This Belt Is Made For Walking

So I've been running pretty religiously on this treadmill we got last year. I started at 3mph, which is walking speed for me, and I've slowly increased my sustained speed to 6mph, working on 7. This, along with some moderate dietary control, has allowed me to lose nearly 30 pounds now over roughly the last nine months, since I really started hitting it hard. I know I've actually lost more of that in fat, because I've built a lot of muscle in that period of time (the abs are super defined yet, but they're getting there; the laughs at me for checking them out in the mirror).

Last Tuesday, however, the treadmill stopped cooperating. The belt was slipping very, very badly when you try to even walk on it, and we were very concerned since the Queen regularly walks on it as well as a friend of ours (we're very communal with our stuff). Well, it didn't take much net research to find out that the level of running I was doing on the treadmill was beyond what is intended for the price point of the treadmill and the parts used in manufacturing. One person even asked if I felt like a "jackass" for expecting to be able to run on it.

Apparently, for the level of sustained running that I do, I should expect to pay about $1500 for a treadmill, and this one cost less than $500. Now, I did look at the treadmills at that price point, and there's no doubt that the features are very, very cool. However, for that price, I'd be better off to get a gym membership, since their yearly cost is less than half of what I paid for the treadmill I currently have.

So the treadmill is more for "light jogging or walking," but when I told Rock Girl this, she immediately popped up with the question of "then why does it go up to 10mph?" A worthy question. Once I tried to do a quarter mile at 10, and I blew the treadmill's internal breaker. It is actually not capable of maintaining its top speed for any length of time. 

So on Saturday after finishing another project I'll discuss on another, the Engineer and I had a look at the internal workings of the beast to see if we could make it work right again. A suggestion I'd found online had to do with the drive belt being loose as opposed to the walking belt, and that some treadmills have adjustment screws on their motors to move them further from the walking belt and thereby tighten the drive belt. After some quick research, we figured out how to remove the top plate from the treadmill that covers the motor and sure enough, this one had bolts holding the motor in place and the ability to move said motor out away from the walking to tighten the drive belt.

So with the Engineer's foot firmly planted on the motor pushing it away from the walking belt, I tightened the bolts down. With it firmly in place again, we tried to walk and run on it. Success. He tried it at several speeds, and then had me try it since I'm more used to how it feels. I tried it at 3, 5, 6, and 7, and all of them worked great for me. 

However, this does not mean I'll be using it as much as I had before. I'm sure I'll run on it periodically, but knowing that the manufacture of it is not conducive to that level of punishment, I've taken to riding my bicycle through my neighborhood. Figuring the mileage on www.mapmyride.com, I rode over 7 miles on Friday and almost 9 miles on Sunday. It makes for a nice change from the endless run, and really, it's more interesting.

So, the problem was fixed, but apparently, even though treadmills are made for walking and running on, some of them aren't made for running. That would be like buying a car where the spedometer goes up to 120 but the car won't actually go... Oh wait.

Paltry Ribaldry

So Optimus Prime over there has a tendency to tell fat jokes on himself which fits this topic perfectly. He says, "I said I wanted an Atlas body, but this is ridiculous." He followed this up with, "Is that why they call it a hemisphere?" To which he added, "I know that's an orbit around me, but what's with the crack in the moon?" This whole discussion began when he complained that the last two days were hard on him because the sky was falling and there wasn't enough intelligent conversation around here with me in training. Ahh.... He said there just wasn't enough of him to go around and that was saying something. Groan....

So what the heck is paltry ribaldry? Well, the Queen was reading Jane Eyre, and one of the characters commented on the paltry ribaldry of the common folk, and neither one of us had any idea what this meant. I knew paltry, but ribaldry was completely new to me. I'm telling you, some of the language in that book is just not commonplace.

Anyway, we looked up the words (which took a bit of doing on two dictionary websites), to get a feel for what the author was trying to say in this expression. What it amounted to was worthless off-color humor, or perhaps petty lewdness or even the hollow sexual pursuits of the lower classes.

I related this in my head to a conversation I'd overheard when I was in the military. I was walking to my barracks and heard two grunts behind me talking about what they were going to do with their upcoming weekend. This was really the only part of the conversation I heard, but it summed up for me what this person in the book was likely talking about when he referred to paltry ribaldry. Grunt 1 asked grunt 2, "so what are you going to do this weekend?" Grunt 2 replied with complete honesty and seriousness, "Oh, I don't know. Get drunk and get laid."

Hm, thought I. Easy as that. At the time I'd heard this conversation, I'd not so much as had a date, so the idea that finding such things out there in the world somewhere was a concept somewhat foreign to me. I had an idea that this sort of thing went on, and the moral ineptitude of it still resonated despite my naivety. But that was the life of a young grunt. Blow crap up. Get drunk. Get laid. Lather, rinse, repeat. Paltry ribaldry.

So to end it, there was this air traffic controller on the ground who called up to one of the two planes circling the runway, and said, "Make right turn two-niner-zero for noise abatement." The pilot called back down and said, "Noise abatement? What are you talking about? It's five o'clock in the afternoon." The controller called back up and said, "Have you ever heard the sound of two planes crashing together?"

So the next time you hear someone discussing their lecherous weekend or someone tells a joke that perhaps isn't entirely safe for work, you can say (at least in the back of your head) "All this paltry ribaldry is simply intolerable."

Training

You know, there are needs for training in the workplace. In the instance I went through it recently, we're getting a new system in place to track our system issues for the clients and ourselves. This training is a necessary part of the learning of the system, but wow, does it have to be so boring?

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy learning new things, and when we were learning new things about this new system, it was a very interesting time. However, not everybdy in the world "gets" these things as easily as I do, and those wh are quicker on the draw don't understand the point of the training class. There may be no such thing as a stupid question, but there are questions that are out of turn.

The trainer, here, repeatedly said that he wasn't teaching our in house processes, but only the conceptual workings of the system. This way, we would know how the system worked and could adapt it to our process, whatever that may be. A lot of people had a lot of trouble grasping this, and continued to ask questions that a) dealt with only their part of the business and b) we were going to cover at a later part of the course.

He ended up answering b-type questions when they came up in brief, which only lead to more questions and more time wasted (and more boredom on my part). The a-type questions, though, were always more incessant and more demanding, and even though we did have two people who knew the basics of the processes we were going to follow, they weren't clear on everything because the system isn't live yet. Did you understand that, people? The system isn't live yet, and so they don't know yet.

Another question had to do with the grouping of clients since it is no longer done by the facilities' IDs, but by a single ID assigned to the contract as a whole. We knew that we were going to look up the individual ID in another system to cross reference, but this one person was all but demanding an explanation of how one specific client would work, and the helper who knew the processes wasn't familiar with that specific client's contracts (as they have several), and so could not answer this until they look at the system when it's up. This person refused to let it go, and made it a parking lot question (that's a question to be reviewed later). Nevermind that once the system goes love, it would take probably 30 seconds to answer it then.

This was a big reason I didn't ask a lot of in-depth questions. First, I understood how the system worked, and could easily adapt it to whatever the powers-that-be tell me to do with it. Second, I knew a lot of these people would remember little to NOTHING about what they learned today, so the review process would be beyond extensive, and drilled into our heads by the time the go-live date comes in three weeks.

I have the learning capacity to pick stuff up in one session. Three weeks of drills, and I'm an expert before I ever touch it. That's why they love me.

And if you think that's conceited... Well, sometimes the truth sounds that way, doesn't it?