Two Plane Stories

I recently read a post on Peter Greenberg's blog (Out of the Office) titled, "The Crazy Things We'll Do to Get on a Plane."  Peter is the Travel Editor for CBS News and says he travels 300 days a year around the globe.  I will be paraphrasing two stories from his blog here.

A friend of Peter's was booked from Lagos, Nigeria, to London on a 727. He received a hand-written boarding pass two hours before flight time.  When the flight was called, the crowd bolted onto the tarmac and ascended the stairs to the plane.  It crushed past the lone gate agent and one timid policeman.

Within two minutes, according to Peter, there were fifty people stranded on the stairs and tarmac who had boarding passes but no seats.  Punches were thrown and the army was called in.  A lone colonel arrived.  He shot his weapon into the air and the mayhem stopped.

"Everyone off the plane," he ordered.  "No exceptions!  Drop your carry-on bags under the fuselage." He lined up all the passengers under the left wing.  "Stay here till you hear me fire my gun again," he said.  "Then run completely around the plane once, grab your bag, run back under this wing and up the stairs.  The first 125 will get seats."

Which they did, even the little old ladies.  After 125 passengers boarded, huffing and puffing, the colonel barred the doorway, firearm ready.  The 50 "losers" had to wait two days for the next flight, when the colonel showed up again, just in case.

That story doesn't sound so crazy now, with the Ebola outbreak there!

In his second story, Peter tells of a flight scheduled to leave Beijing at 10:00 a.m. for Hong Kong.  The year was 1999.  Peter waited from 8:00 till 10:00 without any call to board.  AT 10:20 a.m. a Chinese gate agent announced, trembling, "Plane is very sick.  Please walk to next gate and we take that plane."

However there was no plane at the next gate.  Around 11:30 a.m., an aircraft landed and taxied to that gate. At 1:15 p.m. the same gate agent stuttered, "Very, very sorry again.  This plane more sick than other plane...so we take...other plane."

All the passengers, including Peter, boarded the first "sick" plane...and took off. "Why in the world did I do that?" Peter is still asking himself.

Which reminds me of a a flight Charley and I were taking from LaGuardia to Florida on Delta.  We had boarded and sat on the runway in a queue of twelve to take off. Half-asleep, we heard, "Sorry folks, we have to turn around."  That was it?  In the dark and in pouring rain we disembarked in some remote corner of the airport to take buses back to the terminal.  Dogs sniffed our luggage, strewn on the tarmac. Ambulances and fire trucks surrounded the plane. A phone call had threatened to blow up our flight!

We waited...and waited.  When no bomb was found, we were given the option to wait for a flight the next morning or re-board and proceed south.

We landed that night in Florida without incident but to this day we wonder, What were we thinking??

Link to Newspaper Article on "Fist Bumps"

Here is the link to the complete article on the study of hygienic fist bumps vs handshakes and high-fives:

www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/fist-bumps-hygienic-handshakes-scientists-article-1.1884534

Fist Bumps

Charley has been trying for at least two years to get me to stop shaking hands after tennis matches. He claimed that I was picking up germs during a handshake of even moderate strength that lasted for just a few seconds.

I watched the men doing their fist bumps after matches and told him I thought it would be insulting to finish a match and approach someone across the net as though I were going to punch her. The ladies give firm handshakes to be polite, win or lose. We don't want to be viewed as poor sports, and certainly not competitors with a wimpy grasp, even if wet and slimy. In fact, I seem to remember a rule in the Palm Beach County Women's Tennis Association handbook about the necessity of handshakes after matches.   There's a rule for everything else, so that must be covered, too.

"Suit yourself," Charley said.

Turns out he was right.

According to a study at the Institute of Biological, Environmental, and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales, fist bumps are 20 times more hygienic than handshakes and 10 times more hygienic than high-fives.  It's because the fists have a smaller area that touch each other during the bump.  Handshakes, on the other hand (ha ha), have an average of 24.4 square inches of contact and last an average of three seconds, longer than high-fives and fist bumps. An average of 124 million colony-forming units of E.coli were transferred during the three-second handshake in the tests.

That's right, researchers at the Institute actually donned sterile gloves and dunked their hands in "a soup of de-fanged Escherichia coli bacteria, then shook hands, high-fived, or fist-bumped with one another."
In addition, they used an instrument to measure the grip strength of various handshakes and found strong handshakes transferred the most bacteria.

Imagine a researcher coming home from work and the wife asks, "Did you have a rough day, dear?"

"Oh, it was lethal."

I'm still not convinced I could approach someone with my fist after a match.  So I have another solution.  Why not do the butt bump?  It would be a lot more fun and wouldn't transfer any germs.  I know I'd enjoy seeing NFL players doing the butt bump instead of handshakes!

Link to NY TIMES article about robot caregiving

Here's the link to Louise Aronson's article in the NY Times on Sunday, July 20, 2014, titled,
"The Future of Robot Caregivers."  It also links to her other publications on healthcare.

http://www.louisearonson.com/news

Granny's New Companion: A Robot Caregiver

The world of caregiving is physically and emotionally exhausting, stressful, frustrating, awkward, and sometimes dirty.  It can also be never-ending.  Yet it can be rewarding and stimulating, tapping into a whole range of experiences and challenges the caregiver never knew existed.

What will happen when there aren't enough caregivers for those who will need them ten years from now?  According to an internet report on the website www.retirementrevised.com, there will be a 48% increase in the need for caregivers in the next decade, with a 1% increase in the supply.

Enter the robots.  Many countries have acknowledged the reality of a dwindling supply of caregivers by investing in robot development, such as Japan and a consortium of European countries.  According to Louise Aronson in "The Future of Robot Caregivers" (NY Times, July 20, 2014), research in the U.S. has been slow to move in this direction.  Within the medical community here, the idea that machines can help fulfill more than just physical needs meets with skepticism and occasional outrage.

We see robots maneuver along hospital corridors to deliver meds.  We know they assist in surgery and rehabilitation and clean up afterwards.  Is it too much of a leap to believe that granny couldn't relate to a robotic companion that would answer her question, remind her to finish her meal and swallow her pill, and then read to her?  Is there a huge difference between that and millions of kids who sit in restaurants communicating with an electronic device instead of their human families?  Are they stimulated and satisfied?  Is loneliness and neglect (or even abuse by a human caregiver) a better situation?

As kids we talked to stuffed animals and dolls. We created a world of pretend and were stimulated.  We weren't lonely.  Today the animals and dolls can move and talk back!

"Imagine this," Aronson says in her article.  "Since the robot caregiver wouldn't require sleep, it would always be alert and available in case of crisis...It could do laundry and other household tasks.  When (the patient) woke, the robot could greet her with a kind, humanlike voice, help her get out of bed safely and make sure she was clean after she used the toilet.  It -she?-he?-would ensure that the patient took the right medications in the right doses.  At breakfast, the robot could chat with her about the weather or news.

"And then...the caregiver robot would offer to read to her.  And after a while the robot would say, 'I wonder whether we should take a break from reading now and get you dressed.  Your daughter's coming to visit today.'"

Will there someday be a world where the robot feels as much happiness as the patient?

Link to Joyce Wadler's Humor

At the beginning of each week I'll try to post a link to something that relates to the latest blog I posted. It may be humorous or informational or just plain interesting. This week's link is to Joyce Wadler's humorous column, "On the Road with Mothers," from the March 3, '13 NY Times, which I mentioned in my latest post.  If the link doesn't open, type in the entire name of the site.  It's worth it!


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03booming/on-the-road-with-mothers.html?smid=pl-share

To Urn or Return?

When my kids were toddlers, I'd deposit them in the play room at the indoor tennis courts and we young mothers would exchange recipes or discuss what the kids wouldn't eat or where our husbands were on business.

When my kids were in school, we'd discuss our work, our kids' schedules, their report cards, and family trips.  We wouldn't stick around for a drink afterward because we had to run the carpool route or get the kids home to finish homework before hockey practice or organize our own material for a meeting.

When my kids were in college, we could sit afterward and mostly talked about vacations we were planning or work.  Or the cost of college educations and what kind of jobs the kids might find later (yes, there were plenty of choices then).

In retirement, an after-tennis discussion recently revolved around whether we were planning to be cremated with a memorial service or have an open or closed coffin with wake and full funeral or just a service. And whether we'd talked with the kids about it.

(The tennis was pretty good, really...no correlation to the topic!)

Which brought to mind something a friend recently printed for me - an old column by NY Times writer Joyce Wadler titled, "Queens of the Road" (March 3, 2013).  Joyce has become my new favorite humorist.  Her point in the column was to NEVER travel with your mother long-distance.  "Unless maybe you are disposing of her ashes. And then there's a very good chance you will hear her voice in your head:
     'You packed the box with my ashes without double-wrapping it in plastic and putting it in a baggie?
Look at this box:  It's cardboard, it's nothing.  What if I spill all over this suitcase?...By the way, how are you planning to do this?  If there's a wind, make sure it's not blowing at you, and when you open the box, make sure you don't pour it over your head.  Don't say, 'Everybody knows that,' because everybody does not know.  I hope you didn't invite your father's cousin Marvin.  I can't stand that man.'"

Back to the question posed at the tennis court.  To urn or return (in open or closed casket)?

I've been thinking about my parents a lot recently, doing book promotions for ELDERLY PARENTS WITH ALL THEIR MARBLES.  They'd signed up with The Neptune Society to be cremated and prepaid for the service, which included scattering their ashes at sea.  Dad got seasick on any boat he stepped foot in and they most certainly did not want to be scattered at sea!  What they did want was to be co-mingled and divided in half for my sister and me to dispose of on each of our properties.

We had a lovely memorial service for my mother.  She sat in a cardboard box on a shelf of Dad's bedroom, waiting.  Not too long, as it turned out. When Dad passed almost exactly a year later, we had another lovely memorial service.  The ashes went back to The Neptune Society, which mingled them, provided the paperwork, and sealed the urns.  My sister and I transported them in our respective cars, she to Virginia and me to Massachusetts.


Maybe there's a bench at a tennis court somewhere where Charley and the kids could sit to reminisce about our lives together. As for the rest, I'll leave it up to them.  I doubt they'll hear my voice telling them which way the wind is blowing.