Con Cavity
AI-free fiction from Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths
Con Cavity
We immediately have a communication problem here.
If the title of this story is in English, why doesn’t it say Concavity?
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If the title of this story is in Spanish, why doesn’t it say Con Cavidad,1 meaning “With Cavity?” And if that’s the intended meaning, wouldn’t the English version be that?
I see your point.
To clarify, the cavity in question here is a “cavity resonator” which is a conducting surface enclosing a space in which an oscillating electromagnetic field can be maintained. It is sometimes called a rhumbatron, which has nothing to do with the rhumba.2
You very likely have two rhumbatrons in your klystron if your hobby involves amplifying high frequency radio waves. [I know my readers.] [Okay, not all of you. But some, anyway.]
Take Eliza Dumfree, a techie working for Ma Bell®. She’s a low-power-klystron-user if there ever was one, installing them and repairing them on tall towers for microwave relay. It’s really exacting and somewhat dangerous work. [And we might note that a person in her position is clearly free of acrophobia. She is way up there when she does her thing!]
The danger, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t so much falling, though you wouldn’t get me up a 200 foot tower on a bet, but rather cataracts or testicular damage, which latter ill is pretty obviously not an issue for Liza.3 Tests done in 1953 established that exposure to microwave radiation of 100 milliwatts per centimeter for a period of 0.1 hours (6 minutes for you non-mathematicians) could cause eye damage, so OSHA has set a safety level of no more than 10mW/cm per 360 seconds (also 6 minutes) for those who work in the communications industry.
That’s a safety factor of 10 for you non-mathematicians. Which I think we can agree “sounds pretty safe.”
While all that is fascinating stuff, what we’re here to learn about is the con regarding cavity resonators which took a real bite4 out of Ma Bell’s® bottom (line). It involved the purchase of some 300 GigaMaxAlpha® klystrons, which, as we’ve just learned, would likely contain 600 GigaMaxAlpha® rhumbatrons.
Geoffrey Humboldt heads up the manufacturing division of GMA® and is responsible for moving rhumbatron production to Indonesia, saving the company an enormous amount of money and garnering a sweet bonus for himself. [This, obviously, is one of the worst aspects of late-stage capitalism. All of us are the poorer for it—except, of course, the Humboldts of the world and the investors in the GMAs®.]
But that’s perfectly legal. [Sigh.]
Enter Suan Rajagukguk, known to family and friends as Guk or Gukguk.5 Guk manages the recently converted sneaker factory which builds rhumbatrons for GMA®. He was a heck-of-a shoe sales rep and learned about cost-cutting from one of the best of them: Joe Tambunan. Joe adopted the English nickname to better connect with U.S. sportswear buyers. [Note that “Joe” is definitely not a hypocoristic, since it is a “found” name rather than a contraction or elision. The vaguely possible Indonesian hypocoristic would be “Nan” or “Bunan.”]
Not to put too fine a point on it—under Joe’s management BestTime Shoes® turned out crappy footwear. There’s just no way around it. But the price point was good enough for Walmart®, and everyone commercially involved was making money hand over fist (Toe? Heel?).
Guk applied the lessons learned to his rhumbatron work and used second-rate materials that were assembled by former sweatshop shoemakers. Former shoemakers that is. Still a sweat-shop by anyone’s measure.
The rhumbatrons so assembled were unreliable at best and actually life-threatening, or at least medically mordacious, at worst. Anyone in the near vicinity of a BestTime® rhumbatron when it is fired up is cruising for cataracts or, for guys, infertility.
When tested at the Cleveland GigaMaxAlpha® plant they were quickly found to be substandard, but … and here’s the crux of the matter … Ma Bell® had a hurry-up order in and GMA® was not in a position to default. MegaKlystronB® was hot on their heels, just itching to get a foot in the door6 with Ma Bell®, and if GMA® had failed, the company would very likely have lost its biggest customer to its biggest competitor. So Humboldt gave the go-ahead and also gave the four engineers in the test lab bonuses with the tacit understanding that “mum” was the word of the day. [Job security being the stick upon which the carrot dangled.]
Soon enough 300 GMA® klystrons equipped with 600 BestTime® rhumbatrons were on their way to Ma Bell®. Back in the good ol’ days, as they have come to be known, Bell Labs® would have tested the new equipment, but GMA® had a sterling track record and a lifetime warranty,7 so why waste money on a test that was bound to discover no problems?
Consequently those klystrons were parked on microwave relay towers 50-200 feet in the air, or on rooftops or sides of buildings across much of eastern North America—installed by Liza Dumfree and her fellow Communications Workers of America® union members.
One thing Humboldt didn’t see coming was that one of his engineers, Vern Bustroff, would become a whistle-blower in what we can only observe is the least admirable way possible. He went to MKB® and cut a very lucrative deal. This ought not surprise us, given that he first accepted hush money from GMA®—a clear indication of his moral compass or lack thereof.
However, that double-dealing took time, and then MKB® sat on it for three years, calculating how best to use the information. [Late-stage capitalism, again, at its finest.]
Not before, however, CWA® members had experienced a rash of cataracts and testicular problems. The union demanded an investigation and the faulty rhumbatrons were diagnosed by Bell Labs®. Ma Bell® sued GMA® and ordered replacements from MKB®. GMA® countersued and also charged Bustroff with breach of contract, which had come to light when one of the other three quality control engineers went to Humboldt with the news of Bustroff’s leak.
Given that Liza is the fair-haired protagonist of this morality play, we won’t give her cataracts. Let’s say, hmm, she installed some of the faulty klystrons but wasn’t assigned to repair any of them while they were in operation. [Always taking care of my principal good eggs, I am.]
Now, if you’ve read this far [Thank you!] you are thinking, “Well, okay, but what’s the point of all this? Is there a lesson here? Some pithy nugget that will brighten our lives?”
I’m glad you asked. The lesson is this:
While the cavity-resonator-con looks bad at first glance, it is remarkably good as a leading financial indicator. The cataracts had to be fixed, the testicles done-to whatever is done to a microwaved testicle,8 the new klystrons with their Made in USA rhumbatrons had to be purchased, the old klystrons refitted with new rhumbatrons as time allowed and parts became available, lawyers and judges and even juries had to be paid, and reporters reported for news media that sold advertising and paid their employees, and successful advertisers sold more gizmos and widgets and cheap plastic crap from China. That’s not to mention that some of the CWA® workers died from heavy exposure to unhealthy doses of non-ionizing radiation, which created work for casket makers, crematoria and funeral directors as well as florists.
That all adds to the Gross Domestic Product, you see. It’s the silver lining in every hurricane cloud, in thick forest fire smoke, in any earthquake or pandemic or famine-inducing drought, in every car or plane crash, every train derailment, every 9/11 building collapse, in every death and, for that matter, every birth.
Isn’t GDP fun? It’s the great big gaping hole in Milton Friedman’s economic thinking.
Concavity indeed!
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Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [189] Teeth are never far from mind.
2 [190] Rhumba is the ballroom version of the rumba and I’ll bet you a nickel that some other readers immediately thought a rhumbatron was a dancing robot. But not you. Smart cookie!
3 [191] Which is? C’mon, you remember. A hypo…? [Hypocoristic.]
4 [192] Again, “teeth” comprise the theme of this amalgamation of parables.
5 [193] It’s not clear to me whether the Indonesian practice of using the last syllable of a surname as a nickname actually constitutes a hypocoristic. But it might.
6 [194] “Foot in the door” has a storied history. Among other things, the Rev. Billy Graham bragged (in his autobiography) about using it as a sales technique when he was the top Fuller Brush® door-to-door salesman in the Carolinas. He would literally stick his foot in the door when a housewife answered his knock. “My approach was to say to the housewife, ‘Well, I haven’t come here to sell you anything, I’ve come to give you a brush.’” (The same basic technique he used to create the world’s largest evangelical organization. He also said, “We are selling the greatest product on earth. Why shouldn’t we promote it as effectively as we promote a bar of soap?”)
7 [195] Meaning, as we all know, good for the life of the warranty,—and we’ll see you in court.
8 [196] At this writing it is unclear if Northeast-Indians microwave their bule-bulak oying—see page 76. [In the print version. The story “Snaprats” posted on Substack a dozen weeks ago.] They certainly know one thing to do with testes.
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Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.
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