[lit-ideas] Re: Moon Dust and Duct Tape

Duck Tape.

Most of my customers are restaurants and roughly half my income is from 
commercial kitchen equipment repair: ranges, convection ovens, fryers, ice 
machines, walk-in coolers and freezers, etc.  A few years back I was trying to 
find the circuit breaker to a piece of equipment -- a restaurant can easily 
have over a hundred circuits and they are seldom labeled correctly if at all.  
This particular restaurant, an old one, did have labels but they had been 
superseded several times over the years so it was tantamount to having none.  
But there was one label that intrigued me: "Duck Heater".  There are many 
specialty pieces of commercial cooking equipment out there, but I'd never heard 
of a Duck Heater.  I kept my eyes open for anything that might seem unusual, 
and dedicated to cooking ducks, but to no avail.  After many service calls to 
the place, it finally came to me -- DUCT HEATER -- electric heaters set inside 
air conditioning ducts -- of course!  Not uncommon at all.

Duct tape does hold most of the world together, but there are two things it 
fails at.  The first is as a mailing tape.  It doesn't stick to cardboard worth 
a damn and the other is ducts.  Duct tape is lousy as duct tape, the alternate 
heating and cooling dries it out and it crumples.  I never use cloth or 
plasticized duct tape on ducts anymore -- only foil tape.

Mike Geary
Memphis
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John McCreery 
  To: Lit-Ideas 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 9:02 AM
  Subject: [lit-ideas] Moon Dust and Duct Tape


  Stumbled across the following


  http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/21apr_ducttape.htm?list39638


  and thought instantly of our poet and air-conditioning expert in Memphis. 
Perhaps an ode to the grey wonder and the broken hearts it holds together....


  John

  -- 
  John McCreery
  The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
  Tel. +81-45-314-9324
  http://www.wordworks.jp/

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