What with being a writer and artist, it has been essential to take various kinds of alternative employment from time to time.
The reason for this is not financial, of course. As any artist will tell you, the financial rewards one reaps in the creativity arts are humbling in the extreme. No, the reason for keeping a hand in with the rest of the wretched work force is RESEARCH.
Yes, RESEARCH – meaning “to search and search again and again and again”.
What the search is for is never quite clear.
I am reminded of a hydraulics company where I once did some light filing. This place sold pipes and hoses and tubes and ducts and associated paraphernalia for a wide variety of industrial applications – from cooking equipment to aircraft parts, from train engines to chemical weapons manufacturing.
All day long a trio of blue-shirted, neck-tied men sold these various parts to those in need of them. Offers were made, deals were cut, all with a kind of admirable, boisterous devotion to customer service.
The RESEARCH-worthy element of the job – and the one that made me giggle like a ten year old – was the fact that when liquids are conveyed from one place to another, when a tube is inserted into an opening so that fluids may be deposited therein, whether such a thing happens in industry or in nature, certain types of descriptive language begin to emerge.
So as one lightly filed, one would begin to hear – made with dire, blue-shirted, fluorescent lit gravity – the most hilarious turns of phrase.
Absolutely unadulterated, exactly as they came to me:
At A Hydraulics Supply Company
- tube nuts
- screw type coupling probe
- rigid female connector
- 2-way hose ball bib cock
- full bore ball valves
- M/F bleeder
- SS male plug
- flange seal
- GH436-16 hose assy
- straight male stud coupling
… and one of my favorites, but which belongs more to D&D than S&M:
- swage ferrule for spiral hydra