A Seven Year Old Question

For those in the various industries that produce physical goods for consumption, the intro to this little story may be redundant.  For everyone else, there is this a thing called a “5 Why Analysis.”  It’s a tool that many people in “Industry” will recognize as something that was, at one time or another, jammed down his or her throat by someone called a “Master Black Belt.”  The Master Black Belt, or MBB, makes a lot more money than us. 

What this analysis is supposed to do is drive a team to the root cause of an issue by asking “why” something occurred five times.  Or it could be less, if the root cause was not too far from the surface.  Also, it could be more, if the problem is very complex.  So the name is at best misleading and more likely just stupid and probably has something to do with its Japanese root at Toyota, but I’m getting way off the rails here, driven by my seething animosity toward a system that is really nothing more than using the scientific method but in such a way that is far more limiting and has become a huge industry in and of itself with hundreds of books published a year but still is only a management tool though it’s treated like it is science itself even though it is only holding back science…

Anywho, recently, I had a long conversation with a friend that was there during my formative years throughout high school.  We lost touch before Social Media existed as it does today, so that was that, for a time.  Through a series of happy accidents, we were able to spend an afternoon together.  During that time, I realized that we hadn’t seen each other for about seven years.  That evening, I tried to square how I could still feel like I was relatively young, but also have a gap seven years long between meetings with someone I’d call one of my dearest friends.  That got me thinking about where I was seven years ago and a question that I first struggled with around that time: Is it better to buy locally-produced milk cold, or to buy Ultra-Pasteurized milk, which is shelf-stable?

For a short period of time, I worked full time jobs.  They spanned the traditional third and first shift.  The most difficult part of the situation was eating.  Two 8.5 hour jobs, plus two hours of commuting a day left little wiggle room for first breakfast, the middle meal between jobs, and supper.  I don’t know how I would have done it without dedicated help.  An item that was almost a must was my little box of Horizon Dairy Organic chocolate milk, fresh in its little juice box-type container.  I looked forward to it more than sleep most days. 

Having worked in a dairy previous to this, I was very familiar with what is commonly referred to as the “cold chain” storage and shipping required with traditional dairy products.  The small dairy I worked in received milk in unrefrigerated trucks.  The milk was put into the truck cold and, with such a large volume, it maintained temperature, so long as the turnpike wasn’t backed up too badly.  (Days the turnpike was backed up turned the milk into hog feed.)  The milk was then put into large refrigerated silos before processing.  After the homogenizing and traditional pasteurizing (retronym) it was stored in a huge warehouse that was as cold as your small refrigerator at home.  The warehouse had big bay doors (where the heat desperately tried to get in all the time).  There, refrigerated trucks backed in to be loaded.  The trucks went to grocery stores all over the area, where cooler cases (often left wide open to the store) kept the milk cold.  Finally, someone would buy the milk and take it home.  Even if it wasn’t opened for a day or two, the milk had to be kept in the refrigerator.

Ultra-Pasteurization, or Ultra High Temperature Pasteurization, rendered the milk shelf stable for a long time, provided it was in a well-sealed container and protected from light, preventing oxidation.  This cut the cold chain out, save the refrigerated silos prior to processing and the need to refrigerate after opening.  Green, huh?  At first blush, I thought so.

Seven years ago, the internet was still a young child.  Every once in awhile, earth-shattering revelations came out in some new-to-me media outlet (back then, though, they often contained citations to scientific literature, as young children are prone to being overly-honest).  One of those revelations was that the juice box, a tried-and-true staple of my childhood and the new container for my Ultra-Pasteurized milk, was filling up landfills and never breaking down.  The packaging revolution that had won every major award when it was developed was comprised of so many mixed materials that it couldn’t be recycled.

After some time, I stopped buying the shelf-stable milk. 

At the time, when I searched my soul for the right decision, I reasoned it like this:

1) Why do I need to decide between one or the other in the first place?  Because I am a consumer, and consumption impacts the world around us.
2) Why do I care about that?  Well, I’m in that world, so I’d like it to not be destroyed.  Also, if I ever have a family, I’d be pretty peeved if my kids got sick because of the decisions I made.
3) Ok, so what is it in my actions that cannot be undone?  This is the easy one.  It’s the use of petrochemicals.  Once you pull it out of the ground, it’s up here to stay.
4) Why?  The processes that turned dead vegetation into oil and coal don’t happen anymore.  Or, if you want to be way too pedantic about it for the purposes of the way you live your life day to day, not anywhere near fast enough to put carbon back into the earth. 

So there I settled that of paramount importance is the need to conserve finite resources, or, better yet, not use them at all, because no matter how much one limits pollution from something like petrochemical plastics, those petrochemicals are never going to be turned back into a natural oil deep in the earth.  That carbon will now always be up here on the surface, in the water, or in the air.

What about the alternative, then?  I’m no Luddite.  I totally love progress and convenience and the “Western” way of living.  It isn’t the case now (then… seven years ago… this is all a flashback, remember) that all the electricity used to cool that milk is renewable, but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that it can be.  Moreover, it is certainly possible that it can be.  All signs point to it (seven years ago)! Thus, support the local-as-possible, organic production methods as the primary goal.

And I still operate that way.  The only reason I’m bringing this up after so many years is exactly because so many years have passed.  Energy isn’t keeping up with my ideals.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I see wind turbines and solar panels outside of the US all the time.  To be fair, I do see them in the US often as well.  I guess what I mean to say is that energy management is holding back the science.

My History with the Telephone

A few months back, as I noticed a little message on my smartphone screen that said something like “five missed calls,” I had a momentary flash of nostalgia for the way telephones (and telephone etiquette) used to be.  As the smartphone rang again, I ignored it and thought back to all of the changes…

My earliest recollection of a telephone was in the house I first lived in on Red Arrow Highway.  There was one phone in the house, I think.  It had a rotary dial and a heavy receiver and it sat on the desk next to the dining room table.  Quaint, huh? 

We moved to a new house in 1987.  At the time we toured the house, before my parents bought it, I remember seeing phone jacks in every single room.  This, to me, was amazing.  What was even more amazing our first cordless phone, which we got that Christmas, I believe.  I’m sure I don’t remember the absolute first time I used it, but I remember the pull out antenna, the channel selector button, and talking outside on a telephone at my house.  This, children of today, never happened before.  Not in the Midwest, anyway.  At least three people I knew had that exact same phone.  There wasn’t a whole lot of variety in the beginning.

Sometime in the next few years, I saw my very first “car phone.”  We also called it a “bag phone.”  This was because the phone was in a bag.  It would plug into the car lighter for power and, I think, had a battery that could last up to ten minutes or so if not plugged in.  That was the state of things for awhile.  Some cars, though, had built in car phones.  These were mostly Cadillac sedans. 

Middle School rolled around and I was on the Student Council.  Many of my friends were involved in after-school activities, as was I.  A lot of the activities, like Science Olympiad or scrounging around in the basement of the building for god-knows-what, didn’t really have a solid end-time, so getting rides set up was a pain.  I lobbied to get a payphone put into the school lobby so students could call home when needed.  It cost us, as I remember, $120 out of our budget to get the phone installed.  We had plenty of money then because we had also, the previous year, installed the first pop machine in the school and the Student Government took all the profits.

I recall this was the time when 1-800-COLLECT launched.  One could dial that code and, when the automated service asked for your name, you’d just say “Pick me up” and your parents would come and get you.  Brilliant.  Almost worth having to put up with Carrot Top…

High School started with the bag phone getting scaled down to a large handset that could be carried in the car.  The term “cellular” telephone started being used, but most folks I knew still called it a car phone, because why would you carry it anywhere else but in a car?

Once I could drive, I started working.  Once I started working, I fell in love.  She lived in a different town 12 miles away.  That, my friends, was a LONG DISTANCE phone call.  Services like TalkAmerica, providing free US Long Distance formed (along with a lot of pyramid schemes).  Soon, the “local long distance” charges disappeared and I was free to talk to my girlfriend from a landline telephone in my parents’ basement.

There’s this word I love: retronym.  It is when an advance in something makes you come up with a new name for the old type of that thing.  Until there was an electric guitar, all were just “guitars”, but the advance made the need for the term “acoustic guitar” to be coined.  The same is true for “landline telephone.”

All was stable through college.  We had one telephone in the house in Kalamazoo.  The phone number was 388-8193.  I used to remember lots of phone numbers.  Anyway, it was a cordless phone that lasted all four years.  When I needed to focus on studying, I could go in the basement of the house and read.  The phone stayed upstairs.  Nobody was too upset when we didn’t connect immediately.

I moved from Michigan to Pennsylvania in 2002.  That year, I got my first cell phone.  It was a good ol’ Nextel Brick.  I was driving for third shift work in a dairy out in what used to be the middle of nowhere, so the added security of a cell phone felt good.  I used it maybe ten times the first year.  The landline was still the way to go.  Though I would use the “direct connect” feature to say hello to my Dad once in awhile.

I have had five cell phones total.  The first two were Bricks.  Then a flip phone.  Those all lasted a long time.  Somewhere in that flip phone era, for me, I migrated away from having a landline.  In that same space, I started noticing a change in people.  Since my phone was not a landline, not a “car phone”, but could be carried on me at all times, it was pretty much expected that it be on me at all times.  Responses taking more than a few hours were an insult.  Then in more than an hour.  Then the expectation with some was the need for instantaneous responses. 

And here is where it was, as I sat with six missed calls on the screen of my smartphone from the same person.  There were also five text messages, but that’s another story.

"Dumbphone" is a retronym, too.