolta playing the role of Danny Zuko who had makeup people to enhance his skin, hair stylists to fashion his hair, and wardrobe personnel to fashion him into a cool character. I knew I wasn’t seeing 90 minutes of a person’s life captured for my enjoyment, but I didn’t know how manufactured and choreographed the image of Danny Zuko was. I just thought he was the essence of cool, and when I envisioned what it meant to be cool, Danny Zuko became my prototype.

I’d love to say I quickly processed the difference between the definition of cool and cooler than cool as effortlessly as John Travolta, and the team behind Grease did, but I didn’t. It took me a long time to grasp it. After the writers, directors, and supporting actors manipulated my mind into believing I could form my own path to cool, I developed my personal definitions. We all did. We learned what lines to say and when to say them, but when Danny Zuko used that line we were all saying, it exposed the effort he put into it. If a Danny Zuko needed to learn the lines of the zeitgeist necessary to get in the club, In other words, then everyone did. When I later saw other screenwriters and directors pursue the cool motif for the characters of their movies, it further exposed the effort to me. Danny Zuko and The Fonz were my prototypes for cool guys, and the rest of them were frauds chasing after that characterization.

After seeing some of the effort Danny Zuko and others, put into trying to be cool, I wondered what I would think of them if they hadn’t said those lines we all copied, and what would I think of them if they refused to say those lines we all used to try to get someone, somewhere to think we were cool. We had a formula for cool provided by movies, music lyrics and wiener commercials, but what would we think of someone who strives for a place that leaves others wondering why we refuse to follow their formula? They taught us the formula for cool, but could I find a place that is cooler than cool by refusing to the follow their formula?

The answer to that was no. No one appreciates a ‘dare to be different’ motif when it’s subtle and silent. We prefer the shocking and provocative definitions. Quiet nonconformity doesn’t sell. It doesn’t impress people to the point that they want to be our friends. It confuses them, and they rarely seek to define that confusion. They often just back away. When we want friendships, especially in our youth, we have to offer the kids around us a comfortable place they know. I struggled with all this, until I lost my conviction, and I didn’t try to find it again for years. No one who knew me then, or now, would ever say I found a “cooler than cool” place, and if you asked them if I was even cool, they’d probably laugh, “I don’t think so.” They would probably also add, “But I can tell you that I’ve never met anyone quite like him.”

That was kind of it. They knew I was different, but they couldn’t see how those differences were in service of anything, so they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Between ages eight and whatever age led to my personal age of enlightenment, I had no writers feeding me lines, and no directors giving me notes on how to project cool. I realized that I was on my own when it came to trying to figure this big mess out, because I wasn’t good-looking enough to play Danny Zuko, and my supporting cast was either not able or willing to play their roles in such a way that would manipulate our audience into thinking I was cool. The best course of action I found was “To be [my]self, because everyone else was taken.” I knew I’d run the risk of “impersonating my shadow” and I’d eventually become a shadow of my former self, but I already tried to be other people, I tried those masks on, and while I admit that it was a lot more fun than playing myself in this production, it never worked out the way I thought it would.

Fantastic, Now What’s a Jiffy?

January 12, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Dr. Jones will be with you in a jiffy,” the receptionist says.

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask. “I don’t need you to be exact, but I would like a rough estimate.”

Is it just me, or is it a little odd that those who work in doctors’ offices, auto mechanics, and other businesses that offer waiting rooms refrain from providing true Estimated Wait Times (EWT)? I understand that it’s tough, rough, and in come cases impossible to know with certitude, but all we’re asking for is a rough estimate from a receptionist, and her team of employees, with their decades of experience in their shared field, to come up with a fairly decent guess. When I enter their office I do so with my own EWT, my Expected Wait Time, and while I know my EWT might be uninformed compared to theirs, I’d enjoy gathering with them to see if we can find a Crucial Meeting Ground (CMG). The problem for those of us sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for our services to be rendered, is that most employees at places like doctors’ offices think they can circumvent all EWTs with: “A jiffy!”

“It will only take a jiffy.”

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask again, “and before you answer, you should know that we’ve tried, for centuries we’ve tried, to come up with a definition that we can all agree on. Some stay vague, saying, ‘it’s lightning fast,’ ‘blink of an eye,’ or ‘in a flash,’ but physicist Gilbert N. Lewis clarified jiffy as the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum, or 33.3564 picoseconds, and a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. So, if you’re equating your Estimated Wait Time to the physicist’s definition of jiffy, then you’re saying Dr. Jones should be ready in 0.0000000000333564 seconds, and that’s not too bad.”

The primary reason these businesses offer vague “jiffy?” EWTs, is the disgruntled customer. Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows that guy who approaches the desk with his “You said he’d be ready between 5:18 and 5:23. It’s now 5:24.” The disgruntled customer loves playing the sophisticate who can spot flaws, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies inherent “in the system”. “This is not a chicken McNugget,” this customer says displaying a small McNugget. “It’s a half of a McNugget. You’ve given me nine and one half of a McNugget. I ordered ten. It’s not even a half a McNugget. Look at it, it’s more of a third of a McNugget. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?” The reader reads this, and they think we’re using hyperbole to prove a point. Yet, if the reader worked in the service industry as long as we did, they know that some aggrieved customers believe that we pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds were in cahoots with our employer in a MickeyD-pimply face industrial complex conspiring against him, John McGillicuddy. If he’s not that far down the totem pole of conspiracy, he thinks the corporation has been putting it to the little guy for far too long, and he Mr. John McGillicuddy appoints himself the emissary for all those little guys who are afraid to stand up to pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds.

“It’s not about you, John McGillicuddy,” I want to tell these disgruntled customers. The pimply-faced sixteen-year-old in the back, didn’t see that John McGillicuddy was at the drive-thru, so he decided to throw a half nugget into the pack. “And one other thing, Mr. John McGillicuddy, or whatever your name is, all those snarky lines you dreamed up in the mirror the night before. We’ve heard them all before.” John McGillicuddy obviously brings a lot of baggage to the drive thru window, and he brings the same baggage to the waiting room receptionist who offers him a rough EWT. So, even though the jiffy line grates on me, I understand what drives an office to keep it general for the entry-level employees who have to put up with the John McGillicuddys of the world.

“Okay,” John McGillicuddy will say. “Let me talk to your manager.”

Here’s the dirty little secret that most in the service industry businesses won’t tell you. The manager is but another employee, at a higher level and often a little older and more experienced, but they are not granted a magic wand that can fix all of the flaws and inconsistencies you spot. The employees and managers can meet with their higher ups and eventually fix the flaws you’ve exposed, but it’s not going to happen today, while you’re all impatient and frustrated.

In other words, we know it’s not fair to take it out on the employees or even the manager, but they’re the face of the corporation standing before us. We also know to apply relative constructs to the term “jiffy” in conjunction with the nature of the services we require. In a doctor’s office, we could say that a jiffy should be anywhere between five to ten minutes, if our appointment was at 8:00 AM, and we showed up at the office at 8:00 AM. There are always going to be variables in a doctor’s office, of course, as some patients eat up more of the doctor’s time than expected, but doctors, and all of the employees in charge of the waiting room office, have a combined tenure of decades, and they should have a better feel for “a jiffy” in their Expected Wait Times. When I end up waiting twenty-three minutes for a doctor, I see that as a violation of the term a jiffy, as I know it and physicist Gilbert N. Lewis defines it. Twenty-three minutes waiting should be more of an auto mechanic’s definition of jiffy, but when I end up waiting over an hour and a half for them, I can’t help but think we’re all violating the jiffy. Even after allowing for relative definitions of the term in an auto mechanic’s shop, I can’t see how an hour and a half can even loosely be defined as a jiffy. Like those in a doctor’s office, auto mechanics’ employees have a combined decades of experience, and they should calculate their definition by how many cars are in front of me, and how long they think each job will take, until they 1-2-3 me and say, “I’m going to guess we’ll have you out of here in under two hours.” You know what I’d say to that? I’d say, “Thank you. Thank you for being so honest.” I’d say that because it’s much better to wait a concrete two-hour EWT than a vague jiffy that could take two hours.

*******

I only wrote a letter to a corporate home office one time, and to be completely honest, I hated doing it. I hated being that guy, that John McGillicuddy, so much that I didn’t write it that day, because I was overheated. I waited a day and composed a more professional, less emotional complaint letter. It was my only complaint letter, thus far, and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but if you’re a “jiffy” guy who violates with variables to the point that I question your veracity, it could vex me to the point that it triggers my emotional mutation into Letter Writing Man … and you wouldn’t like me when I’m vexy.

DIY Garbage Disposal Installation: It Ain’t Easy

June 10, 2024June 18, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“I done got my ying yang broke,” I would call out to my apartment managers. “Send Scully!”

“Why do you pay rent to an apartment complex?” my friends would ask me over the course of twenty years. “You’re just throwing money down a well.” This! This is one of the many reasons why, something breaks, call Scully. We don’t have to mow, shovel snow, or know how to fix things with Scully around the corner, and we’ll never know what we don’t know, unless we make the leap to home ownership. When I made that leap, I realized if my dad ever taught me anything about home maintenance, I forgot all of it in those twenty plus years I just called Scully.

And it’s possible that my dad did teach me some things, but I was so bored by it that I didn’t pay attention, or if I did, I forgot all about everything he said as soon as the thing was fixed. I’m still so bored by it, twelve years into the leap, that I forget everything I learn soon after fixing it. If you’re one of us, and you’re tired of paying the Scullies of the world to fix it for you, YouTube is your friend. If you don’t already know this, YouTube is loaded with Do-It-Yourselfers (DIY) who will show you how to fix everything from a leaky roof to your poopeé (as opposed to your pooper, which, to my knowledge, still requires professional consultation).

One of the reasons I recommend YouTube, is that one of the alternatives is the company’s step-by-step instruction manual. My favorite thing to do with a product’s instructional manual is to crumple it up and try to sink it in the nearest waste barrel from what I deem a three-point range. My crumpling process can garner unwanted attention, as I passionately express the bottled up rage these vague, incoherent little pamphlets have caused me over the years. I can do this now, because the Do-It-Yourselfer videos provide so much more clarity.

These DIY videos don’t just instruct us how to fix our appliances and make better homes and gardens, they show us. They show us the difference. “This is a bolt,” they say to explain that which a product’s manual assume we already know, “and this is the difference between a bolt and a washer.” If they don’t say such things, you can see the difference. They’ll hold the bolts and screws in their hands, so you can see the differences in sizes before you start screwing on and screwing up. They’ll also suggest that you might want to consider borrowing your neighbors’ tools before you start, because the “tools” the companies provide are often so basic that they’ll only make your job harder.

One warning before you start searching for these videos, almost every DIY guy will begin their video with, “[This] is pretty easy, IF you know what you’re doing.” Okay, but if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have clicked on your video. For those of us who don’t know what we’re doing, they’ll add, “And I’ll show you how in one-hundred and twelve simple steps.” My guess is that most DIY guys have either done this over hundred and thirteen times, or they had some handyman job where they did it frequently. We do want this level of expertise, of course, but some of the times their knowledge and expertise leads them to take some knowledge for granted.

If you’re anything like me, and you’ve spent most of your life calling Scully, I’m not going to kid you, fixing most household items properly is hard, or at least they were/are for me. My apartment dwelling friends say, “Just submit your name to that ambitious, industrious kid’s weekslong wait list. It’s worth the wait, and the labor fees, to have someone else fix it properly for you.”

Another annoying refrain from DIY guys is the “Anyone can do this from the comfort of their own home.” Anyone can change a garbage disposal? Have you ever lifted one of those things? Try it. Walk into a hardware store and lift one, just for giggles. I can lift a garbage disposal, and I could probably curl it over 100 times, average weight 13.4 lbs., but –and this is a huge but— the angle of the extremely tight kitchen cabinet, beneath my old-world kitchen sink, is such that I can’t put my shoulder into it. For me, holding a 13.4 lb. garbage disposal is all forearm, and although I didn’t have to lift it over 100 times, it felt like it, because of all the holding, positioning, and twisting the task requires.

To connect a new garbage disposal, we need to lift one from a very difficult angle, position it perfectly, and twist it into a groove. “EASY? You think this is easy? DIYers around the world, do me a favor, drop the word E word from your vocabulary. As David Bowie once sang, It Ain’t Easy, at least not universally.” Some of you are probably laughing at me right now, because you think it is easy. All right, well, let’s gauge the relative term easy through another relative term, experience. How much experience have you had doing this? How much experience do you have doing that? Yeah, I can do that, and I’ve done that so often that I consider it easy. So, there’s that.

The first step, for those of us with no experience changing a garbage disposal, is to make sure your old garbage disposal is completely done. That’s right, it might not be broken, it might just be jammed. First click the overload button to reset the unit. If that doesn’t work, make sure the disposal is plugged in and the switch is working. (If you have no experience with garbage disposals, it will benefit you to run through this basic checklist before you go out and purchase a new one.) If all that checks out, find what they call an Allen wrench. Put it into the flywheel turning hole at the bottom of the garbage disposal and turn it. Turn it two to three times. If it’s a jam, you might experience a tough turn at some point. If you make it through the tough turn, and it turns with greater ease, you’ll know it was just a jam. Turn it on. If it doesn’t work initially, repeat the process (I had to do this three times on one occasion.) If that doesn’t work, your disposal might need replacing.

Taking an old garbage disposal unit out can be accomplished by most. I’m not going to drop the E word here, but if I can do it, I have to imagine there are ten-year-olds out there, who’ve never heard the term garbage disposal, that can remove one. Follow the DIY guy’s instructions by unscrewing all of the this and thats, disconnect the tubes, and then twist the old garbage disposal out. (Note: Be careful that you don’t crack any PVC pipes.) It’s at this point, right here, when my fellow apartment dwellers say that they would just hire some ambitious, industrious kid to do the rest. I would’ve laughed hard at that ten years ago, but I nod solemnly now. “It’s probably for the best,” I now say, “because putting a new disposal on is hard. Don’t listen to the DIYers and their E words. Not everyone can do this.”

To install a new garbage disposal, you have to position it just so, and twist. It sounds easy, but as I said that heavy thing becomes heavier through all the trial and errors. If it weren’t so heavy, it might be easy, but it’s hard to hold up there for as long as those of us who don’t know what we’re doing to slip it into the waiting groove perfectly for that final twist. If your cabinet is as tight as mine, you might try eleven to thirteen angles before you realize that there is only one angle that will work. You might look at the top of the unit, five to seven times, and try to line it up. It Ain’t Easy.

It’s frustrating, and yet it’s so frustratingly simple that it will become so frustrating that you might reach a point where you consider it impossible. If you reach that point, it’s time to take a break. If age has taught me anything it’s that it’s okay to take breaks, and in some cases, it’s almost mandatory. We’re conditioned by parents, employers, and other authority figures to think in terms of time constraints. Time constraints also define competency and mastery of a project, “I had some problems, sure, but I got it all done in under an hour.” It’s all true, but it’s also true that if you’re as frustrated as I was, you reach a point of diminishing returns. What are you going to accomplish beyond exhausting every profane word you’ve learned from high school? If you continue, trying to achieve a respectable time frame, you’re probably going to be easily satisfied with a half-ass job just to get ‘er done, then after you calm down, you’ll go back and do it correctly.

To clear the mind and approach the project from a new perspective, I suggest taking two breaks. Watch an episode of your favorite comedy in the first one. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, show, or podcast. You need to get yourself laughing. In the second break, one that occurs after another thirty minutes of frustration, try punching a punching bag for thirteen minutes. After thirteen minutes of picturing that DIY guy’s face on your punching bag, coupled with attaching some offensive terms to his “Easy” assessments, you should be able to approach this project with a clear mind.

If you take nothing from what I’ve written thus far, remember these two words: The Plug. All garbage disposals come with a plug. The manufacturers add a plug on every the garbage disposal, because some under-the-sink systems (sink, garbage disposal unit, and dishwasher) have the garbage disposal connect to a dishwasher. Some kitchen systems allow dishwashers to connect to the waterline independently. You will need to determine which system you have before installing the garbage disposal. Before removing the old garbage disposal take note of how your under-the-sink system is set up. If the dishwasher connects to the garbage disposal, and you didn’t know anything about the plug, your dishwasher will flood.

The DIY guy I watched probably covered this, but some of them fellers talk so much that they remind me of my eighth grade teacher. My eyes glaze over, I miss critical information, and I dismiss some of their instructions as blather. Regardless how I missed the information, I knew nothing about the plug, so I installed the garbage disposal with it still attached. When our dishwasher began flooding, we ripped that appliance apart and cleaned every single element on it. We were so confused, until I retraced my steps and realized that all of our dishwasher problems started soon after I installed the new garbage disposal. I turned to my DIY guys, and surprise, surprise, they taught me about The Plug.

If you failed to remove The Plug the first time through, it turns out that you have to undo everything you’ve done. All that frustration that led you to the most comprehensive spiritual experience you’ve ever had, that included forsaking your creator and welcoming him back into your life, was for naught. If you forgot to remove the plug, you’ll have to take the garbage disposal off, grab a screwdriver, and hammer the (expletive deleted) plug out. That sentence was so easy to write, and it was probably just as easy to read. Take it off and put it on again, it’s easy, a trained marsupial could probably do it after they’ve already done it. The reality of removing the garbage disposal, watching the DIY video guy again, taking two breaks, punching him in the mouth for thirteen more minutes, and watching my favorite comedy was as exhausting as the first time through.

The first thing I think, soon after I’m done, is some people love this. They love getting their hands dirty, doing it themselves, and they love it so much that they invent new projects for the ostensible purpose of updating, modernizing, and renovating. “I think my ceiling fan needs some updating.” Your old one still works. “I know, but it’s so old world.” You can see it on their face, and in the songs they sing while doing it, they love this stuff, and I just sit back shaking my head, asking myself: ‘Why? For God’s sakes why?’

“I’m smart, not like everyone thinks, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect.” I’m not as dumb as I look. I can do things, other things that other people can’t. Some of the things I do are considered hard, very hard to some, but I can accomplish them with ease. I might occasionally, and accidentally, betray some level of arrogance with a look, some sort of unintended feel, or a couple of words, but whenever I start to get all full of myself, all I have to do is try to fix something in my home that everyone considers so easy to realize that I’m not half as smart as I thought I’d be at this age.