Heller and Shannon: Flower-petal Pink

Shannon was on pins-and-needles. It had been six years since she had been the new-girl at work.

She sipped a Monster Energy Drink as she navigated through traffic. She couldn’t stomach the thought of breakfast.

The pounding from the misaligned slabs on I-69 gave her a headache.

The lights were on even though she arrived a half-hour early. She went to the door and knocked.

A man in a “Western” shirt and a Bolo tie came up to the door and asked “Can I help you?”

Shannon showed him her badge through the glass and he opened the door.

“Ya can’t be too careful” the man said. Then he stuck out his hand and said “My name is Fred Barker. I am the branch manager. We are all thrilled to have you aboard.”

“Do you drink coffee?” Fred asked.

“Sometimes” Shannon admitted.

“Keurig is in the corner. Lemme know what your favorite kind of coffee is and I will keep it in stock” Fred said.

Staff started trickling in and Fred let them in. He greeted each one like he was thrilled they had been able to make it into work. His greetings felt genuine rather than like Ken Johnson’s greetings which were scripted by a charm-school video he had watched.

Fred casually walked her about he office as he did his warm-start for the day. He pointed out the staff bathroom, the fire-alarm, fire-extinguisher and walked her through how to lock-down a room in the event of a robbery.

Ten minutes before the branch opened and older woman came to the door. Fred beckoned Shannon to join him at the door.

“Joyce Nesbit, I want to introduce you to Shannon O’Dell. Shannon, this is Joyce. Joyce will be training you. Joyce is retiring after…”

“Fifty-one years, as you well know” Joyce reminded him. If there was a bit of tartness in her voice it was all an act.

Joyce let Shannon do the heavy lifting as the customers came in. Most of them seemed genuinely sad that Joyce was retiring.

“Not my choice” Joyce said. “Company says I have to retire because I am going to be seventy-and-a-half years old next month.

Joyce encouraged Shannon to remember names, “Even if you have to write them down on cards. Folks know it is hard to remember names and will appreciated that you are writing stuff down to remember.”

Shannon didn’t expect the customers to warm up to her the way the old, familiar customers did at her old branch. After all, she was new and replacing a worker who had been a fixture since long before this branch had been picked up by Sparky Credit Union.

Still, some of the customers seemed a bit stiffer than she expected.

Joyce announced to Fred, “Shannon and I are going to take a long lunch. We are going over to Ionia. If you gotta dock our pay then take both hours out of my banked time.”

Fred laughed. “You bet Joyce.”

Joyce insisted on driving since she knew where she was going. She explained “The Credit Union will only convert so many banked hours to pay and I am over the limit. Basically, I either use them or lose them.”

Over lunch Joyce explained that everybody was surprised with they got word the Shannon would be showing up. Manpower being what it was, they thought they would be running short staffed for months before a new-hire-out-of-school showed up. Being on the far-end of nowhere, they were very surprised to get an experienced teller.

“So who did you piss off?” Joyce wanted to know.

That took Shannon aback. She had never considered the possibility that she was being punished.

“Well, I don’t know?” Shannon mused. “Nobody that I can think of.”

Joyce poked and prodded a little bit and learned that she had a boyfriend. She was glad to know that Shannon had a support system.

“Do you think you are going to stay?” Joyce asked. 

“I think so” Shannon admitted. “The commute is brutal but the people are friendly...except it feels like some of the customers were giving me the stink-eye.”

“I think I can fix that” Joyce said with a chirp of laughter. “It is your make-up.”

“Many of our customers are farmers and small-business owners. In a lot of cases, the wife does all of the banking. Not too many young women move into jobs out here and it sets off their radar for gold-diggers” Joyce said.

“The reason I wanted to eat in Ionia is so we can hit the Walmart and tone-down your color palette” Joyce said.

Seeing Shannon’s skepticism, Joyce said “I sold Mary Kay for decades. Trust me. I am not making this up. You only have one chance to make a good first-impression."

So, after lunch the two of them hit Walmart. Shannon had never considered shopping there for cosmetics but they had several of the brands and product lines she had used before.

While they were walking into the super-center, Joyce never stopped chattering.

“A woman has to consider who she is trying to attract and how far away he is” Joyce said. “An actress on a stage is fifty-sixty-seventy feet from the audience and has to wear bright, heavy make-up to be seen.”

“When you are at a party or a dance hall the air might be smoky and people are moving. You might be twenty feet away from somebody who might ask you to dance but he might only get glimpses of you. Again, you have to wear shades that catch his eye and make a statement. That, plus you are competing with all of the other girls to catch his eye.”

“Working in a bank is a little bit different. You will be four feet away from the customer and they will have minutes to study you. You want to project a girl-next-door image. You want to be seen as rock-solid-honest and wholesome.”

“So what do you recommend, Doctor Nesbit” Shannon asked, jokingly.

Studying Shannon’s complexion, Joyce declared “A moisturizer with SPF. Sun will not treat your skin kindly. A neutral foundation and then a pure-pink-tone blush.”

“I would skip lipsticks and go to translucent, semi-gloss, pearl-tone brushable products. You don’t want super-shiny...you just want to look-well hydrated. I would stick with the flower-petal pinks”

Looking at Shannon’s eye makeup, Joyce suggested “Simple is better. Maybe a ‘nude’ base and nothing else. The only other change would be to pump-up your eyebrows with a slightly darker shade. That will accentuate your blue-eyes which are one of your best features.”

Shannon was relieved about the eye-shadow advice. She struggled with balancing multiple colors and the shading. Simple was easy.

“These are little-kid colors and I am afraid that I will be so pale that nobody will see me” Shannon said.

“Believe me, honey, if you are counting money everybody will see you. The thing is that everybody trusts Mary Anne and nobody really trusts Ginger” Joyce said.

The reference to Gilligan’s Island went completely over Shannon’s head.

---A tip of the hat to Belladonna for helping me with the bits about the make-up.---

6.5mm Creedmore

The gentleman I was shooting with on Monday brought a couple of interesting firearms.

One was a pistol caliber carbine which was a hoot-to-shoot. I am not sure what it is good for but it was fun. One thing I struggled with were the sights. The front sight was a very narrow blade and there was not much contrast between it and the knot on the mottled, splotched log I was using as a target. The mission determines the best sight package and I am not sure about the target. If the mission was for home-defense, a shake-awake red-dot might be a good choice.

The other weapon he brought was a 6.5mm Creedmore. He hadn't planned on buying it, but....there it was.

For a time, during the throes of supply-chain constraints and not enough workers, the major manufacturers set the equipment to pump out 6.5mm Creedmore and just kept running the equipment. Every change in product results in lost production because of the need to validate settings. If you can sell every unit you make cranking out 6.5mm Creedmore, it is irresponsible to stop production and lose revenue.

Reloading

Yeah, I need to add another chambering to my inventory like I need another hole in my head, especially if it requires another powder.

Hornday #2620, max velocity 6.5 Creedmore, trajectory, deviation from line-of-sight.

I have IMR 4895 in stock but what about the powders that are more in alignment with the cartridge's volume, bullet weights and expansion ratios? What do I give up by using what I already have?

Looking at velocity, I lose 200 feet-per-second verse the "best" powders like Winchester Staball 6.5 and 100 feet-per-second verse "better" powders like Ramshot Big Game. What does that mean in the real world?

One of the first questions involves trajectory. Will cognitive and physical skills of the shooter be overwhelmed by the need to compute Kentucky-windage, and as a result of those demands miss the intended target.

For a regular hunter, shooting at coyote-sized targets out to 250 yards...it means almost nothing according the the Hornday Ballistic Calculator.

Terminal performance

How about the effect of the bullet after it impacts the target. The bullet's propensity to expand is VERY dependent upon the impact velocity. 

According to the Hornday Ballistic Calculator, an additional 100fps in launch speed for a 0.264", 129gr, flat-base Interlock translates into another 50 yards of range vis-a-vis impact velocity. Even launched at an anemic 2670fps, the 129gr, Interlock softpoint will still be within its design envelop at 250 yards and should expand.

Paradoxically, rifle bullets penetrate more deeply when the impact velocity is at the lower end of their design envelop. A bullet that is marginal for elk when the impact velocity is 2800 fps might perform very well when the impact velocity is 2400 fps because it will expand less violently and expend more of its energy more deeply in the target.

An Aside:

When laser range-finders first hit the consumer market, a gun store in Wyoming or Utah challenged customers to guess the distance to the flag-pole in the center of town.

Bear in mind that their customers were hunters and hunted in an region where long shots are possible.

Most of the customers guessed 1/3 mile to 1/2 mile. They were stunned to "range" it and see that it was about 300 yards from the store. Their estimates ranged from 2X to 3X off. Some of them even paced out the distance hoping to prove the laser range-finder was wrong.

A typical white-tail deer at 100 yards looks pretty tiny to most people and they always over-estimate the range. Without a steady-rest, a 200 yard shot at a deer is a very long shot.

End Aside.

So if I find myself cranking out a few 6.5mm Creedmore reloads, it will probably be with IMR 4895. I doubt the coyotes will notice the difference.

Training run: January 3

Today's training run was slower than expected.

Scaled to a 5k, it would result in 44:20 which is very, very close to the 44:10 of the previous run. I thought it would be faster because I had a three-day recovery period.

I was scheduled to run yesterday but it was foggy and I chickened out.

Progress is not always an unvarying, upward trend.

Bonus Image

Amish Potato Salad (w/ Pimento)

 

Starline brass
165gr, Hornday FXT
26.5gr H-110
Remington 7-1/2 primer
Mayonnaise to suit

The boom-stick has a new flash-suppressor. I wanted to verify the zero. It moved about a 1/2" higher at 100 yards, which is not a big deal for the size of targets I shoot at.

The fellow I was shooting at with was having a hard day. He couldn't hit. Some days are like that.

Planning to fail?

"A February 2022 report from Idaho National Laboratory explored the challenges contributing to transformer shortages, and honed (sic) in on one key ingredient: grain-oriented electrical steel. It’s the grade required for compact and efficient transformers, only one U.S. firm makes it, and the national lab study found its quality and quantity lacking. As a result, domestic producers serve only one-fifth of U.S. transformer demand—mostly small devices powering several homes or blocks."

The study identified funding and coordination under the Defense Production Act as a key opportunity to expand domestic production of grain-oriented steel and transformers, along with other grid components including circuit breakers and switchgear.

So too did some Democrats in Congress, proposing $2.1-billion to boost production of transformers and associated grid equipment, which they argue is crucial to realizing the recent Inflation Reduction Act’s potential to accelerate renewable power generation.

In the end, lobbyists say the proposed DPA funds were simply edged out by other priorities. For now that leaves utilities to create their own solutions.     -Source

Plenty of money to subsidize all-electric vehicles. Plenty of money for dispersed electrical generation like solar and wind. But no money for the key element needed to step voltages up-and-down to transport the energy from the source to the producers to the consumers.

A simple oversight, I am sure.

I have no doubt that the utilities will find work-arounds but they are likely to be more complex and to have more potential failure modes. For example, it is theoretically possible to change 60HZ power to a higher frequency and use a much smaller transformer but then the power needs to be flipped back to 60HZ for transmission down the line to avoid excessive "power factor" losses. 

 Hat-tip Coyote Ken

Heller and Shannon: Career Development

Shannon floated into work after spending the weekend with Heller.

The workweek had been an exercise in frustration. Heller worked ten or twelve hours most days. “Gotta make hay while the sun shines. This month I can get 72 hours a week. No guarantees about next month or next summer.”

Shannon lived on the east side of Haslett while Heller lived in Bluegrass Township. It was only 40 miles in a straight line but the only fast route took her over I-69 which looped north of Lansing. That stretch of freeway had to be some of the roughest of the entire interstate system. She had literally looked up at semi-drivers who were being pitched six-inches as they lurched from one slab to the next. The bucking-bronco effect was also accentuated by the short wheelbase of her small SUV.

The logistics of dating during the week were sucking the life-blood out of the relationship but then the weekend showed up and Heller took Saturday off.

It had been magical.

Ken Johnson was the branch manager and he seemed “off”. It wasn’t anything she could put a finger on.

Then, he told her he needed to meet with her at lunch.

His message was short and not-so-sweet. “You are being transferred to a new branch” Johnson said.

Ken Johnson was a handsome man. Movie-star handsome. He sent his shirts out to the cleaners and they were snowy-white and stiffly starched. Johnson was a firm believer in “You have to look sharp to BE sharp.”

Shelquia Washington had called him early in the morning and filled him in. O’Dell was being banished to the most remote branch of the Credit Union because a credible source informed management that O’Dell had been vocally racist. Washington did not inform Johnson that the source was not an employee of the Credit Union.

Washington informed Ken Johnson that not only was O’Dell being moved to Saranac but that a letter was entered into her personnel file “below the fold” which documented her infraction and would result in O’Dell being terminated without appeal if it happened again.

Ken Johnson tried to be fair. “Will she get reimbursed for relocation?”

Washington coolly informed him, “Saranac is less than fifty miles from your branch. Miss O’Dell does not qualify for reimbursement under company policy.”

Ken Johnson asked “When does this move take effect?” as he wondered how he was going to cover. O’Dell did more than pull her own weight.

“It becomes effective at 5:00PM when she walks out of your building. She is to report to Saranac at 8:30 in the morning for on-boarding” Washington informed him.

“Why so fast?” Ken Johnson wanted to know. Usually there was overlap so the new person could be trained.

“COMPANY POLICY, Mr Johnson” Washington’s voice was so frosty that Johnson would not have been surprised to see icicles form on his phone. “Think of the litigation exposure if we had another racist encounter when we already have information about the risk.”

“So why don’t we just terminate her?” Johnson pressed.

“Why don’t you do your job and let Human Resources do theirs?” Washington rebutted.

Then she hung up before Ken Johnson could ask any more questions.

Termination had been discussed but Ce’Diff thought that getting Shannon to quit on her own was far more elegant. For one thing, it greatly reduced the chance of wrongful-termination litigation and the slight possibility of “other factors” being unearthed.

Shannon was blindsided. Johnson wouldn’t or couldn’t tell her why she was being transferred. The best Johnson could offer was some lame excuse about “It is important to the Credit Union to develop every employee’s career. Your career will be stunted if you stay here longer and there are other employees who need the experience of working in your position at this branch to further develop their careers.”

Shannon knew she was being stone-walled. Normally, you could not get Ken Johnson to shut up, he liked the sound of his voice so much. Now his lips were zipped.

 

She asked for the afternoon off and Johnson gave it to her. It was better to have her out of the building.

After she left, he blocked her card-access to his building. You could never be too careful.

*

Shannon drove to the river-front walk, a sprawling, interconnected set of trails that totaled about twenty miles. She started walking. The whole story about “developing careers” had a false ring. The Credit Union had never shown an interest in developing her career in the six years she had been there.

The move sucked in every way. The traffic would be worse because she had to start earlier and the commute was at least forty-five miles farther than her current commute and it had the same rotten stretch of I-69 that the trip to Heller’s had.

She really didn’t have a firm idea of where Saranac was, just that it was closer to Grand Rapids than it was to Lansing/Haslett. She knew it had to be the most distant branch office and it was in exactly the worst direction for her...she would have to drill through Lansing traffic twice a day.

Demolition derby and football

Driving in reverse is an old DD trick. Most vehicles become inop due to damage to the cooling system, which is in the front of the vehicle.

Quicksilver has a great career ahead of her as a demolition derby driver.

She is stuck in reverse. She has backing-up on all fours down. She doesn't have a clue about going forward.

Football

Great games by all four teams last night. Texas Christian excelled. Georgia showed heart. Michigan's defense showed up too late and Ohio State gave a great account for their program.