Nothing Like a Sunday in the ER

A hospital is a great place to read a real paper and ponder what's really important in life

I’m on a once every five years ER schedule, roughly. Whether it’s taking an elbow to the eye during pick up basketball, a head collision during holiday hockey, or falling on a walk with my daughter, I seem to require some level of urgent care every half decade. Two Sunday’s ago, I hopped in my Camry, seeking care for a dog bite.

My parents tell me I’ve always been nervous around dogs. One bit my face as a kid. Nothing like a little canine kiss to instill a life long anxiety around mans’ best friend. I was not afraid that Sunday. Maybe I should have been.

I was out for a joyful jog, using my kettle donut breakfast to go further, faster like a juiced major leaguer in the 2000’s. I felt like a super hero, maybe even The Flash. I came upon a septagenarian man being dragged by five slightly tamed hell hounds across a parking lot. I certainly could flash by them, right?

Wrong! Unfortunately, I’m not the Flash. One little bastard jumped up and bit me like Forest Gump getting shot in the rump by “Charlie”, putting a nice gash in my leg.

Don’t worry, it was far from the femoral artery. I wasn’t in danger of bleeding out. Just a little worried about turning into a rabid zombie, leaving my daughters fatherless.

So, I went to the ER and spent much of my afternoon reading….THE NEWSPAPER. My phone died; I didn’t have a charger. It was either take a deep dive into the Friday, May 1st edition of The Columbus Dispatch or watch reruns of Lone Star Law on Animal Planet playing in the waiting room.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about horoscopes, which I always love reading, even though Adam Grant recently hated on them, or what the best Sunday comic is, it’s obviously Calvin & Hobbes.

This is just a few life and career related observations and missives from my “no choice” but read local print journalism or sit silently waiting my turn in the hospital.

But First…Be Nice to Your Nurses & Docs!

I asked the nurse who checked me in, “How are you?” Her answer surprised me.

“I’m ok, thank you sooooo much for asking!” Her ebullient tone surprised me, like if Shrek were a soprano. It was like people hadn’t asked her how she was for daaaayyyyys, maybe even weeks.

I was a little surprised. She told another inquiring nurse that everyone in the ER wasn’t REALLY that hard up. No stabbings. No acute respiratory distress. No gun victims. I figured that no one asked her how she was because everyone was too engrossed in their own needs.

So, remember to ask how others are, even when you are in distress. They’ll appreciate it. If you need a job or help in your career, ask others how you can help them. It’ll pay dividends now and in the future. It’s so easy to get lost in our own problems.

Second…Check out the Hive

On page 6A, I learned about the Hive, a workforce development initiative for K-12 students. COSI — the Center of Science and Industry — in Columbus, OH and Boeing have partnered to launch this two year, 20 city initiative to expose students to tech and advanced manufacturing careers.

I love COSI! My daughters and I visited the museum last month. We met a dragon, watched rats play basketball, learned many animation career options at Pixar, and more.

Discovering that The Hive is all about early and continuous immersion was music to my ears. It’s like tapas for tech jobs. We need more opportunities for people to experiment and explore.

Also, why should this stop with students? Why shouldn’t adults have access to programs like this? Discovery is a life long pursuit, whether your 9 or 90.

Third…Can You Imagine $1 Trillion Dollars?

I skimmed an article entitled, “Feed Fido or yourself” which covered the increase in malnourished pets. More people falling into poverty leads to more people having to make a painful choice.

Then, this headline caught my eye: “SpaceX ties Musk pay to Mars colonization goal”. It was next to an ad for Los Guachos Taqueria — which claims to have the best al pastor tacos in Columbus, OH.

SpaceX recently decided to incentivize Elon Musk with hundreds of billions possibly over $1 Trillion dollars to put a million person colony to man data centers on Mars.

At first, all I could think of was sheesh….$1 Trillion. How much money is that, really? Could it fill Scrooge McDuck’s mythic money bin? Short answer: Yes and No. It depends on the denomination of the bill.

When Elon gets paid all that cheese, it should be in 1’s and 20’s. Those are the bills of the people, what we normies use to buy eggs, milk, beer, and gas — when we forego credit and actually have good old fashioned paper dinero on hand.

Scrooge’s money bin is big, three cubic acres big, size of an average Amazon warehouse big. It can fit a lot of toilet paper, beans, retinol serums, books, and, in this case, cold, hard, cash.

If Elon gets paid in $20’s, his trillion would fill about 7% of the money bin. Now that would make diving into the money, like Scrooge did on Duck Tails, pretty unsafe. One might break their neck diving into the cash at that level.

Thus, Elon should elect to get paid in singles. 43 inch tall, $10 grand stacks of ones would fill Scrooges’s vault 1.4 times. I’m sure he’d be able to afford one upping Scrooge McDuck with a larger money bin for his cash.

Plus, getting paid in singles would have the added benefit of tipping the shuttle pilots and cybertruck drivers shuttling the money to and around Mars, assuming that’s where one would build a money bin.

Once I’d stopped calculating if the money would fit in Scrooge’s bin, I wondered, does anyone REALLY need to be incentivized with $1 trillion? Having that much money printed and housed in a big box would be lit. Yet, is a trillion dollars the real motivation to colonize Mars or the claim to be called first Martian or the ability to stake the SpaceX flag into the red rock 140 million miles away.

We are constantly faced with questions of motivation. Whether its as managers, members of a board, household, or team, or as individuals navigating our own path. Sometimes money is a great motivator. Other times it is not. Grand adventure, new personal experiences, pioneering, building new companies can be bigger motivators than a bunch of cash in Scrooge’s money bin.

Last…May 1 is A Pretty Big Deal

There were other interesting stories including one on the strategic benefits of chess and another detailing that more Columbus, Ohioans are finding it hard to make ends meet. But the Daily Almanac recap in the Life & Arts section caught my attention. Some pretty cool things have happened on the first of May.

Did you know…on May 1st…

• 1486 - Christopher Columbus pitched his big “western route to Asia” adventure to Spanish royalty?

• 1893 - The Chicago World’s Fair opened to the public in 1893 introducing the world to peanut butter, the Ferris wheel, and other novel items. (Side note > Read Devil in the White City, if you haven’t. A terrifying true account of a serial killer running amok on Chicago’s Southside while the fair was running.)

• 1915 - International Congress of Women adopted resolutions for peace and a women’s right to vote.

• 1926 - Ford Motor Company pioneered the idea of a 40-hour, 5-day work week. Thanks Henry!

Cool stuff!

Newspapers: Your Next Frontier

My Dad always bought and read the New York Times on Sundays. It was the one day each week he’d supplement our hometown Chicago Tribune with an additional paper periodical.

Times have changed. News papers are narrower, less tome-like. Many of us have foregone the thin, gray paper that leaves your fingers feeling dirty after you’ve consumed everything from national to local to arts & leisure to comics.

Yet, I still find them delightful. I love the feel of the black ink on my thumb. I love that my eyes aren’t as tired from staring at my device. Most importantly, I love that I read things I normally wouldn’t because an algorithm didn’t push it my way.

Thanks for reading!

Paul G. Fisher

If you so desire…some notes on my $1T calcs

$10,000 in $20 bills is 2.15 inches tall and 0.02 cubic feet. That means $1T is 215,000,000 inches or 18,000,000 feet or 3,393 miles tall. That’ll reach past the international space station. It also means the stack is ~2M cubic feet.

$10,000 in $1 bills is 43 inches tall and 0.4 cubic feet. That means $1T is 4,300,000,000 inches tall 358,333,333 feet or 67,866 miles tall. That’ll reach about a quarter the way to the moon. It also means the stack is ~40M cubic feet.

Uncle Scrooge’s Money Bin is ~27.3M cubic feet.

Rough math on other things...

A Tesla Cybertruck has 121 cubic feet. It would take 16,529 Cybertrucks to hold $1T in $20 bills or 331,578 of them to hold $1T in $1 bills.