Barf!

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! Check this out, this is awesome. I'm going to forward this to Pepsico customer service:

All,
Due to the bad taste of the Aquafina water, please discard and do not drink it. This water will no longer be distributed to the water bins throughout the camp and will be replaced with another brand. Do not be alarmed as there are no safety concerns, only the foul taste.
Any questions you may have can be directed to N4 at xxx-xxxx.

Very respectfully,
CDR "Bob Roberts"
N-4 Camp Lemonier

N-4 is the supply division on base.

See, and you thought I was crazy, talking about water all the time.

Bad

The yucky Aquafina water is back. Eww. Fortunately, now that I have a sink, I get to keep a box or two of water right there in my clu at all times, and I'm still working off boxes of Oasis and Masafi I picked up last week. Good thing, too.

Pepsi, which produces Aquafina, is under fire in India for having outrageously high levels of pesticide contamination in its drinks. Presumably the main culprit is Pepsi-cola itself; whether other products from the company were tested or not I don't know, but bottling plants tend to handle multiple beverages at one time so we can assume if Pepsi will kill you, 7-Up will as well.

Yesterday I happened to examine one of the boxes of the Aquafina. And guess what it said:

Manufactured by Pepsico India Holdings Pvt Ltd, Roha, Dhavat, India

So is our water tainted? How would we know?

Thank goodness we have a choice, a choice to drink Oasis water from the Oasis Pure Drinking Water Factory LLC.

Today's Oasis thought of the day: Over the next twenty years, the supply of water per person is expected to drop by a third. Conserve now!

Right on, Oasis.

Burn

Well then. I present to you a picture of The World-Famous Chicken Teapot:

The World-Famous Chicken Teapot (hereinafter The Chicken) was a creation of mine in the early spring of 1999, during my last ceramics class at my dear alma mater, Clemson University (who's Tigers are ranked 18th this week, by the way, even if the special teams have turned out to be more the short-bus kind of special than we'd hoped).

The Chicken was a brainstorm for a teapot project. In fact, I produced several teapots for this project, one of which is a modified whiskey jug with a seven-inch spout that looks very much like an oil can you'd see on a steam locomotive (and remains one of my favorite of all my ceramic creations). I designed The Chicken so that you would put water in the back of the chicken, and then put the lid on, and heat the water for tea, and pour the tea out the chicken's beak. To this end the beak does in fact have a small opening. But for the fact that mysterious evildoers stole not one but three different tails I had created for The Chicken, it would work as intended. Instead, I stuck some silk autumn leaves in its butt; not terribly dignified, but it will do. (Observant readers may note that the teapot lacks a handle and would thus be hard to use. Really observant readers will recognize that of course it's art, so that doesn't matter.)

Although I find chickens terribly amusing, when I first decided to make a chicken-shaped teapot I could not say what, exactly, a chicken looked like. I mean, I could draw you a chicken you'd recognize as such, but what about those little chin dangles and that cockscomb on top? Should I put that in? What does a proper chicken actually look like?

I could have gone over to the agriculture department and asked to see some of their chickens, and I wish I'd thought of that at the time because it would have been terribly amusing. Imagine: there you are, working at your desk in the P&A building, and some possibly-deranged person walks up and says, "I would like to see a chicken, please."

Anyway, so much the better that I instead turned to the more obvious resource, the computer lab upstairs from the ceramics studio and the internet. (I did not google "chicken;" there was no Google yet. At the time, the search engine of choice for wise surfers was Dogpile. Remember Dogpile? You couldn't verb that word, at least not while remaining G-rated; that's why Dogpile failed.)

One of the first sites I came across had pictures of a rubber chicken with a notebook tied around its neck. This was too bizarre to pass up, so I entered into the domain of The Playa Chicken. The Playa Chicken had wandered around the crowd for several days at a wonderful festival I'd never heard of called Burning Man. I looked at the Playa Chicken's pictures, and remembered the web site so I could go back that evening from my own computer and learn more.

Burning Man has changed since 1998 (it was the 1998 festival that I read about on Playa Chicken that year). That year there were 10,000 participants; the 2006 festival was four times as large. It's anyone's guess how long the festival will remain viable given the pace of growth. This year, a city the size of Burlington, Vermont, was built and dismantled on the unforgiving terrain of Nevada's Black Rock Desert in the space of 10 days. The citizens there packed everything in and everything out; they engaged in no commercial activity apart from purchasing ice (profits from which are donated to the local school system). They did not drive cars. They produced art, and music, had parades, ate and slept and lived and experienced an event utterly unlike any other on Earth.

And yes, they did other things. Of course, they burned The Man, from which the festival gets its name. The festival has a bit of a reputation for promiscuity and drug use, too, and certainly many of its participants engaged in both activities, though the festival is not designed to encourage such behavior, only not to discourage it. Burning Man is much bigger than a chance for immature people to sleep around and get high, and charges that it is nothing more are just silly; after all, the same charges could easily be leveled at any American high school and most colleges.

I've wanted to go to Burning Man since I first stumbled across the Playa Chicken and his website. The Chicken sits placidly on its end table under the picture window in my living room, and reminds me of that. I don't think about it often, but the desire is there, just as The Chicken is there.

It's a cliché that there's a first time for everything. I believe, though, that there is also a last chance for first times, that there is a window during which you may do something for the first time, but as life marches on that window slowly closes and eventually you reach a point where, no matter how much you desire it, you will never do that thing. I believe the window is closing on my first time to go to Burning Man.

Next year I'll be 29. For the second time. I'll be a civilian, also for the second time, sometime in the spring. I hope to take some time off from work; one reason why I volunteered to deploy to Djibouti (see, I told you it's fun to say that word) was to save up some money to live off of for a few months so that I am not immediately forced to start looking for work as soon as I separate. But that situation cannot last; I'll be working again by the end of the year, probably by the end of the summer, and I don't really expect I'll have found a job that I especially like. I hope to find one I dislike less than my current one. Burning Man 2007 will run for a week starting August 29th, thus ending about the time I expect to start a new job.

I suspect that if I don't go to Burning Man in 2007, I will never go. That would be a shame. This is something I feel I need to see—and not just see, but actually do. Participate in. One of Burning Man's key tenets is "No Spectators." You must participate. How do you do that? You can volunteer at the ice tent. You can help set up and tear down a theme camp. You can produce art, wear costumes, play music, tell stories; you can do all sorts of things, anything, in fact—that's the point. You can do anything.

I have never felt like I could do "anything." My internal governor has always told me when not to do things I want to do, to save myself embarrassment or, worse, failure. In some sense, it's that governor I'm hoping to leave behind when I get to the playa. I want to know what that's like.

Many Burners work every day for The Man, punch a clock like the rest of us, and look forward all year to the festival as their one chance to leave it all behind and experience a few glorious hours of liberty, true liberty. But others have managed to find a way to survive in this country without punching a clock or working for The Man. I like to think they work for The Chicken.

I want to work for The Chicken. I may never be so lucky, and sometimes I feel that as my life rolls on along my chance to find such a job grows ever more remote. As I said, windows close. There's a first time for everything, but we won't all get to see it. If I'm ever going to experience Burning Man, it's going to be next year. So I'm going.

Who wants to join me?

Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

Boom

This post was going to have a picture.

Friday night during my midnight foray to the gym, we experienced An Event. The gym is a great place at midnight, since there are usually only two or three other people there, plus one or two staff members (locals. Actually, they're Djiboutians. No need to continue this ridiculous farce of hiding the identity of my location; I've already said I'm in Africa several times and, if you look at a map, the U.S. doesn't have any military bases of any size outside Djibouti. Besides, it's a fun word to say.) Despite the limited number of people, the televisions are all turned all the way up.

So I'm in there, not really making a concerted effort at working out, just doing things to ease my insomnia-induced frustration, and I hear something over the Giant Voice. Giant Voice is an amusing name for the basewide speaker system. It's really only Giant if the person using it bothers to speak clearly and at a reasonable volume, neither of which the fellow at the microphone was doing.

The other guy who was working out and I stuck our heads out the doors. "All personnel move to the bunkers immediately," is what we heard. So I grabbed a bottle of water and made my way to the nearest bunker post haste. This bunker happened to be right next to a cluster of female tents, and, it being midnight, all the women were just waking up and heading for the bunker. I lost track of the other guy, and I was the only male in the bunker with about twenty women. This was mildly awkward. We sat in there for a few minutes, until the Giant Voice came back and made more specific instructions--namely, that we were in a bunker that was right near whatever it was that was bad and had to leave immediately! And get north of Michaud Blvd!
Michaud Blvd. was the road immediately west of the bunker we were in. I walked out of the bunker, took five steps, and, theoretically, I was safe.

I went back to the gym. I was the only one in there. The Djiboutian staffer had walkd up the hill and had no intention of coming back. No one else came in. I turned all the tvs to a baseball game. I tried all the exercises I'd seen in the magazines that I'd never tried because they looked silly. Turns out, they were pretty silly. I used the elliptical trainer for about thirty seconds and decided I didn't like it. Then I heard an explosion.

It wasn't much of one, just a little boom, not apparently very far away. I stuck my head out the door. People were wandering around on the main street, by the gym, so clearly the area hadn't been evacuated. I decided to go out and see what was up, so I walked over to my clu. The clus had been evacuated. Dozens of people were standing around looking at their clus with the expression you see on people's faces watching their homes go up in flames on the evening news. I went back to the gym.

After another half hour, the Giant Voice announced all clear, so I left and went back to my clu. And that's when I saw It.

The Robot.

The Robot that Blows Things Up.

It was right there, with Its handlers and mobile oppression unit. It was absolutely the coolest thing I've seen since the cheetahs. I ran upstairs and grabbed my camera, and ran back downstairs before they could load The Robot into Its van. One of the handlers saw me approaching.

"You can't take a picture of The Robot," he said. He had an M-16; he was about 19 and looked a little jumpy. I decided not to inquire further.

Saturday night, while I was asleep, the entire scene played out again. They evacuated the clus. I didn't notice. I may not have slept much, but I slept hard. I missed my chance to catch The Robot in action. Sunday night, I saw a man leaving his clu, waiting for a van to pick him up and take him to the airport. He had luggage. He left the luggage alone and went to a restroom.

Unaccompanied baggage is, of course, a Suspicious Package, and thus must be blown up by The Robot. I considered calling the explosive ordinance disposal unit, just so I could see them come back out for the third consecutive night and maybe surreptitiously snap a photo of The Robot blowing up luggage. But then I thought, I'd be pretty annoyed if they blew up my luggage. So I went and stood by it until the man came back.

Still. I know The Robot is here. I will get a picture eventually. The Robot demands it.

Broken

The headache is not gone, but it is much reduced. The last day or two it's only come about at work, usually around hour three, and then is gone after lunch. I can handle this. I get up and take a walk and stare down the hallway every few minutes, and that seems to help. I know not whence it came, I care less where it goes.

The insomnia is still a problem. Thursday night, for the first time, I lay down at 7 in the evening and actually fell asleep in short order (not having slept a wink the night before). I only slept until midnight, but still, this was five hours, the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep in at least two weeks. Then Friday I tried to pull off the same trick and could not fall asleep. Finally I got out of bed, around midnight, after tossing and turning for a few hours. I got dressed to go to the gym, but some tiny little snag occurred--I think the string on my combat wallet got stuck on the stem of a banana and I couldn't extricate it--and I flew into a rage. I tore the sheets off the bed, threw the pillows against the walls, swept all the books and papers off my desk, pulled downt the clothesline, and threw the mattress against the wall.

Obviously I was a little troubled.

But I went to the gym anyway, and then there was some excitement, and I finally got back to my clu around two. I played on the computer for a bit, felt tied around four, and went to bed. For an hour. I was dead tired when my alarm went off at five.

Saturday night I finally managed to fall asleep around ten or ten-thirty, after tossing and turning for a few hours. Then I woke up again around two and couldn't get back to sleep.

Sunday night I didn't sleep. Interestingly, I've been much more awake and felt better today than I have any of those nights when I got a couple hours' sleep. But I'm also feeling a little loopy; I didn't know the date (I though it was the 26th today, all day, to the point that I argued with one of our missions that they'd put the wrong dates on their confirmation form and needed to redo it), misspelled my name on a form, forgot whether I sign my name in all caps or not (not anymore, but it took me a while to remember that and I had to cross out my first attempt), and so forth. Somehow I remembered to shave this morning, though.

I went to the doctor. I went yesterday, but there was a line out the door at sick call and I decided not to wait. Today I was the only one in there. The med tech offered Ambien, but, after consulting with the doctor, decided against it as it's very addictive and I might need it for a while. Then they offered diphenhydramine, Benadryl, which has never had any effect on me. Then they decided that maybe the mefloquine I'm taking as a malaria prophylaxis (exactly what it sounds like) was the problem. Given that the drug worksheet for mefloquine makes several remarks that people with my medical history ought to avoid the drug, I'm glad they arrived at that conclusion. When I first brought that up in August, after learning that mefloquine was bad for people with histories of depression or anxiety and has been known to cause serious emotional trauma even in healthy people, I was told that there was really nothing to worry about. This time, a different doctor actually came in to talk to me.
You said you have been depressed in the last year?
Yes.
And you have been diagnosed with anxiety?
Yes.
Who prescribed you mefloquine?
The doctors at my home station.
Did you know you shouldn't take mefloquine?
Not until I was already out here.
I'm taking you off the mefloquine. That should help you sleep. It may take a week, so here's some ambien to get yourself adjusted.

Ah. It feels good to know that not all the doctors are insane and like to prescribe inappropriate medications at incorrect dosages.

Okay. Enough navel-gazing. I don't want this to turn into one of those blogs where the writer just whines all the time. Still, if anyone has any cheese...

Breathe

The headache hasn't gone away, but it's not as bad right now. My sleep schedule is starting to get back to normal and that may help matters; we'll see. I do like the idea of consecutive one-word post titles that start with B. Maybe I can extend the streak.

No, the breathing I'm thinking of is the kind that comes with a bit of relief. I've edited Lauderdale, I've read it and edited it again. Now it's other peoples' turn to read it, while I sit back and... well... actually, I have a few other ideas I'm working on. But I'm also taking a bit of a break, which I need. And trying to do some other reading as well.

I have nothing else to report. I just like talking about the book. It's like a baby; once you have one you talk about it a lot. Nothing wrong with that.

Blind

Last Thursday I developed a little headache. It was nothing major, just a little pressure behind the eyes, the sort of headache I get once in a while and treat with Excedrin. Which is what I did.

Friday the headache was still there. And Saturday. And so on and so forth. It's not a migraine, not the worst headache I've had, but it won't go away. It's at the top of my head, and behind my eyes. It's especially bad at work, because I sit around staring at computer screens all day. I have to take frequent breaks. I can't make it go away, not with Excedrin, not with ibuprofen, not with Tylenol.

Tuesday I went to the clinic. I've had a headache for five days, I said. They checked my blood pressure. They asked if I was experiencing any symptoms that might indicate a sinus infection, but the headache is the only thing I have. The doctor came in and gave me a neurological exam and shone a light into my eyes.

I was prescribed a migraine medication, Imitrex. (Not to be confused with Initech.) Take four now, I was told, and four more in two hours, and the tomorrow morning if you feel the headache coming back take four more.

I went back to my clu. Because I was prescribed a malaria medication that is specifically discouraged for people with my medical history, I've taken to reading the little booklet that comes with any drug I'm prescribed before I take it.

The booklet says, take one pill. If, two hours later, you still have headache symptoms, take a second pill. Do not take a second pill until at least two hours have elapsed. Under no circumstances should you take more than eight pills within 24 hours.

If I had followed the doctor's directions, I'd have taken twelve pills within 24 hours, and four within two hours. I decided I'd rather follow the instructions.

The pills didn't do anything. It turns out that Imitrex works mainly by regulatin serotonin levels in the brain; erratic serotonin release seems to be a major contributing factor in migraine headaches. But I don't have a migraine. My serotonin levels are not likely to be erratic at present, which means Imitrex is probably not doing much of anything. I could take more of them, I suppose, and see what happens, but this seems profoundly idiotic.

I'd take a day off if I could, but with recent personnel changes we have just enough people on staff to prevent anyone working a 12-hour day—and this job is boring enough for 8 hours. Besides, having recently changed shifts (on Tuesday I started working mornings), my sleep schedule is all messed up and I don't know whether I'd be able to sleep or do anything meaningful if I did take a day off.

So, I have a headache. I wish I knew what to do.