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Operating Table
At surgery number four, the anesthesiologist said, "You're almost seventy, we ..." I thought, "Wait, I just turned sixty-five. What do you mean, almost seventy?" He continued, "... are going to drop the memory drug." Oh, I thought it was the chemo messing with my memory.
So they hooked me up and wheeled the gurney down the hall. This is where my memory usually ended. The aide elbowed the door switch. I realized this is why the switch is so far back, a gurney's length, from the door. The doors opened their funny way, one inward, one outward, and we continued on into the operating room. He lined the gurney up with the operating table and asked me to move myself onto it. I'm sure this had happened every operation, but I didn't remember because of the memory or twilight drug.
Lying on the operating table, a memory came back, "I've been here before", but no memory of which surgery it was.
When I was settled, they strapped my arms to swinging leaves of the operating table and swung them out of the way. Only then did the anesthetist nurse say
they were giving me something and I was out.
Log Tables
For most science and engineering students in the 70s, two items stayed with you through school: a slide rule and a Chemical Rubber Company book of
Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae. Both cost \$30, a significant expense in those days. The CRC Handbook came with a sheet of gold foil to
emboss your name on the spine. Log tables were needed for some calculations with logarithms where more precision was needed than you could get out of a
slide rule. Those and the differential calculus formulas were the sections I used. As I found my path, I switched from straight electrical engineering to
the computer science option and used them less and less. Instead I increasingly used The Art of Computer Programming. When I graduated and moved
from job to job, both sets of books went with me to show I was a real engineer. Only after retirement did I donate them to the library. The subject area switch, the advent of affordable calculators, and improved programming libraries had made them superfluous.
Circular Table
My first jobs were in the Silicon Valley. Much of our joint eating out was at Chinese restaurants. Occasionally there were enough of us and we were well
known enough that we were seated at one of the banquet tables. They were big enough for 8--10 people with a lazy susan in the middle so serving platters
didn't have to be passed, just the whole thing turned. But people were impatient or didn't want what was in front of them. Serving platters were still passed, jumping ahead or behind in rotation.
— Jeffrey Taylor
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