Wife and daughter are big fans of Dead Mobster, and while I’m not, I do like the garlic rolls and the Lobster Bisque. Anyway, how can you hose up Lobster Bisque? between that and the garlic biscuit, I dreampt last night that I was out on a job, on a machine so worn out that it should have been replaced ages before, and for whatever reason one of my co-workers-the lady who does all the parts ordering and makes sure our expenses get paid on time- was there helping me.

Now, she’s a tiny thing, but she has the soul of an engineer. When and where she grew up, Girls didn’t become Engineers, so she’s a housewife and personal assistant, but she would have been an excellent wrench, but for a bit more upper body strength.

Anyway, she and i are looking at this machine, and she’s being uncharacteristically frank. “This machine is fucked. We shouldn’t be trying to ressurect it, we should roll the stone back over the cave and start a fire.”

I agreed, but still, there we were.

The base of the machine was full of chips, having been used for many, many years with very little maintenance, and the chips were predominantly cast iron and aluminum; the cast was rusty and caked, and the aluminum (and apparently a bit of magnesium) were pretty evenly mixed.

“can we get this machine outside to clean it?” she said, and while I thought it an unusual request, the customer complied, I pulled the power and air, and they forklifted it far out onto the apron of the loading dock and sat it on blocks. They brought out a Hotsy and sat it there, and we went to lunch.

Not before she lit a cigarette out of a large book of matches from the Gobbler, took one long hit (She doesn’t even smoke!) and stuck the cigarette butt first into the end of the pack. She placed the pack on the congealed mass of rusty iron shavings and alloys in the base of the machine and we went off to have a gyro, whcih she ate daintily with her face, using her hands not once to nibble the pieces of Doner Kebab off the plate. Never even got a drop of tsa-tsi-ki sauce anywhere on her. Me, I used both hands and eleven napkins, and by the time I was done, I looked like I blew a seal.

When we returned, the Goldschmidt reaction was in full bloom. Representatives of the company were standing around, trying to extinguish the flames with what they had at hand, which was the Hotsy. It wasn’t working so well. The melt burned through the base of the machine and a trickle of molten iron and boiling aluminum was dribbling down the driveway where it pooled in a small pothole.

The customer got a new machine off insurance money, we didn’t have to fix the machine, and we got a free lunch out fo the deal. Winning!! {/sheen}

Good thing I only have Lobster bisque once in a great while.