A Failure to Communicate
We all know the line from Cool Hand Luke when the warden or the southern chain gang colony, Strother Martin says in his slow and deliberate southern drawl to Paul Newman (Luke), George Kennedy (Dragline) and the rest of the inmates (which include such future cinematic greats as Dennis Hooper and Ralph Waite), “You see, what we have here is a failure to communicate…”. The emphasis is placed on the word “failure” as though it is the complex noun of the hour, depicting an abject lack of success and sounding more like a modifier than a noun, and then that leads ever so inevitably and disappointingly in the verb, “to communicate”. A failure to communicate is made to sound by this emblematic jailer as though someone has let down society by not trying hard enough to comprehend their predicament and just stay in their place in the grand order of the world. Communication is made to sound as though it is so very easy and should be no problem to accomplish, if only the incarcerated souls would accept their fate and tow the line like the jailer demands. I am the jailer and therefore the boss of you, the prisoner. I tell you what to do and you do it. Easy, peasy. Any lack of success in that is clearly a misunderstanding by the prisoner and hence, he has failed to comprehend. That comprehension is a necessary part of the social contract between jailer and prisoner and without it, the noble jailer must accept responsibility for his failure to communicate and must work harder to get the message across, which in this case is best done by having him spend a day or two in the hot box of the Florida Panhandle summer heat and humidity.
Cool Hand Luke is often said to be the sweatiest film in history thanks to that Florida heat and humidity, even though it was actually filmed in the San Joaquin Valley in central California. Other contenders for sweatiest movie include In the Heat of the Night (Sparta, Mississippi), To Kill a Mockingbird (Maycomb, Alabama), Twelve Angry Men (NYC), Body Heat (Southern Florida). I am probably thinking about sweaty films because we are in the midst of the hottest spell I can recall in the three years we have lived on this hilltop. It is supposed to reach over 100 degrees tomorrow and I don’t ever recall getting over three digits on the heat index. It is not unusual for me to sweat if I’m doing my chain gang imitation on the back hillside, but the combination of the dry heat of the chaparral and the cooling breeze off the Pacific, which easily reaches our hilltop from the ocean a dozen miles west, make it most often a comfortable heat. And that is not what we are experiencing this week. Today, when I step outside I immediately feel the sizzling heat and know that I need to water my most vulnerable plants so they can stand up to the heat as best they can. Shade helps them a bit, but nothing works better than hydration and luckily, we are not yet on water restriction yet (an unusual situation these days in the American west). Do more than step outside, even if it is just dragging a hose around for the watering, results in a shirt that quickly becomes a sweaty mess and needs to be changed on coming in, back to the safety and comfort of our well-conditioned air inside the house. I not only have the A/C cranking, but the Big Ass Fans are set to automatically whoosh air around in our common rooms at varying speed to create a more natural ambient environment. It’s actually quite pleasant sitting here in the middle of it all.
I started teaching this week and arrived at the USD campus intentionally early to orient myself to the new business school building, which just opened a week ago, and get myself acclimated to the classrooms where I would be teaching. I buy the highest level parking pass I am allowed and it is well worth it to be able to park in one of two parking lots very near the business school complex. That was no issue as I pulled up at 4pm for a 7pm class. Generally, the best part of my teaching schedule is that the times when I teach are well after the bulk of the University staff have gone home and I really never have a parking issue. In the past I have gotten myself dinner off-campus because the restaurant is at the far end of campus, but the new complex has a cafe that is open until 6pm and a fully automated digital cafe that is open 24×7. Both of those are only 100 feet across a courtyard from my class rooms, so I have discovered that the whole affair is very convenient for me on all levels. I was told a dozen years ago that the secret to happy professoring is to have an office near the elevator, the bathroom, the cafe and the parking lot. I can now say that while I choose to be officeless, I am spot on in terms of proximity of all the other fronts.
After checking out my room with the school’s IT team and feeling that I was on top of the technology to both display my slide decks, but also to do the Zoom conferencing that gets broadcast and recorded for errant students (all of my students hold down full-time jobs in addition to going to class) and for guest lecturers from around the globe. I have many guest lecturers, so Zoom technology is a must and it must be working right. After that got nailed down, I went to the cafe to test those waters. To start with, USD is a very sustainability-conscious campus like most campuses are becoming. When I went to get a soda, I was told that I had to use a reusable cup and did I own one? I did not, but not to worry, as a professor in the new building, I was to be given one bearing the school’s name and with it came two free refills of soda. As I filled the large thermos cup, I asked how to check off the fact that I was using one of my two free refills. Not to worry, it is part of the all-digital program and the cup is a smart cup. Now I have a smartphone and I have heard all about the internet of things, but the smart cup was a new one on me. It supposedly knows how many times it is being filled up and it either gives them to me for free or it’s charges me for my overage use. Since I have one more freebie for Tuesday, we’ll see next Wednesday what kind of bells and alarms go off when I try to refill it a third time or whether my smartphone just dings to tell me that my smart cup is getting filled and my Apple Wallet is getting hit for the cost. I’m quite curious about how it will work.
I also tried a chicken teriyaki bowl at he very Asian-looking vending machine. This thing is a big improvement on the cup-o-noodles machines of years past and I got a complete meal in a cardboard bowl, heated up to almost scalding temperature by the hot water it uses to un-freeze dry that teriyaki. Naturally, there were no plastic straws, but I’m not sure why given that they gave me a plastic fork to eat my poke bowl.
I then went to my classroom and as I started to teach for my three-hour session, I found myself starting to get hot. I started to feel like George Kennedy on the chain gang with my shirt getting soaked. We were unable to adjust the heat, so I just got through it and emailed the facilities people after class. I was sympathetic to the new building shake-down and the extreme heat, but then learned that the school had responded to a statewide request for voluntary HVAC curbs during the heat wave, so they cranked up classroom A/C levels to 76 rather than 72. I thought it would have been nice to have been told that so I could have worn shorts and a tank top to class. But in the words of Strother Martin…what we have here is a simple failure to communicate….