My 40 Foot Friend

I’m at work yesterday. I run a flexo printing press where we mostly run off price and shelf labels for retail businesses. The entire press is about 40 feet long with the turret rewinder attachment. It has seven color and three die stations. The whole set-up costs about three-quarters of a million dollars which is incredible to me that they would give me such an expensive piece of machinery to be responsible for. It’s too cool.

So, I’m running a fairly easy job (Pathmark Smart Coupons, if anyone recognizes it) and I’m a little tired, so I put my foot up to relax it on the side of the control shelf. And I start thinking … I wonder if the press minds that I’ve got my foot resting on it.

No, I figure. It’s been a long haul learning to control the thing, but I’m the master of it now. I keep it oiled and lubed correctly. After seven years I know exactly what pressures and tensions to apply to keep everything running well. I try my best to keep it clean. Yep, I think, this press and me go back a long way together. We work well together. You and me, we know each other idiosyncracies. I’m sure by this time you wouldn’t mind if I took the liberty of just resting my foot here for a bit.

And it suddenly hits me. I’m having a bonding experience with a machine.

…and it doesn’t even run on D-cell batteries :wink:

(yeah, like YOU weren’t thinkin’ it…)

dang - when I saw the title, I thought you were gonna say you bought a yacht. So I’m kinda let down. OTOH, I suppose there are worse things to bond with, tho off the top of my head, I can’t think of any…

Well, I don’t know if it is the same thing, but I talk to my computer at work. And so does my office assistant. Well, to be honest, she swears at hers and then asks me to fix whatever is wrong.

Thing is, when I talk sweet to mine, it works better. Maybe it is just the power of prayer…“Please, PLEASE don’t DO this NOW!”

I run a Gerber Edge vinyl-printing machine. I only give it fond looks, though. Maybe I should be more demonstrative.

Well, I thought this was gonna be a testament to viagra or something. But heck, I bond with my car all the time. I love the thing. I’m don’t actually talk out loud to it, but I’ve always got a warm fuzzy when I’m driving around in it. I like to think it feels the same way about me. :stuck_out_tongue:

Um, are you sure you got that right about who’s the master?

That’s what I said after a long period of self-discovery.

Euty, you are so on target with this. I too have bonded with an inanimate object. My binoculars. And I thought I had lost them today.

~My Story~
I had been struggling along with an ungrateful pair of unworthy binoculars for several years. They got me through my dissertation on magpies. but just barely. They felt awkward in my hands, clarity of image was questionable, a close focus was not part of its repertoire, and the color was ghastly.

When I landed a post-doc job, I finally had enough dough to buy some real binoculars. I walked into a camera/optics shop and tried several. Then I picked up the Pentax. 8x40. Wonderful balance. Close focus and a true to color image. And a mere $180, a pittance in terms of binoculars. Sure, the Leicas and the Zeisses beckoned, but I knew better. Despite the delicate flower that I am, I play rough with binoculars. I am, after all, an ornithologist that drags mist nets, rebar, and heavy mallets into the field. So I bought the Pentax.

That was about 8 years ago. Since then, they have been dutifully at my side or near my vicinity. They did go back to the shop when I poked an ocular out with a mist net pole and when I dropped them at Belmont after seeing a horse go down, but other than that, I always knew where they were.

Or so I thought, until today. I thought I had lost them when I had decided to go birding and couldn’t find them. I felt lost and unsettled. I had no direction. My tummy hurt. I was upset enough to start a thread, Lost Bin Items, something I rarely do.

And then I received The Email. My friend said he had them in Cape May. Bless this man for having a particular talent of finding my misplaced items. I feel whole. All is right with the world.

Dude, you run a Gerber? Those things are sweet!You definitely need to show it some TLC. Give it a pet name (Gerber-Baby being the obvious choice).

I operate an OCR letter sorting machine. But I don’t bond with it. As a postal worker, I’m way too screwed up to bond with ANYTHING ( ‘cept this here ol’ 12 gauge of course).

:smiley:

Well, actually I find that if I neglect it a bit like I do my men, then it tries a little bit harder!

I bonded with a beret that I got at a vintage store. It’s black, made of wool, old.

I like to imagine that it belonged to some late 60’s paramilitary anti-establishment soldier, and that it has seen protests in the streets and gone up against police lines. This thing has been in basements for secret meetings of subversives, it’s been on the head of a revolutionary as he trips on great acid. As far as I know this is all true. That’s enough for me.

A couple of days ago I lost my beret, but I put out a cash reward for it at school, and it was brought back, and the reward was refused :). Hooray!

MarxBoy

I have totally bonded with my car. We understand each other, man. Kitt’s one of my best friends. I understand his idiosyncracies, like the way his gas gauge is horribly wrong and the fact that his headlights need to be manually adjusted once in a while if I want to see with the low beams on, and he understands mine, like the way I like to coast all the way from the turn-off from the main road into my driveway and how I avoid using the brake as much as possible. I know the sound of his motor and exactly how much pressure to apply to the gas pedal to get him to go how I want him. I understand the little vibration he gets between 65 and 70 mph and how it goes away when we hit 73. He accomodates my occasional peel-outs from the school parking lot and goes hell-for-leather with me when the stoplights turn green.

Holy shit, I think I have a closer relationship with my car than my boyfriend. Gunslinger? Can we talk?