The human element

My beloved wife of 44 years is gone, and here I am blogging again.
As I once said to a friend, a fellow railfan like me, I can’t put my pen down.
I’ve always enjoyed doing it, although I didn’t find my voice until 1992, when I began doing a voluntary newsletter for my bus-union.
This was discovering I didn’t have time to edit, a process that usually just destroyed what I wrote.
Just sling it; I called it “slinging words together.”
When I was in high-school 12th grade, my English-teacher said I was excellent at it. I thought him joking.
“But Dr. Zink, it’s just slinging words together.”
“But Hughes, you do that way better than most.”
So that’s what I do. Put pen to paper, and let ‘er rip.
Start slinging words together.
Hardly any editing. Just fixing spelling-errors and unclarities.
Start moving phrases around, and what I wrote gets ruined.
I’ve found I can sling words together pretty good; I can depend on it.
Now that my wife is gone (I’ve yet to assimilate it), I find myself parrying the human element.
I had a stroke almost 19 years ago, and it slightly compromised my speech and comprehension.
I often have to stop people to follow what they’re saying, or repeat, or tell telephone talkers to slow down.
I also have to warn people my speech may lock up (stutter), or become incomprehensible.
My wife covered for me; she did most of my problem-solving.
But now I am on-my-own, and getting by fairly well.
A TV-ad — I think it’s Cisco — trumpets the wonders of “the human element.”
Well, it is significant. It’s what makes our world work.
But I find myself parrying the many hairballs the human element can produce.
Example:
Now that my wife is gone, I find our house full of hospital-equipment we no longer need: a hospital-bed, a ca-mode, an over-bed hospital table, and a walker.
The stuff was delivered by a medical equipment supplier in nearby Canandaigua.
I can’t get them to retrieve it. (Failure to connect over two days.)
Two days ago I happened to be in the same plaza as the supplier, so I went in.
I said I would be driving home via a couple errands, and would be home in perhaps two hours.
So I could be there then to let them retrieve their equipment.
This is where “the human element” comes in.
They concluded I was driving straight home, so they could show up almost immediately.
I wasn’t there when they arrived. I was still in Canandaigua pursuing errands.
I happened to be in that same plaza late afternoon, so I visited the supplier again.
They had erroneously decided I was driving straight home earlier. The human element hadn’t factored in my errands. What I’d said was not fully comprehended.
This is only one example — I could render more.
The human element is significant, but can lead astray.

• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and its environs. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. —During my final year, I did a voluntary newsletter for my bus-union.
• “Hughes” is me, Bob Hughes, “BobbaLew.”
• “Canandaigua” (“cannan-DAY-gwuh”) is a small city nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” It’s about 14 miles away. —I live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield, southeast of Rochester.