About Me — Quasimodo

Recovering jerk

No, this is not me. It’s my father, circa 1985. From a scan of a photograph of unknown provenance.

Note: When I wrote this I was still using the pseudonym “Quasimodo.”

My father owned an automatic screw machine shop in Mahwah, New Jersey which is what put food on the table and clothing on our backs. I worked there off and on as a teenager and even returned at the advanced age of about 35 to try to run the place.

Unsuccessfully, I might add. While Mahwah Screw Machine Products, Inc. provided a good living for us and even paid for our university educations — albeit at a time when the astronomical inflation of tuition costs had not yet occurred — it was by about 1985 a sunset industry shop full of obsolete machinery and saddled with crushing debt. Oh well.

The ensuing experience of failure showed me, after the failure of my music career and the frustration of my teaching career, that I had a knack for that sort of precision work. I became a machinist and worked at various thriving, well equipped establishments before completing my engineering degree and settling into a career as a manufacturing engineer.

But you don’t care about any of that. You’d rather hear about the time I pooped myself in kindergarten. The classroom had its own bathroom. Ignorant of the gender assignments — urinals, boys: commodes, girls. Strictly enforced — I seated myself on a commode one day intending to…