BUZZURRO

Today I had a job interview. One of the questions that the interviewer asked me was “What was your strangest job ?”
I thought about it for a few seconds then answered “It was probably when I did a 2 week temporary assignment at XXXX company.”

“Oh, I used to work there”, replied the interviewer.
“Open mouth. Insert foot” I thought. I made a faux pas as they say in France, but as it turned out she worked in a different division in a different state.

It was (is) a multi-national, global company…
I worked in the R&D (Research and Development) section of a branch of the company that made, as one of it’s products, sanitary napkins.

Sanitary napkins are made on an assembly line. A machine cuts all the layers of fabric, another machine puts them together, another machine cuts out the shape and seals them, and another one packages them.
They never are touched by human hands, and thousands are created at a time. I however was working on a project to develop a new type of sanitary napkin, one using peat moss as it’s middle layer. We were to make them by the hundreds, so we were to do everything by hand (or manually operated machines).

The year was 1988, so sanitary napkins were quite thick with several layers.
After cutting many during the day, I was covered in sanitary napkin dust.
No Happy Hours for me. I went straight home after work to shower.
Imagine going to a bar and having to explain just what exactly the white stuff all over my hair and clothes is. Not something I wanted to do.

I remember on my first day when I was shown the employee break room.
There were 2 refrigerators.
One had a sign on it that said “Do Not Use for Food”.

The employee showing me around explained that that refrigerator contained what they called “Dracula’s tea bags” or in laymans terms, used sanitary napkins.

She explained that the first group of temporaries made some of these peat moss sanitary napkins and a group of women used them and wrote about their experiences.

They then returned them in paper bags to be examined and smelled by some scientists. I am happy to say that was not my job.

I also remember a big vat with a faucet on the side. The employee told me that it was called the “period machine”.

It was filled with some kind of chemicals that looked like menstrual blood.

“It’s cheaper than the real stuff” she told me knowingly.
I just nodded my head in agreement, as if I had a “period machine” at home.

One day the period machine had a leak and there were little menstrual blood puddles on the floor.

“Eww” I thought “that’s gross”.

Even though in reality you probably find worse stuff spilled on a McDonalds restaurant floor.

Skipping ahead 3 years, I was in a supermarket walking down the aisle with sanitary napkins, and lo and behold, I saw this company’s sanitary napkins with “absorbent peat moss”. I felt a moment of pride. I was a part of the long project to make them.

That was my strange job. I’m sure there are stranger ones out there, but this is one of mine.

A few days ago Buzzurro and I were watching CNN News on television when an announcer announced that on September 11 of this year they will be showing original footage from 9/11/2001.
I turned and said to Buzzurro “That’s morbid! Who would want to watch THAT ?” and he replied “I do.” He then explained how he wasn’t in the US at the time and is interested in knowing about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center from an American point of view.
That made me think…”I wasn’t in the US at the time either. I was in Italy on a vacation.” “I don’t really know about thr news that day in America either.”
I remember flying back into the US on September 19, 2001 into LAX. What normally is a busy airport was like a ghost town. Cars were prohibited from driving around the airport, flights weren’t departing or landing (except for my four fifths empty Air France flight) I could even hear my footsteps on the floor. The United States I left on August 31, 2001 was definitely not the same one as the one I returned too.
In the following days and months after I returned to the US I watched hours of television devoted to the World Trade Center disaster, but of course a week after the disaster some answers were forming, namely who actually flew the planes, who masterminded the plan, how and why. Naturally the reporters were reporting this. The large majority of their viewers were Americans in the United States and had already seen the early footage of the disaster. They didn’t need to see it again. All these reporters were poised and a little distant in reporting the news, like they usually are. In the beginning, the early morning of September 11, there was confusion, raw horror and raw tears.
I heard the stories of relatives who worked in NY, or even northern New Jersey. The trains stopped working and cell phones didn’t work either and they couldn’t get home or even communicate with loved ones, but I wasn’t a part of it. I was in a bookstore in Rome, Italy when I found out about both towers being hit by planes and collapsing to the ground. I received words of sympathy from the taxi driver who returned me to the hotel and watched BBC coverage of the disaster which was not the same I’m certain, as an American news channel. The stories might be the same, but the emotions would have been different.
“Maybe I should watch it too.” I thought to myself.
As much as I don’t wan’t to face the sheer terror of that day, especially knowing one of the victims, as an American I probably should watch it.
One should never forget what happened. It needs to be kept fresh in one’s mind. The actual people who flew the plane might be dead, but there are millions of others who would gladly take part in another attack. The masterminds are also alive and free and most likely plotting other attacks. This is a war, not one little incident that will never happen again.
As a side note I will add that President Bush has declared September/11 as ‘Patriot Day’. While the name has not caught on much with the population, I hope some of the memorial activities will. This includes flying at half staff American flag (or another if you live in another nation and would like to show sympathy for the victims), and a moment of silence at 8:46 Eastern Standard Time.

This weekend Buzzurro and I took a 2 hour trip around North Central NM. Where there used to be brown hills with sparse vegetation, are now green hills with wildflowers. It reminded me of a commercial I saw as a child for the play ‘The Sound of Music’ with Julie Andrews. She was supposedly in the hills of Austria, although to be honest I don’t know where that commercial was actually filmed.
“Did we take a wrong turn somewhere and end up in another state?’ I asked Buzzurro.
“No’ he replied “But everything looks so different green instead of the usuual brown.”
Why do brown areas of earth become green with grass? Simple: it rains and the dead plants and live seeds come to life with rain.
It has been raining a lot.
August is known in this area as being ‘monsoon season’. Monsoon season in New Mexico means that almost everyday in the late afternoon the sky will turn gray and it will rain heavily for an hour or so. Then it will stop. Then the clouds will blow away and the hot sun will shine brightly and dry everything up. The normal monsoon rains are 3 to 4 inches a year. It usually starts in late July and ends inAugust.This year though the monsoon season started early-towards the end of june. Since June 26 there have been 11 inches of monsoon rain. Perhaps in many places of this country 11 inches of rain in a 2 and a half month timespan would be nothing to blink an eye about, but New Mexico is desert country, where the yearly average rainfall is only about 14 inches (although in the winter it does snow). It is a lot of rain and all the plants are happy for it.