Unit Control

This is just a quickie. Every now and then, it feels good just to laugh at myself and when is it better to dy that than Saturday Evening?

My office at PSU is on the 6th floor of the Urban Center. Six floors is a lot of floors, so mostly, I have been taking the elevator. On the other hand, what are the alternatives, really? Six floors or the elevator? Why?

So for the last couple of weeks, I have been walking up as many floors as I feel like walking and then taking the elevator the rest of the way. Every now and then, I walk all six because that is what feels good that day. Also, on those days, I’m not carrying a briefcase or a batch of books or anything. Other days, I walk up to the third floor or maybe the fourth (and once, the fifth) and take the elevator from there.

The one little sticky part is that if you think/feel that the options are “six or elevator” and you are standing at the bottom of the first flight, taking the stairs seems like a huge commitment. The trick is to know that it isn’t true. It does feel like six or none are your options, but it isn’t true. It still feels odd to start up the steps, but lately I’ve been having so much fun enjoying the incongruity of it all that I’m still laughing by the third floor.

The “unit” here is “the stairs.” There are lots of others. Would you like “a Coke?” When I was a kid, Coke came is 8 oz. glass bottles and “a Coke” wasn’t overwhelming. Now they come in 16 oz. and more and a reasonable person would say “I’d like to have some Coke.” “Some” takes the unit out and helps you see what your choices are.

My son Dan and I went to a place in Seattle one day where they make their own doughnuts in a huge array of machines. Dan said they were really good and wanted to buy me one. It turns out that they sell them by the dozen. “A dozen doughnuts” was the unit. Dan said fine and bought the dozen, took one, gave me one, and tossed the other ten in the trash. It was pretty dramatic as an action, but in principle, he just changed the unit “a dozen” to “some.”

It’s hard not to put on your toothbrush the amount of toothpaste they put on in the toothpaste ads, because that is “a serving” of toothpaste. But if you crack that “serving,” you can put on as much as you like. The same is true for cream cheese on bagels. When they cream up a bagel on TV, it looks like half an inch or so of cream cheese. It’s “the right amount.” But, of course, once you crack it, you can put on as much as you like. Or see as much of a movie as you like or read as much of a book.

The hard part is standing at the foot of six flights and feeling that even if you start, rather than taking the elevator, you don’t have to climb any more than you really want to. And that works pretty much all the time, except February 2nd in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania if you are Bill Murray.