From the Archives - HAZOP Blues II: The Spawning

Introduction

If you’ve been paying attention to albertnet, you’ll have seen my first “HAZOP Blues” tale, from my archives, four weeks ago. Despite popular demand, I am running the next installment, written about a week later (and circulated via email because this was before blogs were a thing).

In case you’re wondering, I left this job a few months after penning the below memoir. Like James Cameron, director of Piranha II: The Spawning, I went on to much better things.

HAZOP Blues II: the Spawning – September 22, 1995, 12:28 AM

Greetings from Pasadena.

Things are, if anything, worse now than they were last week, so if you enjoy only upbeat tidings, please forego this missive. But if you’re intrigued by the idea of a sequel that doesn’t cost $7.50, read on.

We’re way, way, way behind schedule on this HAZOP, so the general mood is panic. My boss underbid this job by an amazing amount. It’s tantamount to saying you could build a skyscraper in the San Francisco financial district for about $50,000, in three weeks. So he’s been very tense lately. Add to this, of course, a software problem. This time it isn’t a computer glitch, but operator error. Hang on tight, because the explanation is a bit complicated.

Just before I came down here, one of my colleagues showed me how to use this special HAZOP worksheet-building software, so that I could scribe this HAZOP without looking like an English major who isn’t an engineer. (Normally, the HAZOP leader records his own sessions, but this client wanted a dedicated scribe. Lacking one on staff, my boss pressed me into service.) This colleague warned me that my boss doesn’t quite understand the software, and invariably gets his columns screwed up. The program uses various user-defined columns in which you record various things: causes of problems; consequences; and, safeguards (one column each). Suppose your cause is “valve stuck.” You might have consequences like “higher tank pressure,” “possible line rupture,” and “backflow to vessel piping.” In the next column, you list the various safeguards. These safeguards can either mitigate the consequences (e.g., a relief valve to prevent higher tank pressure, or a vent system to prevent line rupture), or they can prevent the malfunction (e.g., alarm detects malfunctioning valve and alerts the operator). Thus you have two basic ways to set up the worksheet: safeguards either relate to causes, or to consequences.

Basically, you decide which way to set it up, and then you set up the software accordingly. Thereafter, the safeguards scroll appropriately, and you number them properly, and your worksheet is organized logically. The only requirement is, you must always enter data according to how you’ve configured the worksheet—once you’ve configured it, you’re committed and can’t change your data entry protocol. My boss, I’d been warned, sets it up one way, enters the data that way for a while, and then at some point wanders off course, forgets how he’d set it up, and starts entering the data the other way, so that when you look at the worksheet, it makes no sense.

Well, knowing of this problem, I was very careful when my boss and I set up the worksheet together. I asked him very specifically how he wanted his safeguards to scroll. He was emphatic about relating safeguards to consequences. He said he always did it that way. And for the first week of HAZOPing, he was true to his word and followed his format: I numbered the safeguards within each consequence (i.e., starting the numbering over for each new consequence) and everything worked fine. The problem began when, upon reconvening the study after the weekend, he evidently forgot how we’d been doing it.

Here’s how it played out: there I was, recording away, and he was having a bad morning knowing how screwed up this project is, deadline-wise, and he whispered angrily to me, “You’re not supposed to start the numbering over at each consequence. Number consecutively throughout each cause.” I whispered back that I was doing it exactly how we’d done it the week before. This he denied emphatically. I couldn’t argue further, so I obeyed. In short order, our columns were all fouled up. Then he snapped, “You’re screwing up the rows.” What could I do? I pushed on. As the worksheet got more and more bollixed, he got more and more irritated. Eventually one of the Colombian engineers said, “Why are you numbering the safeguards that way? That isn’t how we’ve been doing it.” My boss assured him that he was wrong. Now I really began to worry.

At the next break, while the HAZOP team was off scarfing doughnuts, I pulled up a worksheet from the first week and showed my boss how we’d been numbering. He told me I’d been doing it wrong all along. So then I pulled up the worksheet setup/option screen and showed him that we’d configured the worksheet to relate safeguards to consequences, and had correctly adhered to this standard for the first week. At this news, he bawled me out for screwing up the worksheet setup from the get-go, and bemoaned that now we couldn’t fix it—that I’d basically screwed up the whole project and set us up to fail. At this point I was becoming very annoyed—enough to go after his goat. I told him that he himself had very clearly specified the worksheet setup.

Now he was good and outraged. I mean, who was I, this utterly green, English-major kid scribing his very first HAZOP, after only learning the software a week ago, to tell him he was doing it wrong? Not only had he helped to develop the software—he’d practically invented the damn thing—he’d been using it for many years, over the course of countless HAZOP’s. Did I mean to say he’d been doing it wrong his whole career!? “It’s a hideous thing to contemplate,” I said, “but that there’s what is.” Actually, I knew better than to actually say this. I just sat there, silent.

As if to finish me off, he commandeered the computer and said, “Look, I’ll pull up one of my own worksheets, any of them, to show you how I do it.” He pulled up a worksheet, and to my amusement, the columns were all screwed up. Furiously, he pulled up the setup/option screen, and sure enough, he’d set it up one way and scribed it the other. Now he was fairly livid. “Wait, that’s not a good example,” he steamed. He clicked over to his latest, greatest, most prestigious HAZOP, and said, “Okay, this is a good example. Look at this one: unless I’m totally fucked up....”

He pulled up the screen. I was relieved, but not surprised, to see that it was just as fouled up as the first one. I didn’t say anything: nothing needed to be said. A small silence ensued, during which I put 100% of my energy into not smirking. Then my boss said, quietly, “Well, I guess I’m totally fucked up.” Less than a minute later, his shock had given way to abject panic. He immediately began complaining about the incredible stress he was under, and all the staffing problems he had, and this whole HAZOP team breathing down his neck all the time, everybody talking at once, etc.

Once the panic/excuse phase was over, he segued seamlessly into a newer, more ferocious anger, lashing out at me with everything he had, like a cornered badger. He began making harsh accusations, finding fault with every aspect of my scribing. He began to blame my inefficiencies for the project being behind schedule (which is a joke, since most of the time I’m just sitting there, waiting for the team to come to a consensus so that I can type something).

Perhaps he eventually divined that my response was not guilt and shame, but mere incredulity, for he eventually began to temper his litany with expressions like “I’m not accusing you, I’m just sayin’,” and when he had determined conclusively that I wasn’t going to cower, accept blame, apologize profusely, and commit ritual suicide by self-disembowelment, he began to shift the blame to the rest of the HAZOP team instead. Finally he settled on a single scapegoat, Salim B—, the project manager, for whom I cannot formulate negative thoughts, largely (if perhaps unfairly) due to his benign demeanor and his pleasant resemblance to Frog from Frog and Toad Together, that wonderful picture book I enjoyed as a child.

By now the team was reassembling, and we continued the HAZOP. Notably, my boss continued to force my documentation astray, continued to demand that I force-feed the data into the worksheet in a manner counter to all logic. As if he hadn’t, mere moments before, come face to face with incontrovertible proof of his error, he continued to chase me down the errant path. Resigned to our doom, I gamely continued to mangle our innocent data, hoping that nobody would spot the inconsistencies and errors we were promulgating. Sure, my victory during the break should have been sweet—it’s not every day that you can sit back and watch while your arrogant boss makes a complete ass of himself—but it was a hollow victory indeed, for this wasn’t Me vs. Him, it was Us vs. Chaos, and we were now going down together. He’s the boss, so when he loses, I lose. (And he then wins somehow, because he’s a winner—got it?)

Perhaps the very worst part about the whole sordid affair is that when the day was finally over—eight grueling dog-hours behind us—my boss wanted me to be his pal, and go out on the town with him. We went to a restaurant; over great Thai food he attempted to find common ground with me by belittling every no-good, disloyal, stupid and immoral ex-employee we ever had (and there are a lot of them). I’m no slouch, either; I expertly tossed in detail after heinous detail about every one of them. I built up fabulous psychological profiles explaining the underlying nature of each one: “What S— lacked, essentially, was confidence. He couldn’t transcend his meager fire safety background and meet the challenge of holding his own among registered Professional Engineers and Certified Safety Professionals.” My boss—PE, CSP—nodded sagely in agreement.

I proceeded to spin elaborately sycophantic soliloquies: “I’ll never forget when you first saw the problem with S—, months before he left. You hit the nail on the head when you questioned his loyalty, way back in February. I think you knew his flaws even before they became obvious to the rest of us. It’s like you said, the cream rises to the top, and we’re better off without him.” My boss had never said these things—indeed, he had promoted S— only a month before—but that wasn’t about to stop him from savoring the memory of having totally nailed it. With great satisfaction, he dragged out his well-soiled cancer analogy, acidly lancing the tumors he had removed, and ordered us another round of beers. By the end of the meal, a dozen epitaphs later, I was beginning to feel sick.

Then we went out and shot pool, splitting (alas) a pitcher of beer. Our playing was absolutely abysmal; at one point, my boss managed to launch the cue ball off the table, where it rolled all the way into the bar. I, his obsequious little helper, shamelessly chased it down and retrieved it.

Now, we’re as chummy as ever; our worksheets, which continue to twist crazily on the page, are a taboo subject. More than ever before, HAZOP is a grind. Fortunately, I’ve developed a knack for recognizing, among the rambling discussions, the special lilt to an engineer’s voice (be his accent Indian, Colombian, French, British, or Turkish) that tells me he’s settled on an idea that should be recorded. Like never before, I swing to the music of valve numbers and failure modes. Between data inputs, while the team argues pedantically over the likelihood of a 2D low-low shutdown if the stage two crude discharge separator were to encounter a closed block valve at startup, I drift off into mental oblivion, fantasizing about being run over by a truck during lunch.

Note

An alert reader wrote to ask me how much of this I made up. Rest assured, nothing here is fabricated ... the sad tale is 100% true and (as I wrote it while still in the thick of the action) it doesn’t even suffer from the natural erosion of memory.

To be continued...

But wait! There's more! Click here to read HAZOP Blues III: The Final Insult.

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From the Archives - HAZOP Blues

Introduction 

Ages ago, before beginning the career I’m in now, I worked for a chemical engineering firm. That’s how it described itself, anyway. I never saw actual engineering take place; the day-to-day work was safety audits of refineries and chemical plants. It supposedly paid really well but I didn’t experience that firsthand.

What follows is a report I sent around via email, before blogs were a thing. This was almost before email was a thing … it was still pretty new and required me to plug my laptop (a prehistoric thing the size of a phone book—if you remember those) into a modem about the size of a pack of cards, and plug this into a phone jack in my hotel room. The bandwidth was 2400 baud, which was almost indescribably slow, as in 1/42,000th of what modern networks deliver. What’s more, you paid by the minute and had to be online the whole time you were composing your message, because it was a terminal emulator that didn’t support copy-and-paste. All this privation is surely why life expectancy was so much shorter then. It’s a good thing I lived through that dark period, so I can look forward to a long life ahead of me.

Okay, enough of this. It’s time to put up your feet, crack a beer, and enjoy this tale from my archives. It’s a sad one.

HAZOP Blues – September 16, 1995

I’m in Pasadena, California recording a Hazard and Operability study, which is interesting only to the extent that I can understand it. (Which I basically don’t.) The HAZOP process is really about as pedantic an exercise as I’ve ever been through. A team of six or eight people from a variety of engineering backgrounds sits around systematically brainstorming potential deviations from the design intent of a process (in this case, a gasoline field in Colombia, which is supposedly the largest construction project in the world right now). The team brainstorms the potential consequences of deviations, what safeguards are in place, and whether or not recommendations need to be made to improve the safety of the system.

It’s not as exciting as it sounds. The only consolation is the food: top-notch restaurants, every meal. Fortunately the Doubletree hotel here has a gym; unfortunately I have yet to take advantage of it. Instead I sit here, in my glorious new paisley boxers, with the rush of L.A. coming through the window. Still my guitar gently weeps.

The HAZOP team here (among whom I sit, pounding on the keys like a court stenographer) is made up of three local engineers (one a mad-scientist looking guy; one right out of Dilbert; an Indian American; a sporty fellow from BP in England; and two Colombians). Over lunch (lobster ravioli with lemon cream sauce, $15.95), I talked to the Colombians about cycling. They were very enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and were thrilled that I remembered that Jose Patrocinio Jiminez won the Coors Classic in 1982, and that Luis (or was it Lucho?) Herrera won the KOM in the Tour. They speak very highly of Andy Hampsten. They knew about the fistfight that resulted in disqualification of two riders a few days ago in the Tour of Spain. They understand that small front wheels do not result in increased aerodynamics in individual time trials. Finally, I’ve found some common ground with these fellows, since I don’t have anything interesting to say about chemical engineering.

While working down here in Pasadena I am continually faking an attitude of enthusiasm. This constant façade is difficult to maintain, so I’ve decided to vent all over you.

I’ve having a very hard time with the sessions. I don’t understand the chemical engineering aspects of the HAZOP, so witnessing the brainstorming is about as exciting as waiting for my wife at the cosmetics counter. At least I get to sit … otherwise I’d suffer a severe case of museum knees. As it is, my hands get sore because I’m typing like a madman the whole time, with my computer screen projected on the wall via a nifty (and expensive) LCD datapad. This means the team gets to find fault with what I’m typing. It’s not that I make typos; it’s that I don’t actually know what words to type. Everybody’s talking at once and I lack the knowledge to successfully synthesize and combine all of their various thoughts. It’s kind of like a psychiatrist attempting to simultaneously analyze both halves of a split personality. Except it’s worse: there are six engineers on the team, comprising four different accents and usually about six different points of view.

The worst part is, when they recommend a double-failsafe trip on a check valve, I’m supposed to know what check valve it they’re talking about (UVV-493012-001, for example) and type the number into the worksheet. This is difficult because all I have to go on is a fifty-page, 11x17” Piping and Instrument Diagram that has about 1,000 valves on each page, the depictions of which would collectively fit on the head of a pin.

The end result is that I’m simultaneously overwhelmed and bored, which means I have a hell of a time staying awake. It’s just like college in that regard. Today my eyelids actually closed several times, each time for a dangerous and terrible one or two seconds. I may have to resort to double espressos if I’m to continue this for two more weeks.

I do derive some small solace from the hotel here, which is fabulous. I have a real furry bathmat, instead of just an extra-thick towel. Maria, my maid, leaves new bottles of shampoo and new soaps every day, even though I’ve obviously just pilfered the ones I already had. I left her a dirty shirt this morning with a note, and by the time I returned to my room in the evening, the shirt was cleaned and neatly pressed and returned to the closet, left hanging of a fine stout wire hanger that, like the soap and shampoo, I get to bring home with me. But that’s not all. The maid not only took care of my shirt, made my bed, and cleaned up my room, but she also got on my computer and repartitioned my fragmented hard drive. I tell you, the service here is fantastic.

Perhaps the best thing about this room is that the windows have giant wooden shutters that, when closed, are absolutely opaque. At night, the room is as dark as a cabin up in the mountains on a moonless night, which is to say, pitch black. This kind of darkness is about the only way I can really submit to an utterly complete and delicious sleep (a depth of sleep that I rarely even get at home).

Of course, this degree of submittal is very dangerous. I become so tranquil, and sink into such a heavy slumber, that almost nothing can awake me. However, if something does—for example, several cars outside my window defying the odds by backfiring simultaneously, or an anvil being dropped on the floor in the room above me—I do wake up. And when I do, I experience a sudden and terrifying shift from the sacred slumber to a state of alarm—head jerking back and forth, eyes darting around in vain for some kind of visual data with which to supply my information-starved brain. Basically, it scares the daylights out of me (a problematic metaphor, I know, since this happens in the black of night).

I bring up this awful phenomenon because it happened last night. I have no idea what awoke me, except for my own blood-curdling scream. The scream is an automatic part of the whole experience. The last time this happened at home was on the night of a power failure which rendered even San Francisco completely dark. I was awakened when a giant framed and glassed picture fell off the wall, hit the hardwood floor, and shattered into a million pieces. Although I woke up screaming, I had no memory of the sound, and no idea anything had fallen. (I do have a memory of my wife asking, when I’d finally stopped screaming, “What fell?” I was utterly bewildered. Something fell?)

This time was no different, except that I never did find out what initially woke me up. I just know that my own screaming scared the crap out of me.

I think you know full well how loud my voice can be, especially when I’m greatly excited; now imagine a scream. It would make Hannibal Lecter’s blood run cold. Perhaps what the most terrifying thing about hearing my own scream is that in a way, I’m a spectator to it; I don’t know why I’m screaming, but have a pretty good idea that I sure as hell must be in some kind of real danger to scream like that.

After the scream was finally over, and I was done shaking on the bed, spinning blindly in a black void, I gradually calmed down enough to consider the scream objectively. Then, I had the unsettling realization that the police could burst in at any moment to find out what was going on. I also was afraid to fall back asleep—and indeed, even in my greatly troubled psychological state I was quite close to complete unconsciousness—since whatever had awakened me, I feared, would repeat itself, and I would scream again and this time for sure somebody would come arrest me. It really ruined a good night’s sleep … sleep I badly needed before today’s HAZOP.

Today went exactly as I described above, except that I was extra tired, and the team was grumpy and argumentative. Somehow, I got a dumb old Journey song stuck in my head (“She took a midnight train going a-ny-where . . “) which only made matters worse. The breaks were also a drag because last night my boss checked his voice-mail and the last of his senior engineers had left a message announcing his resignation. (Such is the boon of high technology: you don’t even have to have a backbone anymore.) Well, that engineer had supposedly been my direct supervisor, the Group Leader, so his resignation is causing a shakeup in the company hierarchy, as can be expected. But what’s especially dismal about this shakeup is how half-hearted all the shakeup is: there’s simply nobody left to supervise here anyway. Our office now has a grand total of three engineers, including my boss. Of those three, my boss fully expects a certain one to quit shortly, leaving an absurd two engineers total.

This total engineer count is down from about ten when I started here, not all that long ago. I mean, we’ve always wanted a project backlog, but not like this! Now, we have all these projects (business was actually in the process of taking off) and no staff to do them. I expect to spend four hours tonight working on another project for another client, and tomorrow we have to drive down to Long Beach to meet with said client. It just never lets up.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am that I don’t have a chemical engineering degree. I’ll never have to step up and be one of the overworked engineers. The only other silver lining I can think of is that I get paid time-and-a-half for all my overtime, which means by the time this HAZOP is over, I’ll be ready to retire and buy a $6,000 house in Claflin, Kansas, where my wife and I can live out the rest of our days as clerks at the AM/PM Mini-Mart. If we save enough, we might even buy a carpet cleaning franchise and be bona-fide business owners. Stranger things have happened!

To be continued...

This tale continues here with HAZOP Blues II: The Spawning!

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From the Archives - A New Jacket for Fall!

Introduction

Maybe you like to shop. Maybe you enjoy retail environments. Well, other than bike shops, I really don’t. When I’m in a clothing store I have this (only somewhat irrational) fear that I’ve drifted into the women’s section without realizing it. At The Gap once I was surveying a dizzying array of jeans, folded on endless shelves, and a salesman came up and said brightly, “Hi there! Would you like to buy some women’s jeans?”

So, when I have a positive retail experience, it’s kind of a big deal. What follows is the story of how, almost eighteen years ago, I bought my beloved “barn jacket,” which I still wear to this day. Of course this post isn’t just about that. I also discuss wool shirts that I wore before anybody else wanted them; the warping of the factory-outlet concept; a wormhole; and the extinction of quality control.

A New Jacket for Fall! – October 29, 1995

Fall is upon us, and you may be considering a new jacket. So, in the event that you’re interested, you can peruse this spellbinding account of my new jacket purchase.

I really needed a new jacket. My old one, the J Crew Barn Jacket, had served me well but was a bit too small, and was really better suited to Berkeley than to San Francisco. It was just a bit too light for the winters here, and a bit too baggy for cycling in (the wind shoots right up the sleeves). So on a cold, blustery day Erin and I went to the San Francisco Center and poked around.  

One of the things I looked at was a large wool Woolrich shirt, just like the ones my brothers and I wore back in high school. I haven’t seen wool shirts like those in a long time.   The only difference between our old wool shirts and these ones was the price. We’d bought them at a Woolrich Factory Outlet in Broomfield, Colorado back when Factory Outlet meant slightly irregular and overstocked stuff stuffed into bins in a giant warehouse, and at really cheap prices (I think we paid like $10 or $12; these were $100 [and now, in 2013, are $295]).  These days, of course, “factory outlet” means nothing more than a company-run store that sells lesser versions of their brand of product, for a price that is supposedly cheaper, but usually not my much. The modern factory outlet store doesn’t seem to have the “seconds” that I like to buy. I could never tell the difference anyway; I’m sure there was something wrong with those Woolrich shirts, but I never could figure out what. I have to wonder: now that factory outlet stores generally sell all first-quality stuff, what do companies do with their seconds? Surely they must have seconds.

After seeing the Woolrich stuff, we went upstairs to J. Crew. For years, J. Crew has considered me a loyal customer. They have faithfully sent me catalogs ever since I moved to the Bay Area (up until our bike tour, when they finally lost my scent). For a time, their catalogs featured extremely attractive models, which I considered an excellent selling point. (Un)fortunately, the women weren’t for sale. The strange thing was, up until very recently, I’d never purchased a J. Crew garment in my life, for reasons of cost. (The aforementioned barn jacket was a gift from my mom.) How I came to start getting their catalog is a mystery to me. I suppose I had walked into their stores a few times; somehow, they must have figured out my address. Maybe they had me followed. I’d been in there a few times with my roommate at the time, Brett, who was in fact a loyal customer. Maybe they heard him say my name, and something in our behavior suggested that we were roommates, and they’ve used postal records to track me from there. Either that, or they bought my name from Banana Republic.

Anyway, during a business trip to Pasadena a few months back, I discovered an amazing J. Crew store. The amazing thing about the store was its wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Or maybe it was a wormhole ... I’m no physicist.  The store, which is quite large to begin with, is in the shape of a giant L, and has the amazing property of instantly transporting you from one part of Pasadena to the other. One moment I’d be out on Colorado Avenue, seemingly miles from the engineering firm where I was doing consulting work, and then I’d walk past the men’s section, through the women’s, and the next thing I knew, I’d be in a little plaza near Il Fornaio, the Italian cafe right across the street from the office. It was like the wardrobe that led to Narnia. Not only was this a handy shortcut, but for weeks I didn’t really know how else to get from one point to the other. (You know: my usual spatial relations problems.) When I did finally figure it out, I still went through J. Crew because it was about 100 degrees outside, and the store was nice and cool.

Well, on one trip through, I happened to notice a pair of cool pants which were on sale. They were about $30, marked down from something like $400 (well, maybe not that much, but something atrocious). From a fiscal standpoint, it would have been folly indeed not to buy them, so I did. Then I looked at the receipt to find out exactly what these pants were: “khaki pant relaxed plain zip.” (The only way to find out the name of a garment is to buy it.) A few days later, again on the way through, I found a really great shirt on sale. This one is called the “tonal plaid shirt.” I don’t know what the name means, but it’s such a subtle plaid, it almost looks like a solid. The color is so dark that the shirt is almost black. The whole effect, in fact, is so low-key that when I wear the shirt, you almost can’t tell who I am. It’s a great shirt for an introvert, and may in fact be the grooviest shirt I own.

Well, my boss was down in Pasadena with me, and when he noticed that I’d made two J. Crew purchases during the course of a week, he made the same mistake that J. Crew had: he assumed that this must be my favorite store. So, one day at lunch, he suggested we go over there. Once there, he presented me with a $100 gift certificate. “Well, I know you love this store,” he said, “so I thought I’d take this opportunity to show my appreciation for your extra work here.” So, to return to my original story (if you haven’t forgotten it by now), I naturally hit upon J. Crew as the obvious place to buy my new jacket: I could buy something overpriced, save $100, and not sweat it.

I found a great jacket right away. It’s huge, and dark, and has a removable wool lining that is fastened to the shell by about 100 buttons, so the jacket doubles as a hobby. It doesn’t have any zippers, just buttons, which is great for me since I have a tendency to jam zippers. What’s more, the shell is a complete garment even without the lining (but not the other way around). It’s the kind of jacket that you don’t put on; you climb into it. Once inside, you can relax your entire upper body and it will support you. You could fall asleep in it without tipping over; it’s the kind of garment you could live in. But the main reason I bought it, besides that I had the $100 gift certificate, is that Erin liked it, and she had been the chief proponent of the new jacket all along.

[In the photo at the top of this post, the jacket’s liner has been removed and is draped over the arm of the couch. And yes, that’s the khaki pant relaxed plain zip, much faded but still in great shape though it’s shrunk less over the years than my butt, mainly due to lack of business travel so they don’t fit so well anymore.  In the photo I’m even wearing the tonal plaid shirt, which is starting to fall apart after hundreds of wearings but is still among my favorite shirts.]

Upon getting home and reviewing the jacket documentation, I finally found out a couple of things that I’d been wondering about for a long time. First of all, I found out the name of my new jacket: the Mule Jacket. So what does that mean? It’s the queerest, most nonsensical name since . . . Barn Jacket. I guess my old jacket made reference to me being a “barn dweller,” while this new one attests to my stubbornness.

The other thing I learned was why factory outlets don’t sell “seconds” anymore. (J. Crew certainly does have factory outlet stores; in fact, upon returning from Pasadena, my boss got on the phone to find out the locations of all of the J. Crew factory outlets in northern California, and prepared a listing for me.) The reason for there being no seconds anymore became obvious when I read the little tagboard card that came with the jacket (and, as I now recall, that came with my khaki pant relaxed plain zip, and even with the tonal plaid shirt):

THIS GARMENT IS PREWASHED.

We’ve put this J. Crew product through a washing process to create a softer, “lived-in” feel and look. This prewashing replicates natural aging without repeated wearings and washings. So this garment is a bit faded, a bit shrunk, and its seams are looser and less uniform (as shrinking is never completely even in all dimensions). There will also be some variations of shading and texture. In fact, some garments will have large bleached patches. Almost invariably, one sleeve will be longer than the other, and the collar may choke you, or else gape wide open and let cold air in. You may find that there are more buttonholes than buttons, and that the fabric may have large runs or tears in it. Some garments will give you years of service, but you shouldn’t be surprised if your garment completely falls apart after just a few short weeks. These factors combine to give this garment its individual look and comfort. Please keep this in mind as you examine your new J. Crew garment: because we don’t want to hear any complaints. Such variations are assets that contribute to the uniqueness and personality of all our prewashed apparel. 

Once I’d read this disclaimer, I finally understood that there’s no such thing as a “second” anymore simply because there’s no such thing as quality control anymore. We’re expected to love and accept our garments, regardless of their idiosyncrasies and faults. It’s a beautiful thing.  And the sooner we can give this same consideration to our fellow human beings, the sooner we’ll achieve a gentler, more humane society.