Life in the USA 2003-2004

From 2000 to 2004 I lived in the USA, specifically in San Francisco. Since there was no Facebook, I wrote down the stories that seemed interesting to me back then and emailed them around to family and friends.

These days I see some things differently, but I've left it here in its original uncensored form 🤷♂️

The aftermath of 9/11/2001

From the very first moment I saw the New York twin towers coming down, I kept wondering what could have stirred up such hatred towards the USA. Especially when they then showed how in Afghanistan they were wildly celebrating 20,000 dead (the estimate at the time) in New York as some kind of awesome victory over the hated enemy.
I tried to work out from the news what the USA had ever done to Afghanistan and why. I mean, there's no oil there, nothing that could interest the Americans!
American news and media in general have always been nothing but propaganda about how Americans are the best, the strongest, the most beautiful and the smartest, especially the black half of Americans. (in reality they're about 15%, but from TV you'd get the feeling they're the majority). So nobody said a peep about what caused the hatred of the USA. We're the best after all and everybody has to love us, right.
In his speeches Bush just kept repeating something about how the terrorists envy them their democracy and that's supposedly why they did it. That's obviously nonsense, envying democracy doesn't make people fly planes into skyscrapers, there's got to be something else behind it. And sure enough. One time on the boat me, Jeff and Joe were talking about oil and Joe let slip that they'd recently found oil reserves in Turkmenistan bigger than Saudi Arabia's, that there's about as much as the world needs for the next 100 years. Only it needs to be somehow brought down to the sea by pipeline. So I look at the map hanging there on the wall.
There are obviously only two routes down to the sea. Through Iraq, which is politically completely impossible, and then through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What exactly the Americans were doing in Afghanistan and what pissed off the locals so much, I don't know, and I reckon I'll never find out. What's certain is that they have a damn big interest in that country, because America lives and dies on a supply of cheap oil.
Jeff immediately started spinning a theory he'd read somewhere, that the CIA knew perfectly well something was coming and that they even called off surveillance on several of those terrorist hijackers. They let them do it, because they needed an internationally acceptable argument and reason to attack Afghanistan. Originally they supposedly wanted to gain control of Afghanistan by funding the Taliban, but that got out of hand. That theory already sounds a bit far-fetched to me…
Ever since the Americans have had military control of Afghanistan (and I have no idea how much that confirms my theory) the price of petrol has dropped to its lowest in at least the last ten years. A gallon of petrol costs 85 cents at the pump in Los Angeles (7.86 CZK a litre!), whereas the cheapest petrol we filled up with in 1994 on our trip across the USA with Martin cost over a dollar. In San Francisco a gallon cost as much as $2.20 in some places in the summer (21 CZK a litre).
Lately I've been listening a lot to NPR, which is an independent news radio station, and one time there was a discussion with three journalists who had all just come back from Afghanistan independently of each other. One listener called in and asked exactly my question. Why is nobody talking about what caused such hatred of the Afghans towards the USA?
It set off a pretty heated debate among those journalists.
One claimed: „That's not true, for instance just last Friday we had a half-hour programme about it on station XY“. (Straight away another listener called in saying he'd seen that programme and apart from beating around the bush from a mile off nobody said anything of substance.)
The second journalist said, and this shocked me quite a bit: „You know, I've been covering this topic since '95. And I always tried to address the cause of the situation in my articles too. Except whenever an editor cut a paragraph from my article, it was always the one dealing with the causes of the hatred.
The third one just pointed out that before September 11 it was practically impossible to sell any article or report from abroad, because the American public was only interested in baseball scores and the president's latest scandals. They only vaguely suspected that anything existed outside the borders of the USA.
Well, so again they said nothing, except that they admitted to harsh censorship. About which I have two more stories.
One was an interview with an editor from a TV news station that I saw. He said they'd received official advice from the CIA leadership not to publish certain kinds of news in the interest of national security. They then asked him how often they get such „advice“ and how closely they follow it. He answered that in situations like this one it's common and that of course they follow the advice carefully in the interest of national security...
And the last „proof“ of censorship was when I saw a report by a British journalist who got into Afghanistan with a camera, because her father was Afghan, and filmed a lot of what the Taliban were doing with a camera hidden under her robe. First I saw it on CNN and it was pretty interesting. But then I came across that same report at
http://www.tv-nova.cz/tvarchiv...
where the report, as part of the programme Na vlastní oči, was twice as long and, for instance, there was a shot filmed from a football stadium built with UN money. The Taliban use it as an execution ground. On a Sunday morning they herd a few thousand people in there, then they bring out, say, a couple of women accused by someone of adultery or of going to school, and in the middle of that football pitch, at the edge of the penalty box, a soldier walks up behind the blindfolded women and shoots their heads off with a rifle. Unfortunately it was shown in detail in that report, which my eye did not enjoy one bit.
Apart from this bloody scene, whose cutting is understandable, plenty of non-bloody scenes were missing too, ones that somehow didn't suit for other reasons...

To get back to those three journalists and drop my anti-state theory. One of those journalists told how he witnessed a revolt in a prison in Afghanistan, where several thousand imprisoned Taliban supporters rose up. When they were locking these Taliban soldiers into that medieval prison-fortress, nobody searched them at all. So after a few days one of them pulled a grenade out of his robe and killed two guards. It still didn't occur to them to search them. So two days later they managed to kill about seven more guards with another grenade, plus one UN envoy. The prisoners took the weapons off the bodies and shot their way through to the ammunition depot. Some of them had controlled that fortress back in the Taliban days, so they knew what was what.
They managed to hold that fortress for maybe a week and the Northern Alliance didn't have enough strength to beat them.
That journalist told how he and a bunch of other foreign journalists camped right in front of the entrance to the fortress and watched events unfold. Then around noon a beat-up rusty old local taxi-van rolled up and about ten members of American special forces jumped out of it in balaclavas, armed to the teeth. First of all they brutally chased all the journalists far away from the fortress, then they blew the gate with a grenade and stormed inside. Not so much to shoot all those several thousand rebels, but rather to direct an aerial bombing raid with special laser pointers. One cameraman went in with them too.
They'd point that pointer somewhere and whooosh---bang, a chunk of the fortress was gone. Then they pointed the pointer somewhere again and whooosh-bang, the bomb fell right among them and killed two soldiers plus that cameraman and wounded others....
The following night, because the rebels still wouldn't surrender, the Americans bombed the fortress like crazy, the journalist said that even though they were several miles away in a hotel they still couldn't sleep, maybe 20 giant bombs into the fortress in one night. (if they're the bombs I've heard about, one costs a bit over a million dollars...). In the morning when he went to look at the fortress, it was obvious to him that nobody could have survived it. As soon as he got to the fortress, he heard the faint rattle of a submachine gun coming from the rubble... They just never give up...

Fast Food Nation 

This story comes from the book Fast Food Nation (the Hamburger Nation), which uncovers what goes on behind the scenes at greasy spoons like McDonald's and similar dumps. I haven't read it, I'm just picking out what Haydn retold me.
• McDonald's fries aren't made from potatoes. Somebody worked out that it's cheaper to grind up and dry the potatoes centrally and then send out to all the McDonald's just frozen cubes of that stuff. That way you avoid the potatoes going off and on top of that the cubes take up less space. So what they pass off as fries are actually fries made from powder.
• For a while McDonald's advertised that their fries are fried exclusively in vegetable oil and a group of Hindus sued them for it, because they found out the following: In every city there's a central fry pre-frying plant, which is where those frozen cubes of ground dried potato arrive. There they have a huge vat of beef tallow, into which that stuff is pushed through a sieve and out come fries about 20 cm long, perfectly straight and all identical. That then gets delivered to the local McDonald's and there they break it into smaller pieces and „reheat“ it in that vegetable oil. That's also why at McDonald's you can get a fry easily ten centimetres long. And it really pissed off those Hindus, because their religion forbids them to touch anything that has anything to do with the cow, their sacred animal.
• To cover the all-American consumption of hamburgers at McDonald's alone (there are dozens of companies like McDonald's here, e.g. Burger King etc., with the same disgusting menu) 200,000 cows have to be killed a day. It all happens in one place and because it's such a colossus, not everything there is completely perfect. They drive the cows through a kind of fence, which keeps narrowing until there's only room for single file. At the end stands a Mexican with a stick, which he uses to give every cow an electric shock that's supposed to kill it. He's got about two seconds per cow, so now and then he misses one. Right behind him a hook hauls the cow up to the ceiling by the throat and within a few seconds a machine strips off its hide and cuts the skinless body in half. Probably not much fun, while alive.
• The leftovers from those cows, like the innards that don't happen to get used in the hamburgers, and the cows that died of natural causes, get taken to the next building, where they turn it into dog food.
• The heads and bones get ground into meal and then it's used in pellets as feed, and this is especially disgusting, for cows on that same farm. Pure managed cannibalism.
And so on and so forth, all of it delightful. It doesn't faze the Hamburger Nation anyway and they keep stuffing themselves in there like nothing's happening. And nothing is happening, at least not here. But as I've written before, in dumps like McDonald's here only the lowlifes and the poor eat. And McDonald's ad campaign here isn't built on slogans like „A slightly different restaurant“, which is how they try to convince us back in Bohemia what a luxury place it is, but more on how the hamburger has now been marked down to just 99 cents...

The AOL joke

AOL is the biggest Internet provider in the USA and Internet access is only possible through their special browser, which shoves one ad after another at the user. That browser is total rubbish, but once you get used to it, it's hard to get used to Explorer afterwards. Before they hired me, everybody was using AOL and I had to use all my influence to break them of the habit. I'm now known as a notorious AOL hater. And just to make things harder for me, AOL dug up my name somewhere and every week they send me CDs with several free hours on AOL. Sometimes a whole box arrives with fifty of those CDs in it! I could of course throw it out, but I keep it for laughs. 

There's one guy in management who refuses to switch to company email and keeps using his AOL account even for company purposes. A real AOL lover. So for Christmas I packed all those AOL CDs into a box, there must have been over 100 of them, and sent it to his home with a dedication to put under the tree :-)

Yamaha 1100CC

Sometime around March I bought an oldish motorbike at an auction, a Yamaha with an 1100CC engine, which is almost as big an engine as a Favorit has. Except with about three times the power. I bought it at the auction without having a clue what it even was, just because nobody else wanted it, so it was dirt cheap. Which reminds me how one guy we know, who lives in a microscopic flat in a tower block with his wife and two daughters, once bought a purebred St. Bernard puppy, just because it was dirt cheap :).
I took it out a few times and then it stopped running. I wasn't able to fix it, so after about three months of hesitating I hauled it to a repair shop. That was in July. Around the middle of August, after replacing every imaginable part, they finally fixed it. So I picked it up, paid more for the repair than the bike originally cost, filled up the tank and went for a ride. I'm on my way back, it's about ten in the evening, and in the worst neighbourhood far and wide, where Alex got held up at gunpoint not long ago, the bike suddenly died. And when a four-cylinder like that dies at fifty, it's about like somebody sticking an iron bar in your back wheel. It just skids to a stop right there. Anyway, I kept it upright and after fifteen minutes of trying I got it started again. I made it about 150 metres. Then I had to walk about 4 km home. Luckily nobody mugged me, in that leather jacket, which is heavier than I am, I probably look dangerous enough :).
I called that repair shop the next day telling them to kindly go pick it up at such and such a place and fix it. About another month and a half later they called that it was done. This time they threw in loads of parts for free and instead of some ten hours of labour they only charged me for one.
I gave it a proper run again and it purred like a Japanese motorbike should.
Then the weather was foul for ages, so I just had it parked on the pavement in front of the house. One Sunday it was gorgeous, so I laboriously put on the jacket, helmet, gloves, proper boots and off I go for a ride. It wouldn't start at all...

Videoconferencing

Since we've got hospitals scattered all over California and flying is a real pain these days, the corporation's owners wanted me to figure out how this videoconferencing thing works, i.e. a conference where everybody has the mug of whoever's talking on their screen and a camera on their computer, in case they want to say something too. And they're each sitting on the other side of the continent or the globe.
I told them straight away that it's no big deal, that I do it with my folks all the time, you just plug in a camera for a few bucks and a mic and that's it. Well, it turned out it's not quite that simple. This solution works, but it's only good for two people who have a lot of patience, who are fine with a jumpy, echoing voice and a blurry picture the size of a matchbox. Which obviously isn't enough for them. They want me to set up a system capable of hooking up as many as ten locations at once, with picture quality good enough to project on a wall and sound better than a phone call. About that I knew absolutely zip, so the research phase began. I flew to a three-day conference on videoconferencing in Anaheim (the conference was across the street from Disneyland) and picked everybody's brains there. Here's what I came up with:
A camera costs about $7,000 (250,000 CZK). We need ten of those. Then you need a video server to tie it all together. $15,000 (550,000 CZK). And then you need super fast Internet, at least for the place where the server will be. That's about $900 (32,000 CZK) a month.
I was expecting them to lose interest, but it seems it's still being seriously considered. By law our doctors and nurses have to spend loads of time in training, and that could be done remotely to save on flying. On Thursday I'm supposed to present possible solutions at the management meeting.

Slippers

This is one of those cryptic notes I jotted down as a topic for a terribly interesting and witty story and then never remembered what it was supposed to be about...
_That feeling again after 10 years... Unless it was the time when at two in the morning, after a long drive from LA, I pulled into a small car park for a pee and when getting back in I took off my slippers as usual, because I like driving barefoot best. And then after another 100 km I found out I'd kicked one of the slippers out of the car..._

Life in Alaska

The other day I got talking with the principal of one of our schools (there's always a school attached to the hospital for the inmates). At twenty he moved from Chicago to Alaska and lived there in various places for over twenty years. For instance, he spent a few years in an Eskimo tribe way up in the north of Alaska, where the sea is ice-free for only one month a year, so the supply ship only comes once a year. The idea of shopping a year ahead, knowing that if you forget something you're without it for a year, struck me as pretty funny. In winter there's light there, well, more like dark twilight, from eleven in the morning to half past one in the afternoon. The rest of the day it's pitch black. 

Once he set out on a trip with the Eskimos, they told him they were going to visit relatives. They took nothing but matches and tea with them. So he goes along. They rode three weeks on dog sleds and ate only the seals and fish they caught, they went across the frozen sea and after three weeks they were at the relatives'. In Russia. They simply crossed the frozen sea from Alaska to Russia. And then somebody's going to tell me Columbus discovered America.
I asked him how much the Eskimos have been influenced by Western civilization and what they think of us. He sort of smiled, almost indulgently, and said that the Eskimos acknowledge that Western civilization brought two amazing inventions. Matches and the needle. The rest is nonsense. Their life hasn't practically changed in the last few hundred years.
In winter, when it's minus 50 outside and dark 21 hours a day, you need plenty to read and then some long, demanding project to work on so you don't go mad. For example, he said that over one winter, besides several hundred books, he took a diesel electric generator apart down to the last screw and put it back together, without having any previous experience or knowledge of that kind.
Then he lived a few years on the southwest coast of Alaska, which is probably and surprisingly the richest place on the planet. It supplies all the fish for the whole of America and part of Europe, and the people who own the big fishing boats can make 1.5–2 million dollars net in a season there. It is, however, one of the worst jobs imaginable.
A soaking for a quarter
This is a fairly typical example of the American character. In the amusement park I've already mentioned here there's a place where you can look down from a little bridge at the boats going by before the weir. Right above those boats there's a machine where you drop in some coins, aim a cannon into the air and out of it shoots a jet of cold water which then hits the passing boat. It's about three buckets' worth of water. The people on that bridge were having a blast. When we came by later, Káča outsmarted them royally and got applause from the audience for it. Just before that bridge she pulled an umbrella out of her backpack :).

Shells on the floor in a restaurant

It's pretty hard in an unfamiliar place to find a pub where they'd have food you'd actually enjoy. Once in a while you can stomach an experiment where you pick something at random and then risk that it'll most likely be slop. But when I'm on a business trip, it's a right pain when it happens three days in a row.
I started solving it by going shopping at the supermarket for goodies like apples, nuts, tinned peaches, sausages and so on, and then charging it as lunch.
Still in my experimental days I once walked into a place called Steakhouse, I sit down at a table and the first thing they brought me without asking was a menu and a bowl of unshelled peanuts. So I'm thinking, good start, and dug right in. But what am I supposed to do with the shells? I remembered how my grandma once advised me, "If you don't know which fork to use for what, look around and see what everyone else is doing." So I look around and suddenly I notice the whole floor is covered in those shells! I'd walked in over a crunching floor and it hadn't even registered. Otherwise the place looked pretty fancy and the food cost about $20, so no dive, but the shells got thrown on the floor :). It reminded me of the Celtic pub in Kašperské Hory.

Armenia

Once on a business trip I took a taxi from the airport, which is always a bit of a drag, because the cabbies are mostly Arabs or other foreigners who speak practically no English and don't know their way around the city at all. This time it was a fairly civilized-looking white guy, so I got talking with him through that cage they have in there. He was from Armenia and came to America because he won a green card in the lottery. That's no joke, it's a lottery run by the American government where every year they put about 20,000 green cards in the drum and draw lots among the applicants for who wins them. I've already seen or heard of about five people who won it. I guess I didn't win, because it would have come in the post sometime in September. Besides, I haven't needed it for ages, because if I happened to want to stay here, the work visa I have automatically converts to a green card after two years. But what happiness would I be looking for here, I've pretty much had it up to here as it is. Jeff once told me that at a certain point money practically loses its value compared to other values. Back then I thought it was rubbish.
Well, I've strayed from the Armenian cabbie. Naturally he got hopelessly lost, so we had time for a chat. He told me that about ten years ago Armenia had over 4 million people. Then their economy collapsed and the mafia took over. Today Armenia has 1.5 million people... Everybody else emigrated all over the world, most of all to the neighbouring Soviet republics and the USA. 

Report on the state of the waters at American airports
As is my habit, I hereby submit another progress report on the situation at airports. In short, since the rules were tightened after September 11, it's a total pain. I try to fly as little as possible now, because it's an insane waste of time. Last time I waited in the queue for the X-ray for over an hour, then another queue for the boarding pass, then one more search of everything right before boarding the plane... On top of that it was early in the morning, so with no breakfast, after an hour of waiting at the X-ray I was pretty cranky. Since September 11 all those frames you walk through are set to high sensitivity, so whereas before not even a pocketknife in your pocket would beep (which I can't carry at all any more), now even a stupid belt buckle set it off. Which means being pulled aside by a soldier with a heavy-duty rifle and being searched in detail with a handheld scanner, so more delay. On top of that you have to take the laptop out of the bag and let it ride along the belt, where at the end it rolls down the rollers and slams into a metal rim. And the whole time they're searching me off to the side, it's sitting there unattended.
On the way back I wanted to avoid that, so I even took off that stupid belt and sent it through on the belt. Of course it beeped again. By then I was seriously cranky, but I know security have it tough enough as it is, so I didn't say anything. I figured it must have been the button on my trousers, which can't be taken off, so I'll just have to live with it every time. Later somebody told me it could be my glasses. So I'll test that on Thursday.

Chatterbox Michelle

Jeff's second-to-last girlfriend Michelle (according to the latest news maybe third-to-last) talked like crazy. When we drove to Zion for Thanksgiving last year to see Jeff's sister, she opened her mouth on the Bay Bridge at nine in the evening and closed it at 9 in the morning when we got there.. Which was good, because Jeff drove the whole way and at least he didn't fall asleep.
The other day Jeff was telling us how she once called him during work hours and again went on about something for twenty minutes. I saw it once myself and it looked like this: Jeff managed to say Hi at the beginning of the call and then not a single word for 20 minutes. So she's telling him something like that again and somebody came into his cabin needing something. That was 13:50. So Jeff carefully put the receiver down on the desk and ran off to the next cabin for something. There somebody else grabbed him needing something, then the work phone rang, in short Jeff forgot about her. He remembered at 14:15. So he runs back, picks up the receiver from the desk and says, just to test whether Michelle might still be there: "Hello?" From the other side came an angry: "You could skip that, cutting me off, I'm not finished yet!" She hadn't noticed at all that she'd been talking for 25 minutes to a piece of plexiglass on a desk.... 

President x prime minister
The other day a colleague asked me if I knew our president was in San Francisco. I was pretty surprised, because it was about two days after Havel had been admitted to the Military Hospital with the flu, which I'd seen on the news on ČT1.
The next day the colleague brought me a newspaper clipping with a photo of Zeman in an old city trolleybus. Zeman didn't disappoint. Head tilted to the side, the smile of a dim-witted child, drool in the corner of his mouth and a crumpled jacket two sizes too big buttoned into the wrong buttonhole. He'd come to seal the deal where San Francisco bought two hundred Czech trolleybuses. So I tell the colleague, this isn't our president, this is just the prime minister! His answer stopped me short, because he asked me what the difference was. All I told him was that one is stupid and the other isn't. 

The car with the tyre that came off
So I'm driving along the freeway and suddenly I see something's going on up ahead, because all the cars are slowing down terribly. Then I see a furiously spinning and bouncing tyre running across the freeway. So I'm looking for the car it came off and I see nothing on the shoulder. In a while I see more pieces flying around, like half a bumper and plastic covers. That was already interesting, because the damaged car was nowhere to be seen. So I sped up and after a while I caught up with it. It was a Honda Civic that someone was completely recklessly flooring at 90kmh on the bare rim, with bits flying off. It disappeared at the first exit. I figure it was a stolen car and the thief needed to get off the freeway, where it's most likely he'd get caught next to the wreck.
A few days ago I heard a statistic on the radio saying the Honda Civic and Honda Accord are among the three most stolen cars in the USA. 

Saint Francis
Saint Francis, which never occurred to me, is the translation of the words San Francisco from Spanish. Or maybe Saint Frances, I don't know. Anyway, now I live in Saint Francis, which I find funny:).

San Francisco on landfill

Steve is Jeff's buddy who owns an auto shop a stone's throw from the ship, where we all take our cars when we need something. Steve looks like a well-preserved sixty-year-old, he's still working there on his own, changing tyres and he basically runs around the shop. The other day something slipped out of him that made me doubt whether I understand English. He said he's 86, in words eighty-six years old!
He told me that when he came back from the Second World War!, he opened this shop, which he still has today. The shop is about 3km from the sea as the crow flies. He said that in the beginning, when he changed tyres on cars, he'd just kick the old ones across the road and they'd fall into the sea there. So I say, hang on, what do you mean the sea, the sea is 3km away. He explained to me that those three kilometres are just fill they trucked in to create building plots. A little way behind the shop there used to be a decent hill, which they simply took apart and filled in the sea with the dirt. So his shop just moved inland:).
In '89, when the big earthquake hit here, all the houses built on this fill practically went down, because they're built precisely on this unstable ground. They're standing again now.

The shared fridge

This story is short but telling. When we were getting the party ready for Káča's farewell, we were looking for some salad dressing. Káča pulled one out of the corner of the fridge and sniffed it to see if it was still good. Then she gave it to me to sniff, so I'm looking at it, looking for the production date and I actually found it! January 1992!!!! We decided to keep it a bit longer, because in January it'll have its tenth anniversary:).

The flushed wallet

So I'm leaving the office for lunch and I only took my wallet with me. Anyone who knows my wallet knows that I don't just slip it into a pocket, it's the size of a smaller edition of Otto's Encyclopedia. Not because I carry insane amounts of money in it, more because I've got all kinds of cards and IDs and business cards in it that I've been hoarding since high school. Well, and on the way to lunch I ran into a toilet and somehow I discovered that I actually needed to stop by. So I go in, sit down and now I'm thinking, what to do with the wallet, I'm not going to just sit here holding it! And I'm not going to put it on the floor either! The only place that made sense was to put it on my trousers around my ankles.* Of course I forgot about it and when the deed was done, I stand up and suddenly I hear: "Plop!". I think, damn, I thought all the plops had been taken care of for today. So I turn around and there among all THAT I see my wallet floating! I cursed like a hangman and then three more times. It just flashed through my head that it's interesting that the first curse was surprisingly in English (probably so my fellow shitters would understand:)) and the other two nicely the way my beak grew shut, I mean grew in. That's because that rrrrrrrr helps a man get relief. Well, but now what to do about it! I carry my whole paper life in that wallet! Passport, ID card, three driving licences, vaccination record, credit cards, insurance, soc. security card, basically everything! But damn it, I'm not just going to reach into that! I came up with the following tactic. The hole in an American toilet is about a third the size of the hole in a European one. So that everything can be crammed into it, when you flush a special vortex forms that lines everything up nicely, meaning you can even flush a polystyrene ball. So if I leave the wallet in there, the vortex will nicely separate the wheat from the chaff and will even clean the wallet for me. Obviously the whole wallet can't get through. No sooner thought than done. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me that while the wallet resists the vortex, the vortex pulls everything out of the wallet that isn't riveted down... So the vortex pulled out the money, the credit cards, the American driving licence, etc etc.... After that I only cursed in Czech...

This story is total fiction, and that from * onwards...

A work one – The qualifications of our suppliers...

One of our biggest hospitals is now switching over to a new system for electronic payroll processing, called ADP. The whole system is pretty complicated, I'll sketch it out a bit. Two palm scanners are mounted right there in the hospital corridor. The program that collects the data from the scanners sits on a server in the hospital. The program that processes the scanner data and prepares it for the payroll software is on several computers all around the hospital. The central Oracle database that does the final payroll processing is, however, on the server at my place at corporate headquarters, so we've got it all centralised. The whole thing cost just under $10,000 (360,000 Kč) and the price included installation and setup.
The only thing I had to take care of was adding some drives and memory to our main server. Piece of cake.
I ordered the memory, the drives and a special hardware key to unlock RAID5 in the server. That was around 5 November. They were supposed to come and install it on 20 November, so loads of time. Even so I had it sent by post "Overnight" so I'd have it ready in time. Well, the first parcel arrived on 11 November, the drives were in it. The next one came around 13 November, the memory was in that one. I knew it would come in two parcels, except the key was still missing, and without it the whole thing is useless! I waited another two days, then I rang Dell to ask where the damn key was! I spoke directly to the bloke I'd dictated the order to. He admitted he'd forgotten to add the key. Idiot. Never mind, I've still got a week, right. So he'd send it straight away. They didn't send it until Thursday, never mind, it'll come on Friday, plenty of time until Tuesday. On Friday nothing arrived, so I call Airborne Express (that's the courier service that was supposed to deliver it) to ask where it's stuck. And they tell me Dell didn't send it "Overnight" but "Second business day". Well, that's lovely. Now it's starting to get hot, so it's supposed to arrive on Monday and on Tuesday the installation people are here. In the meantime I'd read up that adding those drives to the server isn't that simple, I'd have to reinstall the whole server, which is a good 6–8 hours of fun on the edge of a cliff, because if something goes t*ts up, the accounting data for the whole corporation is on there...
Never mind, I'll stay here overnight from Monday to Tuesday and somehow it'll work out. On Monday I come to work, no parcel anywhere. At noon still nothing. So I call Airborne again to ask where it is. "Well, we're terribly sorry, the parcel will be 24 hours late." All the built-up stress let loose and the poor girl copped it.
"I don't give a s... about your reasons for the delay, tomorrow a gang of experts is coming to install a database, it's been scheduled a month in advance and if it isn't here today, not only is it going to cost me $1,500 to rebook the installation, but the whole project gets delayed and 150 people won't get their first January paycheque, so you'd better find that damn parcel right now and deliver it TODAY!!!"
"Well, I'm terribly sorry, the parcel will be delivered tomorrow morning and if you wish, we can refund the $9 postage..."
I took a few deep breaths, then said goodbye fairly decently with the words that that was the last time I'd ever use their services.
I cancelled the installation and asked them to try and move it to the earliest possible date so we'd still make January.
On Tuesday they were also supposed to deliver and install the hand scanners, which more or less replace punch clocks, except that Franta can't clock Pepa in when Pepa left a few hours early to catch the football, right. Given that about 50% of the staff at this hospital are African-Americans (that's what black people are officially called here, just like back home Gypsies are called Roma), this was exactly the big problem and that's why the whole system is being bought. As late as Friday I was talking to someone from ADP, because they'd sent me a list of requirements, everything I was supposed to have ready for them, and among other things it said I was supposed to have a phone line for these scanners. That surprised me, because we'd specifically ordered scanners that don't connect to the server over a phone line but over the local computer network. A classic case of the left hand not having a clue what the right one is doing, because the people who were supposed to come and install it had the phone-line version ready for us. So they quickly changed that too.
In the afternoon I call the hospital to see how it went. Well, apparently they only installed one, they didn't manage the second one, so tomorrow. It seemed odd to me, it was supposed to be four screws into the wall, connect two wires and done. Never mind.
The next day at noon they call from this hospital again saying it's installed now, but it somehow doesn't work and that it's probably the network connection. I prepared that network connection there with my own hands and tested it ten times! Never mind, I get in the car and race over there. I arrive and there's an unhappy Mexican standing by the scanners and it really doesn't work. What's more, even though they'd sent us a paper template showing exactly where the power and network sockets should be so they'd be hidden right behind the scanner, he'd screwed it half a metre to the side.
So I look at the scanner and I see a telephone wire coming out of it, plugged into the network socket! So I say to him, "Don't tell me you ended up bringing the phone-line scanners!"
He looks into some papers, "No no, this is the network model."
"Then why have you got it connected with a phone cable?"
"The maintenance guys gave me that here, I didn't get any cables with it."
"So you brought us two scanners, $1,200 (43,000 Kč) each, and you haven't got a one-dollar cable to go with them, yeah? And on top of that you use a completely different cable from the one that belongs there and you're surprised it doesn't work. That's like plumbing gas with water pipes. It looks a bit similar, doesn't it? Except a phone cable has two wires and a network one has eight!"
Never mind, I was glad it wasn't my connection, so I gave him two cables from my stock. He even complained they were too long. So I gave him a rubber band to coil them up.
A little while later I come back to test it. One scanner works, the other doesn't. Odd. So I made him open the cover so I could see how he had it wired. When the moron was screwing it back on, he drove the screw straight through the cable I'd given him...
I went back to the office and in the evening started reinstalling the server onto the new drives. Surprisingly it went fairly smoothly, at two in the morning I was done and headed home. I got a paid day off for it later.
Then it went quiet for a while, the next free slot for installing the main database wasn't until 10 December. So we agreed that I'd install it myself with possible help from the experts over the phone. Nobody got in touch, they didn't send the CDs.
On 10 December my phone rings in the morning asking where the hell I am. Well, I didn't tell them I was still in bed. Apparently there's some bloke there who wants to install something and he's looking for me. So I explained to the bloke that he was at the wrong address, that the installation was supposed to be in Oakland and not in San Leandro.
Then we both got in our cars and raced off to Bungletown. He got there first, all wound up, and went straight at our finance director asking where the hell I was. That annoyed him and he got a lesson:
a) When I go somewhere, I find out where it is so I don't drive to the wrong address
b) When I'm supposed to meet someone there, I call that person first so they know about it and can be there
When John (the finance director and also my mate) told me about it afterwards, we had a good laugh at how the "installer" shut up and crawled into a corner :).
A little while later I arrived and the rodeo began. I go to the back with the "installer" into the server room and I can't believe my eyes. Right behind the servers there's a huge hole hacked into the wall, just big enough for a person to crawl through. Someone had broken in overnight with a pickaxe... The servers covered in rubble, pulled away from the wall, cables ripped out of the wall clips, a disaster. I suppressed the urge to fake a faint and jumped to the monitor to check whether it had by any chance survived after all. It had. The servers were working, all that had gone missing from the offices was one laptop. Phew. We'd waited too long for this installation to be put off by a bit of rubble. Let's get to it.
At first I thought the "installer" would be one of those super smart, educated black guys, but... The man was supposed to be an expert, but his only knowledge was a little pile of about ten pages of printed "step by step" instructions that even a monkey could have followed. As long as everything goes according to plan. Except then the lad mustn't confuse a server with a client computer, a network drive with a local drive, he mustn't bring instructions for Windows NT instead of Windows 2000 and generally he'd have to understand computers at least a bit better than a fifty-year-old secretary at the Ministry of Transport...
When he arrived I was a bit nervous that a hotshot like that might figure out that me, being an economist and a wheeler-dealer, don't really understand computers all that much, but in the end it was unfortunately him who was the schoolboy there. After a whole day of suffering we somehow got it going and the moment it showed the first signs of life, he packed up his gear and legged it.
The next phase of suffering came a few days later, when the hospital called saying their modem somehow doesn't work and that the ADP people want me to come over and sort it out with them on the phone. So I drive over there, the modem was in that particular computer and it worked, only the ADP software couldn't find it. So we ponder, we try things, still nothing. In the end they made me take the modem out and go buy a new one (an hour in the car in traffic). So I install a new one there, we test it again, nothing. So in the end they transferred me to some team of experts, where I finally talked to someone who actually knows the stuff, and out of him came the fact that the modem isn't supposed to be in the user's computer but in the server.... After four hours of agony...
Another week of agony I spent dealing with the fact that the modem did download the right files, but they couldn't be used in any way. I had about five different people on the phone one after another, until I worked my way up to one lady who really did understand it. From then on we sorted it out together, though in vain.
Given that this system is going live in January come what may, any delay to the project is critical and could really mean 150 people not getting their January pay. It was looking like in the end I wouldn't even be able to go anywhere for Christmas.
As a last chance, without any support from ADP, I tried reinstalling the whole system that the black guy had installed. Surprisingly, that solved it at five minutes to midnight...
The latest news is that the payroll system is now working, but it doesn't communicate with the hand scanners....
Well, every now and then I think to myself that maybe I even deserve the money they pay me for this job....

Potato pancake

Since somebody in the flat is cooking for everyone every other minute, sooner or later it was my turn too. I checked with my mum that I remembered all the ingredients for potato pancakes and got down to it. Everything went smooth as butter, I maybe just went a bit overboard with the salt. I was dying to see how the locals would react to Czech pub grub and I expected polite applause rather than genuine enthusiasm. Surprisingly the enthusiasm came in its purest form, which was proven by the fact that only one was left for me. Before I could turn around it was all gone. Only Alex annoyed me, because I was thinking that finally here's a dish even crazy vegetarians can eat, and she took a look at it and says:
„Are there eggs in it?“.
Of course, how else would it hold together, right? I remember all too well our experiment with Pápa, when we left the eggs out and it fell apart like clouds in summer.
„Well then I can't eat it, if there are eggs in it“. See, she's not a crazy vegetarian, she's an even crazier vegan, and those can't have eggs, milk, cheese, yoghurts and so on. At that point I really don't know what she actually eats. Probably just soy and grass of all kinds.
For Thanksgiving, which is a holiday on a par with Christmas, we were invited to the Lilys' for dinner and we were supposed to bring one dish with us. Given the previous success we went with potato pancakes. We got to the dinner late and everybody was already stuffing themselves with turkey. Modestly I put the bowl of potato pancakes on the edge of the table, not expecting any great success compared to that festive turkey. When I helped myself to some turkey, I look around to see where the bowl of pancakes is, and I see the bowl at the other end of the table (there were about twenty people there), at the bottom of the bowl half of the last pancake and everybody collectively tossing the turkey aside and diving for the potato pancakes, singing odes to them. Then they went on and on about what a cook I am, which is nonsense, I'm just like that Dalibor, whom necessity taught to fiddle.

Trip to Zion National Park

We let ourselves be talked into going to Jeff's sister Janice in Utah for Thanksgiving. First we went to the Lilys' for dinner and then we set off. I printed out the directions from the Internet on how to get there and without reading them I stuck them in my bag. I vaguely remembered from last year that it's far, but that it's not that bad. After about 100 km I decided to take a look at those directions to see which way we were going, I knew the beginning by heart. I pull out the paper and right at the top it said:
FROM:
San Francisco, CA
94110 US
TO:

Zion Lodge, UT
US

Total Distance: 734.83 miles (1176 km)
Total Estimated Time: 14 hours, 16 min

I started calling myself an idiot, because setting off somewhere on Thursday night, with the fact that we have to be back on Sunday, is all very nice, but not when it's 14 hours by car and almost 1200 kilometres! Anyway, it was too late to change anything, so we just kept driving. Since it was overnight and since I was counting on the cops being lenient during the holidays, we were there in 10 and a half hours instead of those 14 and a half.
For the way back the locals recommended a shortcut through Nevada, it was supposed to be off the main route, so we'd avoid the post-holiday traffic jams, it's supposedly shorter and on top of that I can happily do 100 miles an hour there, because there are never any cops, it's a deserted desert after all, right.
Well, the shortcut was only 275 kilometres longer, took a mere 16 and a half hours, most of the way was on snow, so of course you couldn't do those 160 km/h, and where you could for a moment, the cops nabbed me straight away. Just a brilliant shortcut.
Luckily in Nevada they don't have such strict speeding laws, so the fine was only $115 instead of some $300-400 if it had been in California, and on top of that the cop swallowed my story about not having an American driving licence and wrote it up on my international Czech one, so with a bit of luck it shouldn't raise my car insurance, because my insurance company won't find out… What happened was that I was doing that hundred, then some woman got in my way, so I pulled in behind her and waited until I could overtake her, and just then a cop drove by in the opposite direction, clocked that woman and claimed I must have been going the same speed, since I was right behind her. He clocked us at 86 miles an hour in a seventy zone. Just good luck in bad luck.
Well, and on top of that we saw some pretty interesting places, we drove through a stretch, for example, where over 300 kilometres we met one car.

A donkey in England

I got this story from Haydn and it happened in England. Two mates, let's call them Pepa and Franta, decided to drive out of London to do a bit of rabbit shooting. So they took their guns and off they went. They pull up at the first farm and ask the farmer if they can do some shooting on his land. The farmer says no way. So they go to the next farm, ask again, nothing again. Like this a few more times, until they finally ran into a farmer that only Franta talked to. The farmer wasn't too keen but then he says:
„Look, I don't much like it, but we can make a deal. Behind the house I've got an old donkey that used to be the kids' pet, but he's too old now, so we have to get rid of him. I'm going into town with the kids now, so wait till we leave, the donkey's tied up behind the house, there's a hole dug there, so shoot him and chuck him in the hole, I'll fill it in with the tractor when I get back.“
Deal. Franta walks back to the car and thinks up a prank on Pepa.
„Bloody farmers, I've had it up to here with them, but we'll show them! We'll just wait till he clears off!“
The farmer left, Franta took his gun and marched resolutely behind the house, released the safety and blew the donkey's head off, saying: „Take that, you stupid farmer, we'll show you!“
Pepa watches this and then says: „Yeaah, we'll show you, you country bumpkins!“ and blew the head off a perfectly healthy cow standing nearby...

Home!

Three things follow from this story.
1. How long it's been since I got round to writing
2. How much the local lifestyle bothers me
3. That I had more luck than sense
At the end of the year there was an extraordinary annual meeting of the whole management. When I turned up there, it hit me that I'd probably underestimated the importance of the whole thing. All the big shots from the entire corporation were there, that is the owners, the financial director, the HR director, the directors of the individual hospitals etc., about 25 people in total. Our conference room was bursting at the seams. Everybody's task was to sum up the plans they'd had for the past year and the successes they'd achieved during the year. I'm sitting there looking around at those big shots and thinking, what am I doing here. The next youngest after me is 24 years older! All of them with dizzying careers behind them and today a solid position as a big shot in a corporation that has 10 buildings all over California and whose turnover is growing at a dizzying rate (in April we're opening three more buildings). How do I fit in there, a kid from a tower block in Ústí?
The president and founder of the whole corporation (a woman!) had a list of people in front of her, obviously sorted by importance, and she gave them the floor one by one. She started herself, then the other two owners, then the regional managers (one for northern and one for southern California), then the HR director (as the biggest success of last year he presented the fact that none of our employees sued us last year! It's a kind of national sport here to sue your own company for discrimination, sexual harassment or some other nonsense), then it was our financial director and I'm thinking how I'm going to survive here, waiting for those 25 people to finish blabbing and my turn to come. And just then it was my turn! Am I considered the eighth most important person in this colossus? I looked around suspiciously and in order to even be able to speak to those 25 big shots, I had to start with some joke. After that it went fine. Everybody listened as if they really considered me important.
That's when it started dawning on me. I'm not the guy they originally hired any more. That is, the administrator of about 45 computers. There are now around three hundred of those computers, 14 servers, 10 local networks, about 1000 users. The crappy work like when somebody kicks out their keyboard cable and calls that their email isn't working, I don't have to do that any more, I've got two assistants for that (I'm currently hiring a third). Without me even noticing, my position has grown into something that's called IT director. And nobody cares at all how old I am or where I came from. What matters is that I'm handling it. (or at least I've been successfully pretending for a year that I'm handling it :).) I got lucky that this company grows like bamboo (bamboo grows about 7 cm a day...) and my position simply grows with it.
Now when I say I need an assistant, nobody really questions it. They just pay for an ad, I go through the applicants' CVs and invite them for interviews. Until I pick one. I don't have to slog away 60-65 hours a week like before. Divide and rule.
Why am I writing all this here? To massage my ego? Maybe. But mainly to show how terribly the American lifestyle bothers me and how much living here pisses me off. Even though I've got a cushy job here, even though I'd only have to stick it out for about another 8 months and I'd get a green card, which after five years turns into citizenship, even though I can go swimming in the sea on Saturday and skiing on Sunday, even though you can ride a mountain bike here all year round, even though I could immediately buy a new Jeep Grand Cherokee (on instalments, of course, like 99% of the locals), despite all of that I can't wait to be home again. That first year it didn't hit me so much, because I was working those 60-65 hours a week at work, some paid consulting at weekends and whatever scraps of free time were left I spent with Káča.
Now I work some normal 45-50 hours a week and not at all at weekends and I'm finding out that I don't even know what to do with the free time. Yes, I can go skiing, but with whom? I can't stand Americans (those few American friends I had here were put off when I started saying out loud what I used to only write in these Kocourkov stories, namely the things that don't strike me as normal here) The Czechs here fall into two categories. The first ones are here illegally and scrape by as waiters, cleaners and so on. Those mostly don't have money for trips, or they're slogging away in those pubs at weekends, or they already behave like waiters. The second group, roughly equally numerous, are engineers of all kinds (designers, programmers, construction guys etc.) They're here legally, they have a normal job, a family, a house and so far they're not thinking about when they'll go back home. They're not up for any wild trips either. In any case they confirmed my suspicion that friendship in the Czech sense of the word practically doesn't exist here. That kind of friendship like: „Hey, I need to unload a truckload of firewood at the cottage“ or „Hey, we're going to the mountains for a fortnight, come along!“ that doesn't work among the Yanks. Here a friend is at most for: „Come to the bar, we'll chat about money and work!“ and that's the end of it. The rest takes place inside the family.
As I philosophized here once before, work is everything here, life is just a secondary matter that prepares a person for work. What else can you do with ten days of holiday a year. And those ten days include sick days too. So one holiday or one flu a year.
I believe that if I stayed here another year, the comfort of life would lull me and in the end I'd get used to it. Like all those other Czechs who stayed here. Luckily I don't want to. And that's why I'm home in the summer, no two ways about it. And the whole glorious Ameeerica can kiss my a... Just like always, after all.
One of the main points of these stories from the very beginning was to debunk the myth widespread in communist Czechoslovakia about how wonderfully blissful it is in America. The same purpose is meant to be served by what I've now been trying to describe here in such a complicated and confused way.

Safety on the streets

I used to go on here about how awesome it is that I can totally forget to lock my car, leave my phone on the seat, a trunk full of work junk, and nothing happens overnight. Bullshit. The first time they smashed my window, they stole my whole collection of about sixty CDs. That pissed me off. Half of them were Czech, the other half burned! What the hell are they gonna do with that?
When they smashed that same window a second time two weeks later, they stole a stupid hub (a network component) worth a lousy $30. Fixing the window costs $75.
When they smashed that window the third time, they didn't steal anything. Because I don't leave anything in there anymore. Just like back in Bohemia.

One evening around half past nine Jeff heads off to the boat. He was back in a minute and shouts at Steve (Alexa's boyfriend): „Does your pick up have Colorado plates?“ Steve: „It does, why?“ „Call the cops, somebody's in it!“
Joe and Jeff ran out to catch him, I threw on some sweatpants and followed them. Meanwhile they'd chased him out of the car and he was running away from them, this little Mexican guy, already had a good head start. Then I come running out of the house straight at him and I'm yelling something rude in Czech. He clearly couldn't believe his eyes that so many people were chasing him seemingly independently of each other. He turned off into a side alley and I went after him. Unfortunately I was wearing flip-flops, so he just barely slipped through my fingers. Maybe lucky for me, because even if I'd caught him, I don't know what I'd have done with him. Joe and Jeff had meanwhile gone back for the car. We chased him for another half hour or so, didn't catch him. On the way back we're standing at a crosswalk and this huge black guy with a hamburger walks right in front of us. I say to Jeff, hey, isn't that the guy who got out of that pickup in front of our house about an hour ago and, all out of breath, asked you for a cigarette?
We get back to the house and the cops are already there. They just wrote up a report and were on their way out. What was missing from Steve's car? Everything. He's got this off-road Toyota pickup, about 1.5 years old. There was nothing in the cab. Seats gone, dashboard gone, upholstery gone, even the damn seatbelts unscrewed. How can somebody have the nerve to unscrew all this at nine in the evening? Anyway, Steve's insured (unlike me, because my American driver's license is too fresh, just liability alone costs me $150 a month), we go to bed.
We're walking back to the house and suddenly Jeff, who'd been loafing around somewhere, calls Steve over. So we all go there and Jeff is standing by the pickup that the two-hundred-pound black guy got out of an hour earlier. The pickup exactly the same as Steve's. And what's in the bed? Everything that's missing from Steve's, of course! Down to the last screw!
So we call the cops again, this time three cars showed up and they started combing the neighborhood. In a while the two-hundred-pound black guy comes strolling back with a bag of hamburgers. He saw from a distance that there was trouble, so he turned around and took off. Before we managed to explain to the cops why they should be chasing a black guy when the one we'd been chasing earlier was a tiny Mexican, the black guy was long gone.
Meanwhile they found out whose pickup with the parts in the bed it was and drove to the owner's house. We were supposed to identify whether he was the one we'd chased.
They brought him over, but we weren't sure. It was dark. So we advised the cops to look at his feet, because the whole time we were chasing him he was barefoot, must've lost his shoes somewhere in the rush. They said they can't do that. So they took his fingerprints and towed Steve's pickup to the police lab. The Mexican just drove home in his own pickup.
The next day it turned out no prints could be lifted from behind the seats. Perpetrator unknown, case closed.

Three days later Jeff is coming out of a bar and sees some black guy sitting in his car (the car we chased the Mexican in) doing something to the steering wheel! So he charges over and the black guy jumped out, stared thoughtfully at the hammer in his hand for a moment and then decided to run. It was a different black guy than last time, but across the street a tiny Mexican was waiting for him in a car! Too dark again to tell whether it was the same one. Jeff chased them by car for a while, but no sane person can chase somebody who blows through stop signs at fifty.
Since this incident nothing new has happened, word about Jeff, who always catches them, must have spread among the thieves :).

Doctors

I've been to the doctor here twice. First to the dentist. At work they told me: „We pay for the best health insurance for you, just go!“
A stupid amalgam filling with all the X-rays! and the blather about how I have to get an injection took two hours and I had to pay $70 out of pocket!!! In total it cost about $270 (9700 CZK). For one lousy filling! And on top of that he gave me that Chinese face of his, like how backward we must be in Bohemia, letting them drill a filling without anesthetic.

The second time I went to a dermatologist. When I crashed a quad dirt bike in the desert sometime in January, I banged up my ankle. I was wearing high boots, so it didn't hurt all that much, just a bruise. But when the bruise was still there after six months, I thought it was weird. Káča held a gun to my head and made me find a dermatologist on my insurance company's list and go there. So I get there, in an office the size of a biggish toilet in downtown San Francisco the doctor looked at the bruise, poked it with one of those pointy things people use to smear earwax around in their ears and then says: „ It's nothing, it's just a dead layer of skin, it'll go away. Do you need anything else? No? Then settle the payment with my secretary.“
It was the most expensive 5 minutes of my life. $150. It turned out this doctor takes my insurance, but only the HBO plan and I have the HCO plan. Which means I pay. All of it.

Feminists

Haydn was out partying and dancing in a club one time and couldn't score anything all night. So he's just standing there, resigned (completely sober, because back then he still didn't drink), one in the morning, everybody around him drunk, and then this beautiful Asian girl comes up to him and looks him in the eye. So he starts smiling and the Asian girl comes closer and closer... When she was about a meter from Haydn, she got this absent look on her face and then she puked. Horribly, but horribly.... Right on Haydn's chest...
From what I manage to observe about the nature of the local girls, I'm more and more certain she did it more or less on purpose. So she could then tell her girlfriends how she'd blown off another guy begging for sex and shown him how us girls are completely independent of the male species.

Résumés 
As I've already said, I'm going through résumés again and looking for another assistant. Since several thousand Internet companies have gone bust here over the last year and a half, I've got offers up the wazoo. Some of those résumés are worth mentioning:

Worked for 10 years as a gas station manager. About 3 years ago he did every possible Microsoft course and exam and has been making a living as a computer expert ever since.

Under education he lists: Las Vegas School of Gambling – Slot Machine Mechanic! :)

During calls with applicants a potential employer must not ask for any personal information like gender, age, marital status, skin color, to prevent discrimination. But from the first name you can at least tell the gender.
I had in my hands the résumé of a woman with unbelievably rich experience in the field of computer user support. I didn't even invite her for an interview. Not that I don't believe a woman can do it, of course she can. But as my direct subordinate she can also sue me for sexual harassment and I'd be paying it off till I die. And if this ever gets into somebody's hands here, they'll sue me for discrimination and I'll be paying that off till I die too…

Among his list of jobs he entered for the period
1995-1998-Stay-at-home father, i.e. a dad on parental leave!!!

A bizarre accident

I was driving to San Jose, where we have one building. The highway was fairly full, but it was moving at about 50. Then one of those completely inexplicable rules of highway traffic that work here kicked in. Even though the three right lanes kept going at 50, my far-left one (everywhere in the world that's the fast one, here it's just the left one, because everybody drives wherever they feel like) came to a complete stop. I see two cars ahead of me, somebody braking into a skid, the car in front of me braking into a skid too, so I slam on it as hard as I can and brake into a skid. Just as I was thinking about where my insurance card was, that tank of mine kindly stopped, a couple of centimeters behind the one in front of me. Not even the ones ahead of me bumped into each other, but everybody had about 5cm to spare.
The drama isn't over, I hear a girl behind me skidding toward me in a brand new Honda SUV, she didn't even have plates yet. I wait for the crash, nothing. Phew. I see in the mirror how she wiped her forehead in relief. Then she put it in reverse and backed up and as she backed up, the rear of my car sank down!
Since I'd been braking furiously, the car had pitched forward and at the moment it was settling back, she already had her hood under my spare tire! (the kind that hangs on the rear door). And so that spare tire sat down on her hood and held my car slightly tilted forward :).

Buying a car over the internet

I was following an auction of a bankrupt Internet company, wanting to buy some network printers for work. You can either attend the auction in person, or follow it in real time on the Internet. I didn't have time to drive there, so I followed it from the office. Suddenly I notice they're also selling 100 company Dodge Grand Caravan vans (back home better known as the Chrysler Voyager), one of those eight-seater passenger vans. I figured, if they've got a hundred of them, they'll probably be pretty cheap. They were all barely two years old with about 20 thousand miles on them. Even though I'd definitively quit the car-dealing business, I couldn't resist and bought one of those vans. It was by far the most expensive car I've ever bought and I bought it without ever having seen it. On the internet there was only a small photo, the mileage and the year of manufacture. When I went to pick it up the next day, my ass was clenched so tight I'd have been king among the Buttoners. Either it'd be a disaster, a beat-up piece of junk with a blown engine, or the best deal of my life. In the end the car was far better than I ever dared hope. Perfectly clean, well kept, still smelled new and it even had onboard 110V outlets, so you can plug in, say, a microwave :).
I'm driving back from the auction in this brand new thing, a total downpour, here and there a car rammed into the guardrail. I'm driving slowly, about thirty. Suddenly on an overpass, which is on a slight curve, I drive not into a puddle, but into Lake Lipno! The idiots built the highway so that in one spot water about 30cm deep collects. I hit it with the left front wheel, which immediately sent me into a skid, so I'm hurtling down the highway still at thirty, only now sideways and straight ahead of me the guardrail and behind it about 10 meters of empty space going down, where there's another highway. In a car I'd just spent most of my money on, with no insurance, Káča next to me. Lovely. Luckily the survival instinct won out and I did the only thing that could get me out of it. A short stomp on the brake, which got me through the water onto the asphalt, followed by a yank of the wheel to the other side. That turned the sideways ride back into a forward one. Ugh, even now, half a year after it happened, my heart is pounding from it...
About fifty meters further along they were loading onto a tow truck some guy who hadn't been so lucky. Car rolled over onto its roof.

The attacking screwdriver

Unlike the previous ones, this story is fresh. It happened today.
I'm driving over to a buddy's place, we're going out on the bikes. A buddy from the "Legal engineers with family" group. Ahead of me on the freeway there was a pick-up with toolboxes in the back, me about 100 metres behind him, doing around 110 km/h. Suddenly a screwdriver flies out of one of the boxes. A screwdriver flying along the asphalt at 110 km/h tends to bounce wildly about a metre into the air and as something you're inevitably going to meet in 2 seconds it doesn't look friendly at all. I was already picturing a smashed headlight, or maybe the radiator. Unfortunately, right in front of me the screwdriver got some wild idea and instead of the usual metre it jumped about 2 and came flying straight at my windscreen. At that point I knew I was screwed and all I managed was to cover my face with my hand.
Thank God I was going fast enough to DRIVE UNDER the screwdriver while it was in the air!, and it smacked down wearily just behind me, rolled over a couple more times and stayed lying harmlessly on the road... Phewwww....
At that moment I still had no idea that this was just the appetizer for the adrenaline riverbed waiting for me on the special bike trail built by the local "Suicidal cyclists club" :). But more about that some other time.

Hot pursuit — or a wild car chase live on air

I was in LA on a business trip the other day and I turned on the TV in the hotel. (The hotel is actually the only place where I ever see a TV)
They were doing the news and they interrupted it with something live. It was a live feed from a helicopter, some guy racing along the freeway at about 160 km/h, which is a capital crime here all by itself. He was weaving between cars with about 5 police cars behind him. Plus two police helicopters in the air and one TV one.
After a while he came off the freeway and drove through a residential neighbourhood, stop signs or no stop signs, still doing about 80 km/h. That's where the police cars lost sight of him, because obviously they can't ignore those stop signs like that. The helicopters still on his tail. After a bit the guy stopped and jumped out along with his passenger, each running a different way, hopping fences, cutting across people's gardens. The driver soon disappeared into one of the houses. The helicopters obviously weren't in contact with the cops in the cars, because it took quite a while before the guys on foot got to that house. Clearly they couldn't find him there. Then came the commercials, so I switched it off and went to bed.

Czech food

The other day a colleague of mine told me they'd opened a new little shop round the corner and that they've got loads of Czech food there. So I went and found and bought: genuine Czech butter, Croatian liver pâté, Slovak cheese, German bread (exactly like Šumava), Hungarian sausage on a Polish roll. All of it from a Romanian owner :). All of it true, I swear. I still have the bread and the butter. The only thing there that wasn't Czech or Slovak or Polish, let alone Romanian, were the prices. Those were completely American.

Henpecked

Erik is the first of my assistants, he lives in LA in Seal Beach and he's a typical example of an American guy under the rule of an American feminist. He took his wife's maiden name. Apparently they decided not to have kids because it would ruin his wife's figure. Well, Erik could carry it, he's already about 150 kg.
He drives a beat-up van while his wife drives a BMW. That's the typical arrangement. A family almost always has two cars, one for show, one for hauling stuff or kids around, i.e. a pickup or a van. Naturally the better car belongs to the wife.

A wedding, fake as they come

Ronald is a Czech who's been here six years and doesn't fit into any of the categories. He came as an au-pair! and he actually did it for two years!
Then he decided to study and studied computers. When he'd somehow got through it, he decided he actually doesn't enjoy computers and now he's studying psychology at the prestigious Berkeley university, where it took Joe, for instance, 10 years to get in. Ronald got in on the first try.
Sometime about two years ago Ronald met some girl from Minnesota on the Internet. Minnesota, that probably sounds around here like Horní Lhota. For two years they only mailed each other, never talked on the phone, never met. After two years Ronald got in the car and drove to Minnesota. After 30 hours in the car he was there. They spent five days together and on the sixth day there was… a WEDDING! After the wedding (in January) he drove back again and he won't see her until summer, when he gets his holidays.
And here I thought I was the weird one, that I found both of my (two) jobs on the Internet and that I know a few people better by mail than in real life…

What's good about America

Last time I was accused of being too biased and bitchy, since it's obvious that if it were as bad here as it looks from my stories, nobody would be living here any more, me least of all.
So I got to thinking about what's good here and maybe even better than back home. So here are a few things I came up with:
• cops aren't allowed to pull anyone over without a specific reason. No stupid preventive checks, where back home the cops stop every car and then go looking for something to nail on it. Which effectively means that as long as you don't do anything dumb, the cops leave you alone. Even if you happened to be driving drunk. Once you do pull something, though, it's worth it. Not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign – $275 plus your insurance goes up for five years. Etc.
• The system of freeways going absolutely everywhere. California is generally famous for it, ten- to fourteen-lane freeways in the metro areas, four-lane everywhere else. I've been moaning here that the freeway speed limit is 104 km/h, which I still moan about, but in reality doing 1000 km here takes significantly less time than anywhere in Europe, precisely thanks to the fantastic freeway network.
• the spoiled customer – the system of absolute guarantee, which means you can take anything you buy back to the shop and return it without giving a reason and they'll give you your money back without a word. I'd love to see how beautifully the Czechs would manage to abuse this system, until it drove the shopkeepers into bankruptcy :).
• no connections needed – success (if we consider a pile of money and a dizzying career to be success) is achievable here by anyone who's willing to work hard. Regardless of who his uncle or daddy is or who he slept with and where. Let alone where he came from, what nationality he is, what colour (well, I'm not entirely sure about that one) or what sex. Good positions aren't filled with friends of friends but with capable people.
• tolerance – the other day I watched some German film where some German teenager was screeching at a classmate of his, "You shut up and go back to your crappy Turkey!" That's when I realized that in all the time I've been here I haven't heard the slightest hint of surprise, let alone contempt, that I'm not from here but from over there. Nobody cares at all where I'm from, what religion, sexual orientation or culture I am. This very pleasant state of affairs comes mainly from the fact that practically everyone here is an immigrant. The only difference between me and Jeff is that he immigrated from Europe 200 years ago and I did it two years ago.
• envy – I think I've written about this here already. What's the main difference between a Czech and an American? When a Czech buys a new car, the neighbour looks out the window through the curtain and mutters to himself: "Where the hell did they steal that much money for a new car this time? I hope they smash their face in it!" (the well-known neighbour's goat that's supposed to drop dead). And then in the evening he goes out and keys it.
An American buys a new car and the neighbour leans out the window and calls out loud: "Hi neighbour, awesome car!" and thinks to himself, man, that neighbour is really good, I should work on myself so I can match him.

Kids and chocolate

This is a phenomenon I never heard about in the Czech Republic, but here everybody takes it as a known fact. Namely that chocolate makes kids hyperactive! So after devouring a bar of chocolate they start flying around the apartment, jumping and fighting and are generally impossible to handle. So I don't know. They seem like that to me all the time.

Off to training in Prague

The biggest stunt I've probably pulled off here was when I convinced the management at work that they had to send me to a training course in Prague, because the course there is just as good and even with a return plane ticket it works out cheaper. Which was true. So I flew.
I get back from Prague sometime in February (well, sometime – I know exactly when, because it was the first and hopefully the last birthday I've spent on a plane) and then after about a week two gentlemen in suits came to visit me, saying they represent a company called Unitek, which is the largest Carrotsoft training centre in Northern California. And that as part of promoting their company they can give me two free vouchers for any course from their offering.
I started laughing and said, "Gentlemen, you couldn't have picked better timing. If you'd come a month earlier, I'd have been pissed off!" They stared blankly, so I explained my trick with the trip to Prague. Of course I took the vouchers anyway and went straight to one of the courses. It was an equivalent course to the one in Prague, except it would have cost 70 000Kč more! I could choose daytime or evening, but the daytime course would have buried me under a pile of accumulated work, so all week I went from five to ten at night and on Saturday morning. On top of that, I had a 60 km drive home from that course! But I enjoyed it enormously, because since I have loads of hands-on experience with large networks, the theory didn't seem as boring to me as it did to the others on the course (or as it did to me three years ago), since I was able to picture a real situation behind it. An example like "Mrs Marie at the Paris branch, on the second floor, needs to print a document stored in Taipei, fourth floor, on the printer of the director of the New York branch on the eleventh floor in New York" used to seem to me like nonsensical futurology. But now it's a pretty concrete matter, because there's no difference whether Marie is printing from Paris to New York or Mary Jane from San Francisco to Los Angeles! Those are just slightly shorter wires, but the principle is the same.

Rat Race

"Rat race" is one of the usual American sayings, the literal translation is "Krysí závody". It describes (and more or less nails) the situation on the job market, i.e. the general ambition to succeed at work. Unfortunately, the term "success at work" here blends into success in life.

Enough powder to drown in

Steve is Alex's boyfriend, a guy who moved from New York to Colorado at about twenty-two, because he was a snowboarding fanatic. Well, from a snowboarder's point of view he definitely did the right thing, because for two years straight he was on his board EVERY SINGLE DAY! Even though he doesn't look like it, he's one of those lunatics who hike up a mountain and then ride down through the trees, do flips off cliffs and all that. He told me how once he and a buddy spent several hours hiking up a mountain in Colorado and then rode down through that virgin terrain. Above one particularly high cliff his buddy stopped and said, watch this, I'm gonna do a backflip, took off and jumped off that cliff. He disappeared out of Steve's sight, Steve called after him whether he could go now, nobody answered, so he took off too and did just some “normal” spin, three times around his own axis or whatever, and as he was landing, pissed off that his buddy had ditched him, out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something red sticking out of the snow. It took him another 150 metres to stop at that speed, he looked back and all he could see sticking out of the snow was his buddy's board, upside down, thrashing around. Then it stopped thrashing. Terrified Steve unstrapped his board, jumped off it to run and help his buddy, and as he jumped off the board into the powder, he sank so deep into that powder that not only was he completely under the “surface”, but he barely managed to grab the edge of the board so he wouldn't “drown” completely!!! With great difficulty he clawed his way back to the “surface” using the board, and then, with the “stab the board in, pull yourself up” method, he slowly crawled those hundred and fifty metres back up the hill to his buddy. Because his buddy hadn't managed to finish that flip and had landed head first in that powder and couldn't dig himself out. He was stuck head down, with just the board above the surface.
When Steve crawled up to him, he started digging a hole to get to his head. His buddy wasn't even moving any more, and when he finally dug down to his face, it was completely purple-blue and lifeless. He frantically tried to give him mouth-to-mouth, which, considering they were both under the snow and head down, didn't work too well. In the end his buddy (his name's Jake) started coming round (probably more out of disgust at being kissed by a guy than anything else), Steve's yelling at him “What's your name, dude!” and the barely living guy says “Benjamin” and started laughing. “Jeez, the idiot had one foot in the grave and he was still cracking jokes,” Steve said when he told me about it.
I've been out mountain biking with Steve a few times and I have to say that when I saw him slowly riding that bike down a rock face where people are scared to climb down on all fours without a bike, I know he's not bullshitting about Colorado…

Off to see Hejduk in the NHL

Milan Hejduk is a guy who went to our grammar school and now plays hockey not only for the national team, but he's also a fresh NHL star with the Colorado Avalanche. (any resemblance to the previous story is purely coincidental).
When Colorado played in San Jose, which is just round the corner from here (70km), I bought tickets on the Internet and off I went. I was worried I'd see bugger all compared to TV, but the arena is built and lit so well that I could see brilliantly. I spent the first period frantically scanning the rink for Hejduk. During the second period I was cheering Colorado's successes, right up until I noticed that I was probably the only one of those 25,000 people rooting for the visitors and everyone else was giving me funny looks, so I toned it down a bit. In the third period I'd come to terms with the fact that Hejduk wasn't playing (the next day the papers wrote that Colorado is significantly weakened by Hejduk's injury) and I closely followed the movements of the other three Czech rookies on the ice.
The good thing about live hockey is that you can watch whatever you want and not what the director wants, so you see the fights and the line changes and the goalies directing traffic and the bench and then also that twenty-thousand-strong crowd, just an experience.

How I became a teacher

Some of our hospitals have a high school as part of them. In one of those schools we had a “computer teacher” who was supposed to teach the kids how to handle computers and, on top of that, partly help me with looking after the computers in that particular building. I spent three months patiently showing him what and how, and then fixing what he'd screwed up. Enough is enough. One day he pissed m.., I mean he got on my nerves, and I went to the school principal saying we simply had to fire him. Within about two weeks we managed it (it's not that easy to sack someone here, even if he's completely useless, never shows up for work and has excuses like “My girlfriend got raped”, which would sound sad if he weren't dumb enough to use that excuse twice:). I think I can free myself of prejudice enough to claim that the fact he's black had nothing to do with him getting the boot. He was just dumb, colour or no colour.
Yeah, well, except finding somebody new just isn't happening and the kids love computers and they're suffering. So I offered to give it a go with them, figuring they can't be dumber than the secretaries at the Ministry of Transport or the comrades at Česká pojišťovna. They weren't. On the contrary, some of them (mind you, I only got a pick of the best ones) could easily run circles around me in programming, for instance. So I'd rather give each of them a screwdriver and an old computer and we took the thing apart down to the last screw.

The vicious circle of picking partners

I was reading one of Jeff's books, which deals with relationships between men and women, and the psychologist writes there that a person subconsciously picks exactly the same personality types as partners and more or less has no conscious influence over that choice, since he'll always be attracted to the same type. Jeff and I discussed it once and we spotted one catch, namely, what can you do when someone subconsciously keeps picking the same type who is absolutely incompatible with him! Then you go round in a circle of endlessly swapping partners, looking for someone who wouldn't annoy you so damn much, and according to that same-type rule you keep running into equally unsustainable relationships. That's probably Jeff's case, he's about 43 and still searching frantically:).
Another fact supporting this theory would be Haydn. I once saw his wife and then I come to the Lilis' Christmas party and there's that wife happily dancing away! It turned out that of course it wasn't his wife, just Lili's friend Gwen, who looks like her.
The next time, Haydn happened to show up at the Lilis' party too, and it didn't even take an hour before the two of them were cheerfully leaving the party hand in hand to go partying somewhere. Then they had a pretty serious thing going for a while, until the following happened:
They went out to the theatre and then somewhere for a beer. They're sitting there over a beer and someone on the stage is singing and trying to get somebody from the audience to sing too. He picked Haydn as his victim and is trying to drag him up, Haydn didn't want to, so the entertainer says: “And who's this young lady?” and Haydn says as a joke: “That's my wife.”
Gwen got insanely offended, got up from the table, knocking over her chair, and marched out of the pub. They never saw each other again. And they say women aren't weird:).
The punchline of this story should probably confirm the opening theory with some story about Haydn's ex-wife, except unfortunately I don't have one:).

Show-Off

Show off is the English expression for showing off, or directly for the person who's showing off. The biggest show-off I know is Jeff. His favourite way of showing off is telling funny stories about how brilliantly he showed off somewhere. Naturally he has to embellish it a bit, so in the telling he actually comes out looking better than when it really happened:).
Damn, maybe I should switch on the Czech keyboard, huh?
Well, so Jeff was telling us how he once happened to read some book about mathematics, more or less the history of mathematics combined directly with mathematics, how it developed from Egypt, through ancient Rome up to now. About a month later his sister Janice started dating some new guy. Jeff got talking to him and the fellow rather smugly explained that he studies the history of mathematics at such-and-such university. Jeff sniffed out an opportunity and immediately hit him with something like: “So what do you think about the theory of limit integrals according to Acrydus of Alexandria versus Archimedes' theory of integrals?” and then he had a whole disputation about mathematics with the guy. Naturally Jeff knows sod all about mathematics, but back then he remembered the interesting facts from that book. After a while the guy asks in amazement: “And what do you actually do?” and Jeff says to him with a wave of his hand: “Oh, I'm just a technician on a ship.”
Jeff's story reminded me of two of mine, which I told them right away. That's how Jeff and I complement each other:
The mysterious driver
This one was told to us by an assistant lecturer at the Czech Technical University. Once upon a time there was a professor at the Faculty of Nuclear Physics, a world authority in his field, he hit every conference around the world, fluent in English and French, whose passionate hobby was driving long-distance ČSAD coaches. He was actually employed part-time by ČSAD and at weekends, in that bus driver's uniform they wore back then, he'd drive the flat-cap crowd to Brno and back.
Once, on a Sunday evening, he's driving from Prague to Brno again and in the front seats there were two guys talking English. It turned out they were two American nuclear experts who were travelling after some negotiations. They were discussing some serious problem with the fission of the uranium nucleus or whatever and they just couldn't agree on how it actually works. Well, our driver couldn't take it, and as he's hurtling down the motorway to Brno, he butted in and explained the problem to them in perfect English, as if it were as simple as keeping bees.
Those two American experts didn't say another word for the rest of the journey. They just stared in terror in the driver's direction. You could see what was going through their heads: “If every bus driver in this little commie country understands nuclear physics better than an American professor, then we've lost the Cold War good and proper…”

The hard life of a vegan girl

We once went on a trip up Mount Tamalpais, the highest mountain around here – me, Alex, Steve, Haydn and Alex's sister what's-her-name, oh yeah, Sarah. So one carnivore (me) and the rest die-hard vegans, which is the worse variety of vegetarians, the ones who don't even eat cheese, butter, eggs, basically nothing that's ever been anywhere near an animal.
Somewhere halfway along the way we bought drinks and Alex bought a Fanta. I'd already finished my drink and she was still studying the label on her Fanta. Then she swore, asked me whether I wanted her Fanta, and when I said no, she chucked it in the bin unopened. I'm gawping at her like an idiot, so she explained to me, the ignorant carnivore, that the Fanta contains A40!!! I was still staring blankly, so she had to enlighten me that A40 is a dye that's made from cow's blood, right? You mean you don't know that, surely everyone knows that, no? So watch out for Fanta! :)

Sport against the blues

When I ended up here alone in December, it didn't do my soul any good at all. At first I thought I'd just go partying with Jeff, Haydn and co., except their only goal in life is to bag some chick and they always get smashed doing it, then for a laugh they act like they're gay, which of course means they'll never bag anybody and it's not even funny. So that was a dead end. Then for a while I waited, tense as a string, for somebody or something at work to really tick me off so I could throw it all in their faces nice and theatrically and go home. That didn't work out either, every time I had a reason to gripe they somehow met me halfway and the drama was over.
Then I ran into a bunch of Czechs here and they planted the idea in my head, which I'd been toying with anyway, that all the gloom needs to be drowned in sports. The possible sports came out as basketball, volleyball, mountain biking and skiing. I started by ending a year of strict saving and not buying anything, and I bought ski gear. Just like with the bike, the blind pigeon found the grain and the second shop I walked into had a sale, so for instance I bought skis marked down from $490 to 99. Except when a guy moves to California, he doesn't take stuff like gloves and hats with him. So besides the skis I also had to buy bindings, poles, a jacket, a hat, gloves, goggles, pants, socks…. But it was worth it!

I got in far more days this season than in the previous four put together, and in the ideal combination of high mountains (3000m above sea level) and California weather (sun about 350 days a year).
I was so blown away by the first skiing trip that I called my boss at home on Sunday evening to say I wouldn't be coming in on Monday and not on Tuesday either, because the snow was amazing and the view of the lake beautiful, which was such a solid argument that he couldn't object :).
And when I was skiing those perfectly groomed, completely empty weekday slopes, I couldn't hold back and was howling out loud with joy, until the bears in the woods were tapping their foreheads.
On the next skiing trip a couple of weeks later the weather was absolutely unreal. The thermometers showed some horrible number in Fahrenheit, which I later converted to an appalling 30 degrees Celsius, which matched the sweaty short-sleeved T-shirt I was skiing in and the peeling burnt skin a few days later. I burned my skin even under my hair! The snow wasn't anything special, but the weather was like July in Italy.
By the way, all this skiing takes place around Lake Tahoe, which is a lake in the mountains at 2000m above sea level about 350km from San Francisco. When I first heard we were going there just for the day, there in the morning, back in the evening, it seemed like sheer madness to me, of course. Except it's not that bad, the freeway goes all the way there and it doesn't even take three hours, as long as you don't hit a jam caused by the California dimwits who started putting chains on en masse on the freeway because it was raining a bit! Not a single flake of snow the whole way on the freeway, all you could hear were the Californians' chains clattering on the wet road. The best one was a guy who had chains on the rear axle of a Corolla, which is front-wheel drive :).
Once I also went there with the little band of Czechs who go to the cottage of another Czech they've never even met, but who always emails them where he hid the keys, and off they go. It was hot again, but not as insane as last time, so the snow was better. I enjoyed it so much that I was the only one from the group who got in the car after dinner and went night skiing. In the whole resort the only people skiing were one high school on vacation and a few snowboarders shouting to each other on the lift about how well the heroin was working today.
Up at the top I noticed a few guys on snowboards and the high school girls lining up for a race. So I gave them about a 100-metre head start and set off after them. On a nicely groomed slope I can pretend I know how to ski, especially now with those new skis that are shaped like a double-ended wooden spoon (narrow in the middle, paddles at the ends, in Czechia they call it by the technical English term Carving ski, here on the other hand they call it plainly Parabolic ski). So not because I'm any kind of downhill racer, but rather because a snowboard is generally slower and the girls weren't that good either, I passed all 6 "racers" and waited for them at the bottom like it was nothing and rode back up with them. I kept playing with them like this until of course it backfired on me. On the last ride up the lift somehow more people gathered on the hill and everybody was going to race. It took me a while to push my way to the front of the crowd, so my opponents got a bit of a lead. I'm chasing after them and I see that now they're hauling like crazy. I put on even more speed and, right at the edge of survival, I started catching up a little to the last of them. Of course my ego couldn't allow (idiot that I am) me to finish last, so risking my life I passed two of them, in the process getting nicely sprayed with frozen snow right in the mug. I have no idea how fast you ski, but if it's roughly as fast as on a mountain bike, I can state that getting a spray of frozen snow in the face at 70km an hour isn't exactly super pleasant.
Well, in the end I finish about fifth, find out my legs are shaking terribly and I'm wondering where those schoolkids suddenly got that speed. So I look the group over and I see: all of them in helmets, race suits, bent poles… Idiot me, those aren't the schoolkids at all, that's the local team of racers at night training! And I nearly killed myself :).
I also overheard them talking about what kind of nutcase rides like that here without a helmet :). 

Emigrants' kids
Some of the Czechs I hang out with here have kids. It's hilarious to watch how they bolt English and Czech together, so out come sentences like:
Can I go domů? (Can I go home?)
I don't have bačkůrky. (I don't have slippers)
Matýsek has málo. (Matýsek doesn't have much.)

Put your nožičky out of my way!

Meat factory

I've already written here about how hamburger meat is made. Not long ago I heard a roughly hour-long interview with a journalist who decided to figure out how things generally work in the meat industry in the USA. The interview then also came out in the New York Times and other papers and caused a bit of an uproar.
So this journalist, let's call him Franta, decided he'd buy a calf right after birth and spend its entire average life in the meat industry with it, from birth all the way to the slaughterhouse, without interfering with its fate in any way.
The first three months are fine, somewhere on a farm with mama cow, grazing grass. Then the farmer sells it to a meat factory a thousand kilometres to the south, where they haul it in a cattle truck.
So Franta flies after that calf by plane, lands in the nearest town to the meat factory, rents a car and drives. After a few miles he finds out that something in the car stinks insanely, but I mean insanely. So he thinks, jeez, the customer before me must have gotten really mad and peed on the back seat. So he starts turning around to go back and swap the car, and while turning he opened the window. BAM! An even worse stench into his nose, which rolled into the car from the outside. And then it hit him. That's how a meat factory smells. At that moment he was 40 miles (64km) away from the factory!
A meat factory is more or less a town where 60–100 thousand! cows are packed head to head in single-storey tin buildings. In the middle of that town there's a concrete lake where all the urine is channelled. You can't do anything with it for 2–3 years, it's too strong and has to be left to mature, and only then can it be used as fertilizer, otherwise it would kill things.
Franta the journalist (evidently already with a totally deadened sense of smell) talked to the owner. The owner proudly told him how his grandpa around, say, 1940 had to feed a cow for 4–5 years before it reached slaughter weight. His dad, in the seventies, managed to fatten that cow up in just two years! And he, a child of 20th and 21st century technology, can do it in just 11 months!!! And now a few tricks on how he manages it.
As is known, a cow has a system of stomachs (omasum, rumen, reticulum, abomasum, is that all of them? A little biology quiz :) ) and that's a perfect, unique chemical-biological system that can grow 300 kilos of meat out of grass. Yeah, well, except the gentlemen designers of the meat factory didn't find it convenient, because just try supplying grass for 100 thousand cows a day! That would take up too much space and that would be expensive! So they decided to teach the cow's digestion to sing the song of the market economy and they feed them nothing but corn! Not the plant, dried kernels! I mean, it stores so easily and in India you can buy it so cheap! Just to give you an idea of how much corn is needed, a truck full of corn pulls in there every hour, day and night.
Well, actually the poor cow gets something else too! That corn with water produces a lot of methane and other crap that cow digestion isn't built for, and so they regularly get inflammation of, I don't know which organ now, my anatomy of internal organs in English isn't there yet, well let's say the kidneys. And then here and there some tumours and so on, right. So to keep the poor cows from croaking of kidney inflammation, every morning they get a solid dose of antibiotics in their feed, right. And while we're on the subject of pills, let's shove some growth hormones in there too, then they grow faster and four years becomes eleven months and right away beef is cheaper and profits bigger, right.
It also sometimes happens that under that layer of glued-together corn in the stomach a cow builds up so much methane, which can't get to the surface, that her belly literally starts to burst. For that they have a trained attendant who runs over and quickly shoves a thick hose up the cow's rear end (or wherever), punches through that layer of corn and lets the methane out into God's daylight. Well, when that stomach was built for grass, it has a few bugs now, that's just how it is.
Don't you fancy a steak? They're suspiciously cheap right now!

Volleyball

I was talking at work once about how we play volleyball on weekends with a bunch of Czechs, and one colleague immediately piped up that back when he still lived in the Philippines he played volleyball like crazy. So we agreed that he'd find some group and we'd go play.
Surprisingly he found one (I originally thought volleyball didn't even exist in America) and we started going there. Twice a week practice for beginners, twice a week games for the advanced. Always in the evening from seven to half past nine, which is great, because it forces me to leave work at a reasonable hour so I make it. I go to both, which together is 10 hours of volleyball a week plus sometimes on the weekend. My right arm is now twice as thick as my left from spiking :).
Those practices with a real genuine coach turned out to be hugely useful. Suddenly I don't have to just run around in confusion looking for where I should probably be standing, there are theories and rules for everything. Even spiking goes a lot better when you know that it flies out of bounds because I don't snap my wrist down. Shame nobody told me that ten years ago, that would have saved a lot of balls out of bounds :).
Well, in short, I'm a bit of a volleyball maniac now. This happened to me about a month ago, it's a chunk of an email:
Today at volleyball I landed right under our coach's descending foot, so he stepped on it and instead of apologizing he sprained his ankle. Everybody acted like I'd killed him and that's why when we get our photo taken they'll probably give me horns. Except he landed on OUR side, so it's NOT MY FAULT! We had to walk him to his car and he acted like he couldn't even drive, chicken. So I told him that when a guy sprains his ankle four times, the fifth time it doesn't even hurt, it just snaps back in. I know it from Papa. He didn't find it funny :) But he didn't blame me for anything.
He's still got a splint on that ankle and it's been 5 weeks now. Like I said, chicken :).

Eat all you can!

Once somebody at work had a birthday, so we all went for lunch to the Hilton, the company pays. A fancy hotel like that, waiters in tailcoats, everything silver and so on. Well, what do you think all those Americans ordered? Sandwiches! All of them! Sure, they were Hilton sandwiches, so not a roll with salami, but like half a marinated chicken between two slices of bread with mango, salad and stuff, but still. Me, I just ordered an empty plate. Because they had a counter there with an "Eatallyoucan" type of food, so I helped myself to six courses. That evening I didn't spike much at volleyball. I didn't want to see those six courses one more time, in reverse order :).

When things go to hell at work, they go in several places at once...

As it usually goes, sometimes things pile up in one day so nicely that you feel like smashing everything. This was one Monday, about a month ago. I'm driving to work, late as usual, and not stressing as usual, since I'm always the last one there in the evening anyway. The vice president calls me, saying that a: Outlook has once again sent a few of his mails uncontrollably to the addresses of people they absolutely weren't meant for (pretty confidential information, naturally) and b: that his Internet at home is down again (he works from home). So I told him that as soon as I get to a computer I'll take a look at it, while thinking to myself what a lovely start to the week this is. That mail-sending thing had already happened in a few places before, it's probably some virus, but one that none of the known antivirus programs knows about, and it simply sends copies of some mails to people randomly picked from the address book. It leaves no traces behind. Of course, by the law of maximum spite, a virus like that has to hit the biggest shots.
I get to the office and check the answering machine. As if that weren't enough, one of the hospitals out in the desert is completely without Internet (and therefore without email and access to accounting), because the Internet provider decided over the weekend to reconfigure the IP addresses, which wouldn't be such a big deal, I'd just have to reconfigure it on that network too, except the way they changed it, they cut me off from that network, and I can't connect there to change it, right. So I'm furiously thinking about how to do it so I don't have to bloody fly out there, and I call one of my subordinates (Erik) to ask whether he installed PC Anywhere on one of those computers, which is a program I could use to connect there over the phone. He says yeah he did, but that he can't talk right now, because he's got the Internet provider's tech support on the other line, because their Internet is down. Well, that's just brilliant, another 50 people disconnected.
On top of that, another of the three owners of the whole corporation calls me saying he's getting dozens of totally weird mails from people he's never seen in his life. So I start digging into it and I discovered the biggest bombshell of the day, and of the month for that matter. Somebody abused my email server over the weekend to send out 6500 advertising spam mails!!! They were sending it to random addresses and as the return address they used the addresses of the corporation's owners, which they found on our website. That's why they're now getting those weird mails. Dammit! So quickly find where the hole is, why it happened and plug it fast. Within about an hour the hole was plugged, the abuse stopped, but those odd replies kept coming for a few more days. Phew, another lesson learned.
Well, now back to the disconnected desert. To connect there I need that special program. So I sent Erik with a CD from his building to another one that was still connected to the Internet so I could copy that CD remotely. The whole thing took about three hours and when I was finally done with it, I uncovered a pile of unprocessed papers on my desk and under them – a copy of the CD with the program I'd just been laboriously downloading. Erik had mailed it to me a few weeks earlier...
Anyway, I dial into that network in the desert and I'm redoing the configuration there. I stuffed in the new numbers, hit OK and before the screen even disappeared I noticed a typo. Oh, dammit! I don't speak Czech in front of my colleagues very often, but when I do, it's proper Czech swearing. Well, with that typo I cut myself off completely. By entering the wrong number (read: device address) I cut myself off from that device for good. So now only a physical person will do. The nightmare of all IT specialists came true, namely using a person who knows about computers only that you don't pour coffee into the keyboard to configure a fairly complicated network device. Oh well, better than flying out there. In the end it somehow worked out. Phew. By the end of the day I felt like it was already Friday. Sometimes I even feel I deserve that money. Occasionally, though.

The motorbike again...

The motorbike is, as the attentive reader has noticed, a favourite topic of my stories. I bought it more than a year ago and if you added up the time spent buying it, registering it, polishing it, hunting for parts, repairing it, hunting for a helmet, writing about the bike, advertising the bike and so on, it would be like skiing in the Krkonoše. That is, two hours in the lift queue, five minutes down :). Well, I've ridden 125 miles on the bike in that year, and if I ever had the courage to add up what it cost me in repairs and such, it would turn out I could have rented the most expensive Harley for that money and taken it out to dinner at the Hilton as well (for a sandwich :)).
The bike was parked on the pavement in front of the building, the only ones working on it were the pigeons. When sometime in March I decided to take the bike out for a ride again, I found out it was out of action again. Why? Because somebody came along and knocked off the spark plugs on the engine with a hammer, on both sides. I shook my head in disbelief at such a perverse kind of vandalism. So I went to the bike shop, bought new plugs, fitted them and then found out the battery was shot. So I left it for the next weekend, that I'd take it to the boat to charge it.
Sometime during the week I look and the new plugs are broken off again! That I really didn't get. I thought it must be some perverted opponent of motorcycling and my fists clenched at the thought of what I'd do to him if I caught him. Later I found out it's junkies who use the hollow porcelain top of the plug for smoking heroin, or whatever they're into around here. So I forgave them a bit, at least this makes some sense.
I bought new plugs again, charged the battery, put on the helmet, gloves, off I go and – nothing. The bike wouldn't start. So I got mad, called some guy who advertised that he buys up motorbikes, he came, gave me some money and hauled the naughty bike away. There. Take that.
Two days later the guy calls that there's something wrong with the gearbox and that he wants to return it. I was squirming, but then he said it runs now, so I told him to bring it over. So he brought it and I couldn't believe my eyes. The bike polished up, starts on the first try, the torn seat fixed, a new throttle cable (the old one had rusted through), just great. He didn't even want to take any extra money, just what he'd given me.
So I took a ride, listened to Jeff telling me the bike is more of a boomerang, and advertised the bike on the web again.
The very next day I got a mail, word for word (translated):
Hi,
I'm terribly interested in your motorcycle, please call me at 354654
With love
Sandra
So I'm thinking, girl, you've got guts, that bike weighs 350 kilos and when it fell on me once my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets before I got it back up. Anyway, I call the number and a deep bass answers: "Hello?"
So I, expecting a tender female voice, say I'm looking for Sandra. And that bass goes: "That's me, what do you want?"
We arranged to meet at ten at night (after volleyball) on the street by the bike. From a distance I see Sandra coming, high heels, tight jeans, a perm down to the shoulders, a blouse, ladybirds in the hair. When it got closer, I also noticed heavy makeup on a TOTALLY MANLY MUG!
Sandra wanted the bike terribly badly, since apparently it sat great between her legs :). Except the bike WOULDN'T START!
Over the weekend I somehow managed to start it and I had the urge to leave the engine running until somebody bought it :). I quickly put an ad on the web and somebody bought it that very evening. Phew.

Selling the Nissan

Given the new laws about importing motor vehicles into the Czech Republic, I had to start looking for something less than five years old and slowly say goodbye to my old rustbucket-tank. They also told me at work that since I'm always driving around with those mountain bikes and skis, I should get myself something bigger. Those 2.5 tons of sheet metal, six cylinders and three litres didn't seem big enough to them. They're weird. To me it seemed that driving a car with 256,000 km on the clock is a bit much even for me. Even though it looks like new and has never been driven anywhere but the motorway… So I decided to sell it. I put out an ad, and on Thursday Camile calls me. Let me remind you that I had my date with Sandra on Wednesday.
Camile clearly a female voice, I arranged to meet her at her workplace. A beautiful young lawyer, she liked the car, she'd take it, just in the afternoon her mechanic would take a look at it. So we met at the mechanic's and while the mechanic is brutally slagging off my car (naturally, he needs the work), an older, ugly, limping, rough-looking woman came into the shop, dressed a bit like a bloke. Camile had told me earlier she was expecting a baby, so it was clear they couldn't be together, even though they hugged and greeted each other like crazy.
Then they stepped aside and Camile came back saying that she'd love the car, but the other one doesn't want it and she's not going to wreck her marriage over it, right! They were expecting the baby together! I guess I shouldn't be surprised by anything here anymore.
What's interesting is that things like this surprise me, mainly because of how completely open people are about it here, but it doesn't bother or repel me in the slightest. 

The fighter jet collector

Different people have different hobbies. For instance, a friend of a colleague from work collects MiGs. Not models, actual MiGs. A MiG, that's one of those old Russian fighter jets that still guard our borders. This gentleman bought 11 of these fighters from the Polish army, once the Poles had figured out what new fighters they actually wanted to buy. He paid $10,000 for each of them and then had one stripped for parts and sank $150,000 into each of the remaining ten!! He claims they're in better shape now than when they were new from the factory, because he crammed modern electronics into them. Here's the proof: (or whatever)

I took this photo at Jeff's sister's place in Utah. Her neighbour has a house under a cliff. One day he overslept and suddenly hears a terrible rumble. He thought it was an earthquake. He waited for it to pass and went to have a look in the kitchen. Instead of a kitchen he had... A ROCK! A boulder broke off the cliff above the house and paid him a visit. If he hadn't overslept, he'd have been sitting there having breakfast. By the way, the insurance company didn't pay him a thing. Apparently it's an "act of God"! 

Puritans or free thinkers?

The last, totally Kocourkov-style story. I have to go to bed, it's one in the morning, Monday 20 May, only 50 days left until I fly home!
The other day I read in the papers how in LA some parents want to sue a teacher, because at the prom she personally checked every girl to see if she was wearing a thong under her skirt, and if she was, she sent her home so the boys couldn't look at her backside. Now that's what I call puritanism. On the other hand, today I wanted to go and watch a run through San Francisco called Bay to Breakers, which is about a 12km run with up to 100,000 people taking part and about half of them running NAKED! Unfortunately the weather today was so bad you wouldn't put a dog out, so I didn't put myself out either to bring back evidence with my inquisitive lens with its tenfold zoom! And believe me, I'm more sorry about it than you are!

Commuting San Francisco -  Prague every 5 weeks...

My first planned attempt to leave that warm little spot in sunny California and come home in June 2002 was thwarted by a promotion (and a pay rise :) ) that simply couldn't be turned down. The second attempt partly worked out. At Christmas 2002 I went home with our president's blessing to work and live partly in Prague. So now I spend a bit more than half my time in Prague and do my job over the Internet. It does mean flying to the USA about once every 5 weeks, but so far it's been a breeze.
As for the break in writing up my stories, since roughly January 2002 I've been spending all my free time as far away from a monitor as possible, which mostly means somewhere in the mountains, either on skis, on a bike, on foot, on snowshoes (once so far :) ) or playing volleyball, tennis or maybe basketball. So there isn't much time left for writing, more like none at all. With the exception of the Shasta climb, when the urge to share what it's like to get up to 4300 m was stronger than the lack of time.
The last few weeks have been pretty interesting, so let me give my writer's gut another go.

14 days in the USA without a car!

I was in the USA for just three weeks, and about one of those was a business trip around the south, so I didn't feel like hunting for anything more permanent to live in. I managed to talk Jirka and Madla into letting me crash at their place :). (Thanks!)
They have a flat in a cracking spot in Sausalito, a neighbourhood right on the bay with a view of downtown San Francisco on the other side. An ideal place to live, though for me with one small catch. It's about an hour forty to work by car. Not so much because it's geographically far, more because I have to get over two bridges and through the jam in San Francisco, or drive around the top, which is pretty far again. On top of that I had no car, at the time it was frozen in on a ship somewhere just outside Hamburg (see below). Originally I planned to buy some car for peanuts, but in the end I took it as a challenge and proved to the world (or to myself?) that you can survive 14 days without a car even in America. At seven in the morning I'd get on my bike, ride the 300 m or so to the harbour, get on the boat with the bike and head for downtown San Francisco. The boat has tables, a snack bar, toilets and so on, so a nice cuppa, breakfast, the paper, sometimes even brushing your teeth, right :), watching the sunrise etc. Half an hour later off the boat, a short ride across downtown SF to the metro. Then about 25 minutes on an empty metro under another bay (see map) to Oakland. Again a book or the paper, sitting down in peace. And from the metro another 4 km or so on the bike to work. The same thing back in the evening, usually already in the dark.

..

If you can't do it, delegate!

In the afternoon I didn't have to bike home from work, because I went with our HR director to their place for dinner. He told me how back in '94, when the whole neighbourhood on the hill where he lives burned down, he stood on the porch and watched the fire coming closer. In the end they put it out about 3 houses away from his. Several dozen houses burned down back then.
He needed something fixed on his computer, which I couldn't handle, since I don't remember archaic Win98 any more and fixing desktops hasn't been part of my job for about a year and a half. He was a bit surprised I couldn't manage it but agreed he'd "bring the patient to the hospital". There I gave one of my subordinates the job of reinstalling it with Windows XP and that was that. The magic of management. I got the dinner and someone else did the work :).

El Niño

On Tuesday I flew to a meeting at our hospital in the desert east of LA. By the way, the hospital is just a hop from Joshua Tree National Park, where U2 shot one of their albums. For the end of January it was damn hot. It's usually not very cold here in winter, but 30 degrees and a car so baking you couldn't touch the steering wheel is a bit much for January even here. Hurricane El Niño apparently brought California an extra warm winter this year.

Party at Erik's

On Wednesday I got invited to dinner at the house of my subordinate for Southern California. He lives in Seal Beach, a posh neighbourhood by the beach, in a massive house. His wife is a big shot in the management of some healthcare corporation (healthcare doesn't mean little money everywhere in the world, here it's rather the opposite), so even though they have no kids they've got a house with five bedrooms and a pond out back. She drives a big Volvo and Erik bought himself (or rather, she bought Erik?) a BMW 740IL. It's funny that even though I'm his boss I look more like a broke student :).
I brought wine only to find out I was the only one drinking alcohol. Once I'd nearly finished it off, they didn't have that hard a time talking me into staying the night. I was allotted the Green Room with a view of the waterfall and the pond :).

A face-to-face encounter with a skunk

I don't know what those people see in me, but on Thursday I got invited to dinner again, this time by Jean, the finance director for Southern California. We sat out behind their house (they don't have kids either and the house is the size of a smallish European hotel). Jean, though a frail little woman, drives a huge American pickup, the kind you could tow a 20-metre yacht with. Her husband only has an ordinary Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the word "ordinary" isn't even much of an irony, a Jeep is generally considered a not very reliable car of a lower class. That's also why it costs half as much here as in Europe, where it has more of a luxury reputation. Undeservedly.
So we're sitting in the garden, already after dark, and suddenly I hear some rustling. I peer into the dark and see two eyes, too big for a cat. Jean reckoned it was a raccoon. I'd never seen a raccoon, but I know they're common here. Jirka and Madla have two behind their house and they've even given them names. When it cheekily came closer, I saw that a raccoon is about the size of an Alsatian with a dachshund's legs and eyes like a calf's. I had no idea what to expect from an animal like that, and it unsettled me a bit that Jean pulled back and put her feet up on the table. I heroically stood up and stamped at the raccoon. It was already about a metre and a half from us. It looked at me curiously with those big eyes and didn't even budge. So I sat back down, uneasily, and it jumped up a tree and walked along a branch right over my head. I had it about a metre above me, which didn't help my nerves. After a while it strolled off into the dark again. Of course at the most important moments I never have my camera on me.
Jean also told a story about how she once heard an insane screeching behind the house, like someone squeezing three cats' tails at once with a nutcracker, so she ran outside, where she bumped into her neighbour, who'd heard it too. It turned out it was just a pair of raccoons shagging on the fence!
Later, when there was rustling in the bushes again, Jean went to fetch their camera. I heroically walked up to the bushes with it and shot more or less blindly at whatever was rustling in there. Then we tried to work out from the display what it was. It wasn't until about the fifth photo that Jean recognised it was a skunk! I don't know why it spared me, but apparently if it had sprayed me with its infamous liquid, I'd have stunk for another month, shower or no shower.

After dinner I drove back to the hotel in Redondo Beach. It was warm, so I was torn between a walk on the beach and the pool. The thought of wandering about in the dark among the rubbish on the beach made me go for the pool. I'm not a big fan of swimming, but apparently it's a must for my back. I also went so I could tell everybody I swam in an outdoor pool on the thirtieth of January, right :). It was no act of heroism, the pool is heated and it was still about 18°C outside.

Whale watching with Peter

Originally I was supposed to head back north on Thursday, but our vice president called me saying he was going out on Friday in his little motorboat and asking whether I'd like to join. We'd talked about it ages ago, so I couldn't refuse. The "little motorboat" turned out to be a solid yacht with a cabin where 4 people can sleep comfortably, a fridge, a sink, a toilet, a shower and so on. Two V6 4.3L engines. The weather was gorgeous again, in a T-shirt and shorts it was baking. I was also hot because, idiot that I am, I turned up late to the meeting point and nearly missed them. There was one more friend of Peter's with us, who told us twice that he'd been to the Albert Einstein museum and found out that Einstein got his doctorate at 24 and his wife at 23. He said it as if, obviously, that made his wife smarter than Einstein. I know his wife, she's a consultant for us, she's a right cow. Stuck-up and arrogant. She once tried to advise me how to do our company website, her ideas belonged in a kids' magazine.
We filled up 350 litres of petrol and headed out to sea. Los Angeles is a fairly industrial conurbation with loads of factories and drilling rigs with refineries, so I was surprised that right at the harbour exit we had to swerve around a seal! A bit later, and even more surprisingly, a dolphin flashed past off the port side in a leap!
Then, to my utter bliss, Peter let me take the helm. He warned me that I should accelerate slowly, first the bow lifts and the engines go well under water, and once it picks up speed the whole boat rises above the water. I thought that sounded a bit odd, but sure enough, within moments the whole boat was flying above the water at 55 km/h, which is damn fast on water. When you stuck your head out past the windscreen, you felt like the wind would rip it off. Well, just try it in a car :).
On the way back we parked for a while about 500 m from the shore and watched the goings-on around. Suddenly Peter let out some inarticulate shout and pointed to port. We looked that way and nothing. Peter explained that something huge had surfaced there and that it could be a whale. I put it down to the bottle of wine we'd just finished, but about two minutes later something really huge stirred up the water a bit further off. Peter took the helm and moved over that way, and before he even stopped, the body of something started rising out of the water, something that in the end was far bigger than our yacht. (Question: can you call it a yacht when it has no sails?) First a long ugly snout, then a black-and-white blotchy body. We jointly estimated the total length at about 15 metres, which is roughly the height of a seven-storey block of flats! When almost the whole whale had surfaced, it slapped back down into the water and rocked us nicely, even though we were about 50 m away from it. Then it surfaced just the top of its head and let out a geyser of water from the hole behind its neck. That was repeated about three times, each time somewhere else though, so Einstein's husband, who had the only camera, didn't manage to get a single decent shot.
From the harbour I drove straight to the airport and headed back to SF.

Skiing solo and the shuttle explosion

1. February 2003

On Friday evening I rented a car at the airport so I could go for a ski. I set off at 7.30 in the morning, and on my own, because I couldn't talk anybody into a one-day trip. Even though I rented the cheapest car they had and even though it was an American car (read American=cheap junk), I quite enjoyed it. It was a Dodge Neon and it had the looks and the handling of a European lower-middle-class car, nice and easy. On the way I heard on the news about the Columbia shuttle crash, so the whole drive I listened to interviews like: 

„And we have here James Smith, who apparently heard the Columbia explosion this morning while brushing his teeth in southern Texas, it's truly a national tragedy, tell us how it was“
James (heavy Southern accent): „Weeell, I was juuust brushin' my teeeth like normal, that's what I aaalways do on a Saturday mornin', and I hear this bang outside“
„Sorry James, could you describe that sound for us in more detail?“
„Well it just banged. At first I thoought the neighbour's twins had tied dynamite to the cat's tail again, but then it seemed a bit too early for that. So I went outside and looked at the sky, and there wasn't nothin' to see up there, so I went back in to get it on with the wife like we always do on a Saturday mornin'....“
„We thank James from southern Texas for the interview and we're switching over to Florida, where our reporter Joe is waiting in front of the locked gates of the Space Center until he finds something out“

I got to the slopes (North Star near Lake Tahoe) at 10.15, but I was so terribly hungry that I had to go for a pizza first. The sun wasn't out yet anyway, so I figured I'd wait. After eating I went to the so-called Demo tent, where they lend out the best ski models for testing before you buy them. I rented Dynastar Cross 9s, brilliant all-round carving skis.
I had an afternoon pass, which is only supposed to start at 12.15, but they let me up in the gondola as early as 11.30. There's no way to get to the lifts up top other than that gondola, so nobody checks anything up there. Honza Dlouhý and I recently noted that if this were in Czechia, there'd already be trails trodden up the hillsides everywhere and the lift operators would go bankrupt :).
I did one run and a crazy snowstorm started. Last year I skied here about ten times and it was never anything other than a totally blue sky and sunshine, so I'd only brought black sunglasses, in which you can see sod all in snow and fog. I told myself that since I'd already paid for the rental car, driven all that way, paid for the ski rental and the pass, I wasn't going to give up now. The way down was torture. Either I put the black glasses on and saw sod all for the first few metres, and then they got covered in snow and I saw two lots of sod all, or I went without them and the moment I exceeded the walking speed of a pensioner in a loden coat my eyes watered unbearably. More or less I skied that hill blind, bracing my legs for a bump or a dip, pretty thrilling.
While I was freezing on the lift on the way up in the blizzard, I decided that losses be damned, you can't ski like this. Up on the hill I went into the bar. Evidently more people had that idea, because there was no room to spit for the crowds and I sat with a beer on a rubbish bin. At the bar they also sold normal ski goggles, but then I remembered how I'd been packing back in Czechia, I had my goggles in my hand and was thinking: „What do I need these for, they're for skiing in lousy weather, I'm going to be skiing in California!“ so I didn't take them. Plus they cost about $45.
When the weather hadn't improved after another half hour, I finally went and bought the goggles. Luckily the last pair left had a broken buckle, so I squeezed a 40% discount out of the girl and happily headed back to the slopes. There was already about 15cm of fresh snow and no people, so in the end I had a fantastic time. I liked the skis so much that I considered buying them. But when I asked the price at the Demo tent, it dawned on me not only why I liked them so much, but also that I wasn't going to buy them. They cost $725 (about 21,000 CZK).
On the last run I got so carried away that I properly pulled my knee ligaments in the deep snow. Not great, considering we've got another volleyball match on Monday, and of course a vitally important one (like every other one).
The drive back was pure hell. The first time I go skiing in something other than an off-road car and of course the first time there's loads of snow on the highway. Californians absolutely can't drive on snow, they put chains on as soon as it rains, so the drive that usually takes 2.5-3 hours took me 5.5. I'd originally wanted to return the car in the city, but I arrived so late that I had to take it to the airport, where the rental place is open 24H a day. Getting from the airport to Jirka and Madla's on a Saturday evening is a bit of an adventure even under normal circumstances. Except it was 18°C outside, and I was wearing stretch ski pants and a warm winter jacket, with snow chains and poles in my hands, ski boots on my back and the rest of the ski gear. In the first bus the card machine didn't work, in the metro they only sell tickets for cash and in the second bus they don't give change. Sometimes it's really handy to have your own car :(. I hobbled into bed with my pulled knee at about half past midnight.

Beach volleyball the day after skiing

2 February 2003

In the morning Jirka, Madla and I set off on mountain bikes across the uninhabited hills of Marin to play volleyball. Jirka always claims he knows a new shortcut that'll get us to the volleyball in no time. The sun was glorious again, nobody wanted to believe my snowstorm from yesterday (though it was 300km further north and 2200m higher up), in the sun it was definitely 25 and in shorts and a T-shirt we were roasting. That's what I call the beginning of February :). After about two hours of insane climbs in the forest we arrived at the park in Larkspur, where the volleyball meet-up was. My legs were still stiff from yesterday's ski boots, so my volleyball performance was more of a comedy act than a sport. Next to us a bunch of girls in bikinis were playing beach volleyball, which distracted my (and not only my) attention even further. Still, we had a nice game, got our mugs sunburnt, and then grilled some meat, sausages and corn on the barbecue in the park, washed it down with a few Pilsners and Petr's slivovitz and after dark headed home on the bikes, this time by road. I'm always cursing and honking at cyclists with no lights, this time they were honking at me.

Logistics exam: failed

Back at uni, when I signed up for International Logistics for 8 credits in my master's programme and flunked it, losing those 8 credits made the rest of my studies pretty tough. You were only allowed to lose about 14 credits over the whole degree. Lately it's been turning out that maybe they threw me out of that subject fair and square :).
First I had the Mrkves over for a 14-day visit. They came with two bikes, I managed to pick them up at the airport on time, show them most of the attractions both on a mountain bike and on foot in the mountains, and even get them plus the bikes back to the airport on time. It's just that during a visit to the SF opera I got so carried away that I left my new digital camera on the seat, but more about that in the Pertosyndrome section.
It went worse when Radka and Petr came to visit. They flew into LA and made me promise in advance that I'd definitely be waiting there, otherwise they'd be totally screwed, since they can't really speak the language. I swore up and down I'd be there on time. Man proposes, Los Angeles traffic disposes. I got there late, but it turned out they could find their way around the crowds after all, they'd already picked up their suitcases and were puffing away outside the terminal. I think each of them had a lit cigarette in each hand, a 14-hour fast like that is rough :).
Again I showed them the Californian attractions and after 14 days it was time to drive them to the airport.
Now I'll just quote the entry from the Pertosyndrome: (see www.kocourkov.cz/Pertosyndrom.htm)

Honza was supposed to drive his aunt and uncle to the airport on Friday morning, they were flying to Prague at 8.00 in the morning from SFO. From Honza's place to SFO it's about 20-25 minutes, he goes there all the time, no problem. So he set the alarm for 5.30 so they could leave at six, meaning they'd have 1.5 hours at SFO for check-in. He also immediately booked himself a flight to LA at 7.45 for a business trip so the drive to SFO wouldn't go to waste. Said and done, they set off at six. On the way it occurred to him to stop by work to pick up some stuff he wanted to take to Prague, then he found out that at SFO the car park is considerably further from the terminal than in Oakland, so by the time they got to the international terminal it was already 7.00. He searched for Delta Airlines in vain, they don't fly out of international. That's when it hit him that flying to Prague via New York doesn't necessarily have to be an international flight. So a sprint across the airport back to the domestic terminal. On the way Radka dropped her ticket, someone shouted at her, she went back and picked it up.
They came panting up to the Delta check-in desk at 7.25. An attempt to abuse the short first-class queue was met with the clerk's stony, unhelpful mug. An attempt to jump the roughly 80-strong economy queue would have been successful if it hadn't been for the events of September 11. Since then there's a new rule that checked baggage isn't accepted later than 30 minutes before departure. It was 7.31. The computer had already been blocked from accepting baggage for that flight. Given that the tickets couldn't be rebooked, the only chance was to fly without luggage, so Radka and Petr took off with nothing but a handbag and a carry-on case as if they were on a day trip to Průhonice :) Once they got over the initial shock, they apparently had a good laugh imagining Honza lugging their bags and his own back to the car while his business flight took off without him :)

Another international logistics operation was shipping the car. When I found out that as someone who'd been living abroad for a longer period I could bring my property, including a car, back to the Czech Republic duty-free as part of relocating, I looked up how much it costs to ship a car, stuffed it with the things I need at home and sent it by container to Bremen in Germany. I sent the car off around December 12, it was supposed to be in Germany in mid-January. I was flying out of the USA on December 22, so I kept only the bare essentials, crammed everything else into the car and sold my furniture so I could give up the flat (the rent saved for the month I'd be in CZ pays for almost two return tickets). On the roof of the car I also strapped skis and a wicker armchair. Inside were of course Radka's and Petr's suitcases, which they'd been waiting for in vain for over a month.
The first mistake was putting the skis in there. Before I saw them again I had to rent skis five times, each pair worse than the last. When I was finally reunited with my skis, the aggressive sea air had rusted the edges so badly that even a week of skiing didn't get all the rust off. The second mistake was relying on the “mid-January” estimate. I took mid-January to mean January 15. I needed to pick up the car in Germany, drive it to the Czech Republic and then fly straight back to the USA. I bought my ticket for January 19. Mistake. Thanks to lousy weather the ship was 10 days late and only arrived in Bremen when I was already enjoying the Californian sun again. What's more, nobody but the owner could collect the car (German law), so it had to wait somewhere in the port in a car park, full of stuff (including my computer, for example), until I got back to Europe. Naturally I was worried they'd steal the things out of the car or the skis, but the problem turned out to be elsewhere, see below.
I flew out of San Francisco on Saturday. The evening before the flight the Czech gang organised a party at Kamila's for my, Tomáš's and Jindra's birthdays. We ate and drank well and in my drunken state I happily accepted every little parcel anyone wanted sent to relatives in Prague, saying I had a giant suitcase and everything would fit. Unfortunately I wasn't keeping track of who was giving me what and who I was supposed to hand it to. When I sobered up in the morning and piled it all up, I got a bit of a chill. Oh well, the suitcase really is big, everything fitted. I dragged the suitcase, the skis (also a gift, but from me), two laptops and a ten-kilo leather jacket to the airport (it was about 25 degrees Celsius and the sun was blazing), queued up at check-in and heaved it with relief onto the scales with a thud. The lady looked at the digital scale, then leaned in in disbelief to check whether her eyes were deceiving her, and then cried out “Holy smokes!!!!” (translation: Holy cigarettes!!! :) ). 59KG!!! Sir, do you know the limit is 32kg? And you've got skis as well? Well, if you want to catch this plane, you'll have to sprint across the airport, buy a box, take 27kg out of that suitcase and pack it into the box. My feeble objection that I'd had the same suitcase on the way over didn't soften her up. So a sprint for a box (price with tape 14.50$), a bit of cursing about what a bunch of rip-off merchants they are, and a sprint back. Moving 27kg out of the suitcase wasn't such a problem, but the stuff both in the box and in the suitcase was rattling around like mad. To pad out the wrapped gifts a bit I had to add my jacket to the box, which turned out to be a fundamental mistake in Frankfurt (-5°C). Luckily in all the chaos they at least didn't notice that the skis were already my third piece of luggage and that I should have paid 50$ extra for them.
When I got to Europe, I had to hand the parcels over to various people in various places. Mrs Křížková rang me persistently about it, about 9 times while I was in Germany before I picked up and, for roughly 50 CZK, informed her that I'd hand it over within 24 hours, and then another 13 times to Italy when she found out I'd given part of her consignment to someone else entirely :). As Honza Delší later remarked, a telephone in the hands of grannies can be a mighty weapon.

A quick meet-up with Kubík in Frankfurt

On Sunday I landed in Frankfurt. I look at the board and see my connection to Prague leaves in a bit under an hour, sweet. Just to check the flight number... and lo and behold, it doesn't match. What, my plane doesn't leave for another 6.5 hours? Oh well, I'll change my ticket, I do it all the time. I queue up and a grumpy German woman informs me she's not changing anything, because my luggage is checked in for that flight in 6 hours and under the new regulations after 9/11 I'm not allowed to fly on a different plane than my luggage. Great. Now what.
Luckily the Krauts employ clever programmers from abroad, so a couple of my old classmates live in Frankfurt. I tried ringing around and caught Kubík at home. He instructed me how to get to the main train station, that we'd meet there. I got there and since the station is massive, I immediately texted him where I was. These phones that work on every continent are a beauty! Standing around in just a T-shirt wasn't exactly warm, but I had the prospect of a cosy pub ahead. So I wait there and wait. And wait. Fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour. Then I couldn't take it anymore and moved my frozen, starving body into a snack bar right next to McDoofus. I'm surely not going to those disgusting American hamburger heads, right. I didn't go to McDoofus in two years in America, I'm not going there in the Reich either. Mistake. It was exactly at McDonald's that Kubík was looking for me. When I finally got him on the phone, it turned out I'd been sending those texts to his landlineL. When we finally met up, we had just enough time for one beer and I had to head back to the airport. Which goes to show that arranging to meet someone at Frankfurt station without specifying it any further is stupid. Even in the age of modern communication technology. 

Importing a Jeep from the USA

In Prague I barely managed to get some sleep and at 4 in the morning we were already tearing off to Germany again to pick up the car in Bremen. The trip went by briskly, the German motorway with no speed limit was seriously fun. When we got to the port, another grumpy German woman tells me: "But you've got stuff in that car!" I remembered how painstakingly I'd typed up a list on the computer of every little trinket I'd loaded into the car, so the shipper would know about it. She says they never got that list from the American side. Well, no problem apparently, we'll drive my other car right into the port, transfer everything over and we'll go to customs with an empty car! Nice how they've got it sorted in Germany :). So we set off to the car I'd last seen two months earlier. The chair off the roof gone, oh well. Ahaa, they crammed it inside! I get into the car and there's a horrible stench. What is that? Uuuugh, mould! Everywhere, on the floor, on the seats, on the dashboard, on the steering wheel. Stinks like an old cellar. A crust of ice on all the windows, both outside and especially inside. Great. Well, I'll drive it out into the sun, it'll thaw. I overcame my disgust at the car I'd loved so much not long ago and climbed in. Well, at least it started. What's this, why won't it go? Right, it won't shift, must be the oil in the transmission. I check the oil and there was NOTHING in there!!! An automatic won't shift without oil. In the end I topped it up with 3.5 litres. A full fill is 3.8 l... Oh well, main thing is it's moving now, let's try the radio, this car has the best sound system I've ever had. Damn it, the right speaker just crackles, the mould probably ate itL. It only started playing after about 100 km.
Driving back to Bohemia that same day would have been madness, not that the car wouldn't go – a proper dose of transmission oil and the heating on full blast to defrost it fixed that – but it was already late. We only made it to Hamburg, found a motel and had a look at Hamburg by night.
Driving across the whole of Germany in two cars and not losing each other wasn't that hard, because I'd bought a new toy, two Motorola walkie-talkies the size of a mobile with a range of about 3 km. It was quite good fun, apart from that insane smell of mould, so I had the heating on full and the window open at the same time.
I discovered a few interesting and very depressing facts. A full tank, which cost me about $25–28 in America, comes to about $85 in Germany. The Jeep does go faster than the 110 km/h allowed in the USA, but unfortunately it has an instant fuel consumption readout. When it showed 22 l/100 km at 140, I was swearing. But when at 190 km/h it steadily showed 44 l/100 km, I was left speechless. And then when the cruise control, after being set at 160 km/h (it doesn't work any higher), automatically slowed down to 130, I gave up my passion for speed and drove the rest of the way at 130.
At the Cínovec border crossing a car this size with no plate on the front attracted attention from far away. The Germans came running out of the booth even in the frost and snow and pulled me over to the side. They went through all the papers and found nothing suspicious.
The Czechs surprised me with how helpful they were. They were most amused by my licence plate and couldn't believe it was legal and valid. One of them even ran out and shouted into the opposite window: "Franta, you plonker, get over here quick, you've never seen anything like this!" Then they wondered why I had a CZ sticker on it when I lived in California. "All Czechs living in America have one so they can recognise each other," I say. That probably pleased them, because they let quite a lot slide after that. We all knew they weren't going to ask me for duty, but under the applicable laws and tables they wanted a six-figure sum from me as a deposit on the duty, which would later be refunded to me at the inland customs office. "You probably won't have that much money on you, will you?" says one of them. Well, I don't normally carry that much loose change in my pockets.
In the end I talked them into it so that I'm not clearing the car through customs at all, that I'm actually just coming for a visit and then I might happen to change my mind and clear it at the inland customs office.
The day after came the ceremonial handover of the suitcases that had parted with their owners two months earlier in San Francisco, see the story International Logistics. Not even the wine inside them cracked from the frost, so all's well that ends well. If anyone else fancies trying out what it's like to live for two months without all the basic things, come and visit too :).

Skiing in Italy, Czech style

The day after getting back from Germany we packed our gear, got on the bus in Budějovice and set off on a ski trip to Italy. Or at least I thought it was to Italy. In the car park below the slope there were 11 Czech coaches, countless Czech cars and, without exaggeration, Czech made up 70 to 80% of what you heard on the slopes. In the Czech hotel Czech cooks made Czech food and pulled Czech beer. Well, Czech – it was Starobrno, so it was either beer from Bohemia or from Moravia, but can I call it Czech?
Every now and then after dinner we had to pop into the local pub to make sure we'd really left Bohemia. Even on the slopes the pubs and snack bars were full of Czechs, which is actually a positive development, because in 1990 I was in Venice, which was packed with Czechs (roughly 70 Karosa coaches in the car park) but the pubs were totally empty. Back then the Czechs just sat on the kerbs and scoffed schnitzels from homeL. So, progress. What was interesting was how hostile Czechs were towards each other this time. Kind of as if they were saying "What are all you other Czechs doing here, this was supposed to be my luxury trip abroad!!!"

California Iron Man

• Is it possible to drink 8.5 litres of water in 7 hours and only go for a pee 3 times?
• Is it possible that you'd find 100 people willing to pay $160 just so they can torture themselves for 6-11 hours in 34-degree heat running around the mountains? (Total elevation gain of the race 1350m)
• Is it possible to sign up with no training at all for a race where in one day you have to run 10km on trails, paddle 7km in a kayak, run another 8km off-trail over the hills and finally ride another 35km on a mountain bike off-road?
• Is it possible to pull the same thing off in a team of 4 people, when one is a 45-year-old woman, the second a roughly 48-year-old bloke, the third a dweeb from a concrete block of flats in Ústí who last ran (further than for the bus) back in high school, and only one of them is a buff lunatic who trains 4 times a week?
• Is it possible that duct tape, "ducktape", or "atomovka" as we call it in Czech, helps with cramps in your thighs?

The answer to all the previous questions is… Hmm, see below. And now, how the whole thing came about and why.

On Independence Day the whole gang was at Milan's cabin and in the evening by the fire one of the celebrating women asked me whether I'd like to go for a bike ride with her and her husband the next day. Of course I would. Right after that it came out that the week before she and her husband had done an Adventure marathon, which was 120km on a mountain bike, 32 km of running and 8km of swimming, all of it in max. 30 hours in one go :(. That shut me up, I suddenly wasn't all that keen on going anywhere on a bike with them...
In the end I went and because I had a (probably) better bike, I even dropped them on a few rocky steep climbs, because their wheels started spinning and they had to walk. Which I shouldn't have done, because it gave them the impression that I was in god knows what kind of shape. The punishment came the very next weekend.
On Tuesday I got an email saying that a team member for a race had dropped out on them at the last minute, and that I was the only one who could save them. I laughed HAHA and replied that I last ran back in high school and only 1500m. They said this is only 8 miles of running, 20 miles on the bike and 4 miles in a kayak, no swimming, that it'll be fun, that they'll help me and blah blah. They broke me on Friday, and only after I told them up front that I don't think I can run it and that they should count on that.
It was only on Friday evening that it turned out that the two I know wouldn't be there, so I'm going into this with three people I've never seen in my life, and Americans on top of that. I was supposed to meet them at the campsite by the race start, by mobile phone. Not only was there no signal after I arrived at the camp, but on top of that the woman gave me a mobile number without the area code, so I might as well have shouted out of the window (here mobiles have the same area codes as landlines, so there's no guessing it).
By some miracle we unfortunately found each other in the end, so there was no escape. There was still a chance I wouldn't be able to get hold of the mandatory equipment like a compass, a life vest and a pile of other junk, but in the end we got it all together.
In the morning all those lunatics who do nothing but go around doing races like this gathered at the start and they scared the hell out of me. Expensive bikes, jerseys, shaved legs, ripped bodies, special shoes, shin guards and above all dead serious expressions on their faces. About 100 of them and the rest of my laughter was gone. I set my goal for Saturday: "SURVIVE!" No ambitions to finish the race or anything, just quit in time to survive it, even if the rest of the team stands on its head. The rules said we mustn't get further than 100m from the rest of the team, so mysteriously getting lost on the course and "accidentally" ending up in some pub was out. On top of that the buff guy on our team looked like he'd sort me out properly if I dropped out somewhere. And as if that wasn't enough, in the morning I found out the entry fee was $160 per person! Well, cheers. Weather forecast: "Hot as hell, sun all day."
The first part of the race went well. A run uphill, about 500 metres there, 500 back and hop on the bike to move to the start of the running section. Piece of cake, I thought to myself, I ride a bike now and then. On the first hill, when I started shifting down to the easy gears, it dawned on me that "now and then" isn't quite enough. Even though the hill was a brute, NOBODY slowed down. As team support, in the worst moments Mark (a member of our team, not the buff one) grabbed my saddle and pushed. At first it hurt my pride quite a bit, but then I said to myself "Oh well, the goal for Saturday is to survive, not to play the hero".
I arrived at the start of the run pretty knackered. It was only about 4km on the bike, but at a hideous pace over a similarly hideous hill. Jump off the bike, helmet flies into the grass and we're running. At that moment the temperature had already climbed to 93F, which is about 34 Celsius, and there it stayed all day.
The first kilometre of the run of course had to be in direct sun, just the way Johnny likes it best. When we reached the forest, I knew exactly what I wanted: "Screw this!!". Unfortunately I didn't have enough breath to say it out loud and before I knew it they'd tied a bungee cord to Mark's back and clipped it to me on the hip belt of my pack on my belly. So is it going to drag me along or what? What kind of nonsense is that? It wasn't nonsense, it had one advantage for the team and one disadvantage for me. I simply couldn't stop.
Thus came the first crucifixion of Johnny Christ. They dragged me over hills through the forest like an ox to the slaughter. I knew we were running to the place where the canoe section starts, meaning there'd be some water there. With all my mental strength I tried to focus on the fact that I could already see the surface glinting through the trees. I must have a low capacity for self-suggestion, because it took an hour before I actually saw it. And even then we had to keep running along the water. After a while though I got into such a trance that I probably didn't care.
I was looking forward to flopping into the water, but there was no time for that. I had to carry the canoe to the water and they assigned me Annette in the bow (the last member of our team). For god's sake, can't they see what kind of figure I've got, and they put me in a boat with a woman on top of that! We'll never get anywhere! Except my chauvinism miscalculated badly. Annette grabbed the paddle (me too, I was holding it like a monkey with a football, because I'd never had a paddle with a blade on both ends in my hands before, only a canoe paddle, which is a different thing) and took off so hard we left a wake behind us like a motorboat. Those two guys had their work cut out keeping up with us. I had my hands full of thumbs trying to keep her pace and although I'd been looking forward to the kayak section (you do sit down for it, right?) after about 150m I'd almost rather have been running on the leash again. Naturally the wind picked up and blew against us from the left. On the way back across the lake it naturally blew against us again, this time from the right. After about 1.5 hours of furious flailing about in the water I was glad I could run again. But I'd gathered enough strength to refuse the leash. The way back to the bikes wasn't anywhere near as agonising. Since morning I'd drunk 3 litres of water and sucked down about three sachets of some horribly sweet energy gel.
As we were approaching the bikes, you could hear sirens wailing and a helicopter. That's not a good sign anywhere near 100 lunatics on bikes. Sure enough, there was a helicopter by the bikes and they were carrying a cyclist into it on a stretcher. He'd been hit by a car :(. Surprisingly it turned out he wasn't a race participant but a random cyclist riding by. In any case, because of the helicopter the race had to be stopped for 17 minutes, because you couldn't safely leave the parking lot. Well, for 17 minutes of rest I definitely wasn't cursing them out.
After the rest and back on the bike I was full of energy, relatively speaking of course. We rode back to base camp, dumped the bikes, refilled the water in the packs on our backs and set off on the orienteering run. That differed from normal running in that you didn't run on trails, but across meadows on steep hills where the thistles were knee-deep. (how sharp American thistles are will become apparent at the finish!). Before the race Annette had forced special untearable shin guards on me, which saved me about 0.5 litres of blood.
Another advantage of the orienteering run was that from time to time Oliver (the buff one on our team) had to stop and figure out with the compass where to go next. Originally I thought this would be one of the few situations where I could be of some use (after all, every Czech went through civil defence drills and all that, right?), but in the end I was glad it wasn't needed.
The task was to find 8 of the 12 marked checkpoints on the map in any order and write down the codes. If it hadn't been in hills you had to climb on all fours and if it hadn't been the hottest heat in the world, it wouldn't have been such a horror. But as it was, it was. On the top of one hill I was again thinking about how to phrase the sentence "Screw you, you idiots, you can kiss my a..." in English. Sorry for writing it out so literally here, but at that moment sentences like "Dear friends, I'm terribly sorry but I'm afraid I'll have to announce my premature withdrawal from the race" really didn't occur to me.
In the end my mood was lifted by finding one checkpoint by myself, while the rest of the team was crawling around in some nearby bushes. I used the method known as "Watch where the other teams are coming out of and forget the compass".
After the orienteering run I topped up 2 litres of water in the pack again and changed into my bike shoes.

We set off on the part that was supposed to be my strong suit. Off-road biking. Unfortunately the discipline "off-road biking" is not the same as "off-road biking after 4 hours of running in the sun". So on the first climb, another crisis. This time I wasn't thinking about quitting the race any more, my ego would never survive quitting on the bike of all things (I'm a bit afraid it would never survive quitting at all, I'd rather drop dead than admit I'm not up to it). I just wanted to slow down a bit, maybe push the bike up the first hill and then we'd see.
But Oliver couldn't allow that, so the leash again, this time on the handlebars. I put up with it only for the first hill, about 400 metres. Then came a downhill, so I made the excuse that I had to unclip and then I never clipped back in. Luckily I caught my breath and my rhythm and for the rest of those agonising 30 kilometres I mostly wasn't even last. But I probably didn't look too optimistic, because at the finish a few people came up to me who were quite surprised I'd made it there at all. They were the ones I'd been joking around with on the steepest climb. (The Czech nation has this special quality that even in the worst situations (I wanted to write "in the deepest crap", but that's too vulgar, even if more apt) it's in the mood for jokes. Americans find this terribly hard to understand, so when I told them jokes during the floods in Bohemia that were going around CZ (like "Cottage for sale at Slapy, can be viewed at Charles Bridge") they didn't laugh at all and said we're a bunch of cynics.
So when I was pushing my bike up a hill on my last legs, death in my eyes, and some guy overtook me who'd decided to do this section without a bike, I said to him "Hey, don't you want a bike, maybe you'd get up this hill better?", he looked at me strangely and didn't laugh at all :).
In the second part of the bike leg I suddenly got a mysterious second wind (maybe those energy drinks and gels, maybe that banana or maybe just the thought of the finish) and I was flying as fast as I could. It helped a lot that whenever it went downhill I simply forgot about the brakes and told myself that everything I don't brake away I won't have to pedal up the hill opposite. And I also have a spring under my backside on the bike, so most of the time I really did coast further than the rest of the team. At the end Mark even told me I'd apparently been using the "sand bagging" method, which is something like "Pretend you've got nothing so you can rake in more than the others", meaning I simply had more energy than I was showing. I don't know, I wouldn't want to find out the opposite, so better to finish with some reserve than to end up like one of those professional buff guys from another team who ran so long that he passed out and they had to give him injections to bring him round. By the way, they disqualified him for those injections :).

At the finish Oliver and I had to wait for Annette and Mark, because it's proper for the team to arrive together. We dumped the bikes in the corral and walked through the finish arch into the finish to the applause of those who were still left there. Originally I'd expected that if I ever made it to that finish, I'd collapse like they do on TV after a marathon and lie there for several hours. Surprisingly I was able to stand for a few more minutes and pretend I was alive. The whole thing took us almost exactly 7 hours. Chilled watermelon has never tasted as good to me as it did there at the finish. Even better than cold beer. The offer of a grilled sausage struck me as pretty funny. In the end I really did collapse into the grass and I think I even fell asleep.
When I came to, I went to look at the board with the standings. I was a bit surprised that the placings weren't up yet for all of the roughly 30 teams, but I was more interested in the time it took us. So I read it and almost immediately forgot it. My brain was still a bit out of it.
I went back to the grass and watched the goings-on. Surprisingly more teams kept coming in and the camp was filling up. After a while Mark came over to me (he was the only one showing a bit of enthusiasm about the fact that we'd not only survived but also made it to the finish. It was his first race in his life too).
So he comes over to me and says:
"So, how do you reckon we should split the money?"
That cheered me up, because evidently I wasn't the only one whose brain had gone soft in that heat.
"What money, what are you on about," I say to him.
"Well, the $300 we won!".
"Are you nuts, how won, just be glad we weren't last!"
"No, seriously, we're third!"
I jumped up and ran to the board (read: I got up like a pensioner in the worst phase of chronic rheumatism and hobbled over to the board). I look at the numbers, confusion, I can't make sense of it, but finally, well yeah, really, among the 4-person teams we're third! They must be kidding, those other buff guys who do this for a living are going to beat me to death alive for this injustice! (by the way, I was really the only one in the whole race who didn't have special cycling shorts with padding, but completely ordinary cotton shorts with no padding. Not to mention my bargain-bin shoes which are anything but running shoes).
I hobbled back to the grass and thought about how that was possible. Sure, overall among the solos, pairs, trios and foursomes we were only fourteenth out of about forty, but they only rank you within your category, not overall. Where did it go wrong? How can we be third?
It was only at the official ceremony, when we had to line up, get photographed for the official website of the race series http://www.bigblueadventure.com  and collect the prizes, that I believed it a little.
Once I'd recovered enough to be willing to step out of the shade and go look at my bike in the corral, another shock was waiting for me. Both tyres punctured and COMPLETELY flat! For a moment I thought some pro just couldn't stand the fact that a dweeb in tracksuit-ish shorts had finished before him, but when I saw the thistle spines sticking out of the tyres, it dawned on me that I'd just been lucky that they went down slowly enough for me to make it to the finish. Then on Sunday I found 6 punctures in the tubes!! The thought of not having those shin guards, when the thistles even punctured the tyres, sent a shiver down my spine. Actually nonsense, in that heat there couldn't have been any shivers, not even down my spine.
Even eleven hours after the start, meaning 5 hours after the first one arrived at the finish and 4 hours after us, more teams were still coming in. Insane. I said my goodbyes and folded my body into the car. I don't like automatics much, but sometimes the absence of a clutch comes in damn handy.
I set off towards Stanislaus, to visit Milan in the mountains once more before I disappear from the continent and at the same time from the bachelor market. After about an hour of driving my bladder spoke up to remind me that today I'd drunk 4 full two-litre bladders of water plus two small energy drinks for breakfast. I stop in the parking lot in front of Safeway, open the door and boldly step out of the car. It immediately nearly dropped me to my knees, cramps in both thighs. I just barely managed to grab the roof rack on the car and I'm hanging there in my death throes. Just then a supermarket employee walks by, one of those guys who collects the shopping carts and brings them to the entrance, and with a phrase learned from his job description he asks me "How are you doing?". Nicely timed little question. I always thought they couldn't care less how people are doing, let this be my proof.
Still twisting with cramps, I walked through the store looking for the toilet. People looked at me rather strangely and thought to themselves:
"Extremely dusty dirty tracksuit-ish shorts, a similarly looking once-white moiré T-shirt, socks and shoes covered in thistles and bits of tape, the whole body a mix of sweat and dust and on top of that that weird expression on his mug, almost as if he had cramps or something. Isn't that a wayfarer? Damn right it's a wayfarer"
It's a good thing rule number one for every American is above all "Look after yourself first, then yourself again, then for a long long time nothing and then have another look around to see if you couldn't do something for yourself". So they let me crawl to wherever I needed to get.
When I hobbled out of the store, relieved, with a sausage in my hand and at least my face washed, I remembered that I'd actually already had those cramps in my thigh once today! It was about halfway through the cycling phase and Mark had them too. He dealt with it by wrapping his thighs tightly with thick duct tape he had in his pack. He claimed it helps and in my desperation I believed him. And it really did help for the rest of the race. Now explain that to me, you doctors and therapists with your magnesium deficiency. Magnesium my foot, what you need is duct tape and pull it good and tight! :).
Naturally I spent the whole Sunday shuffling gingerly from the sofa to the armchair and back, depending on where I'd just fallen asleep. Except that in the morning Milan and a bunch of mates dragged me out for a walk, which didn't please me much, but at least I got moving.
Now it's Monday afternoon and I'm getting ready for volleyball. I feel relatively OK.

BTW: If I survived this, then maybe I'll survive the wedding too