The Muddled Male

Wife Two, Engineer Zero

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

 

         It has been a tough couple of weeks for your friend the Muddled Male.  Ann, my wife, has an insatiable curiosity about how things work and why certain things happen.  Because I was an engineer in my former life she thinks that I can answer any question about anything at any time and she expects an immediate answer when she asks.  Since I don’t want to lower her estimation of my ability by letting her know that sometimes I am clueless, I occasionally make up the answer to her question just to keep her from finding out that for that particular question I really don’t know the answer.  I always assume I won’t be caught since she wouldn’t have asked if she already knew.  Even when I don’t know the answer, if I sound authoritative enough, she will assume that I do, thus giving me extra credits that I may not deserve but really need.  Sadly she sometimes pins me down and finds that I am prevaricating and that causes mistrust to creep into our relationship. 

            My real problems began a few weeks back on Ann’s birthday when our kids surprised her with a birthday party and lots of Helium filled balloons.  After a few days some balloons began to deflate and sink.  When Ann asked if they were sinking because they were getting heavier I told her that actually they were getting lighter since some Helium had leaked out.  Then she asked why, if they were getting lighter, the balloons didn’t rise instead of sink.  I tried to explain that it wasn’t so much the weight of the balloon that mattered, it was the weight of the balloon and Helium compared to the weight of the air that the balloon displaced.  And that when the Helium leaked out the balloon collapsed so that it was smaller, and the smaller size meant that it displaced less air.  I further fortified my answer by reminding her that what I just said was consistent with Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy which he included as part of his treatise on floating bodies.  Archimedes principle states that any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.  So that means that if an object weighs less than the fluid that it displaces (air in this case) the object will float, but if the object weighs more than the fluid it displaces it will sink. 

 

           She responded by asking why she should take the word of a prevaricator backed up by a partner in crime who just happened to have died more than twenty two hundred years ago?  And for that reason, she informed me, she was going to stick with her first assumption and believe that the balloons were sinking because they were getting heavier.

            Then came the vacuum cleaner caper.  Ann has a bag-less, upright, cyclone type vacuum cleaner she uses to vacuum our upstairs carpets.  She can always tell when its performance begins to drop because the cyclone disappears and the dust bunnies in the cyclone tank stop swirling.  The normal fix is to remove the entire cyclone assembly, carefully disassemble everything, and clean each part carefully.  But this time cleaning did not fix the problem.  After a thorough analysis of flow paths, Ann’s resident engineer concluded that the problem was likely caused by dust being trapped on the upstream side of the Hepa Filter and blocking airflow.  But after multiple attempts I was not able to figure out how to remove the filter, even if I used the Mechanical Engineer’s beloved tool, the screwdriver pry bar.  Ann’s cutting remark was, “Did you read the owners’ manual?”  “No,” said I, “Engineers write manuals, they don’t have to read them.”  So Ann, in an attempt to shame me, followed me around reading from the manual.  When she came to the part about removing the Hepa Filter by grasping the tab and pulling, she thought she had me.  But I quickly explained that a tab would be obvious, moulded into the plastic ring that held the filter, and easy to spot.   And there was no such tab anywhere near this filter.  Then Ann said, and she refuses to let me forget it, “What is this loose piece of nylon material here on the edge of the filter?” as she reached out and easily lifted the filter out of the cyclone tank just as it said in the owners’ manual. 

            Now I am beginning to think that maybe Archimedes was wrong and the balloons are sinking because they are getting heavier.