My boss at my first real job was a guy named Dom. Dom and I had gone through graduate school together, though I didn’t know him well then. He'd been in a different research group, on the other side of the building. He claims we took a class together (the dreaded Classical Electrodynamics, oh god), but I don’t remember him in the class. Sea of young men, one or two women. Horribly difficult math.
Dom had graduated a year ahead of me even though he’d started a year after me, partly because he was one smart cookie, but also because I took a detour for a year and a half. I like detours.
Right after graduate school, Dom and two other guys from our department set up a company. Their initial product was scanning tunneling microscopes. You may remember that invention from the 1986 Nobel prize in physics. Binnig and Rohrer? IBM Rüschlikon? Yes, that’s the one.
If you remember scanning tunneling microscopes, then no doubt you remember a much more marketable derivative product, the atomic force microscope. Dom's young company started making those, too, while I was in my last year of graduate school, writing my thesis.
I’m told that most people in STEM disciplines dread writing their thesis, and that was certainly the case among my cohort. Writing my thesis was my favorite part of graduate school. I’d get up early and write all morning using my new Mac II, backing up my work periodically on blue or gray diskettes. Then I’d meet my friend Katie at the Palo Alto public pool for a swim. She was on the same schedule, writing her thesis on gender roles for the psychology department.
Her thesis could well be a more interesting read than mine, which had the catchy title, Determination of Dopant Site Occupancies in Copper-Substituted Yttrium-Barium-Copper Oxide By A New Application of Differential Anomalous X-ray Scattering. My advisor told me that when he couldn’t sleep, he’d pull out the latest chapter of my thesis. Better than a glass of warm milk. When’s the next chapter coming out? he’d ask anxiously, dark circles under his eyes.
Dom’s thesis dealt with atomic force microscopy. So did the thesis of S.I. Park, who founded the company together with a guy from my research group, S.I. Park. Their names differed by one vowel, buried in the S part of their first names. But they couldn’t have been more different. I thought of one of them as the good Park and the other as the evil Park, but may have been oversimplifying.
Dom was the third employee, and a good complement to the Parks. Half Irish, half Italian, Dom came from a big family, mostly boys. He was smart and gregarious. He not only taught me how atomic force microscopes work—we later wrote a chapter about it in a page-turner of a book called Encyclopedia of Materials Characterization—but also introduced me to the Simpsons, a new satiric comedy that would have a profound impact on animated comedy for years to come.
The Simpsons, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bugs Bunny: formative.
I found my way, working at that company. I had no idea what I was good at, no idea what anyone would pay me to do, no idea what I was even interested in---and I started making progress figuring that out during my four years at Park ‘n’ Park. Thereafter I moved to MNC, the company from which I retired early this year. Dom moved there, too, a year or so after I did. He rose quickly in the ranks. I rose more slowly. He was one smart cookie.
When the first Simpsons movie came out, I wanted to share the genius of the Simpsons with my son. I’d recorded episodes from the early nineties on a VCR, and we watched them together after he’d finished the ridiculous amount of homework that third grade wrought upon him. I pointed out the clever visual and verbal twists, as we ate ice cream and absorbed the early Simpsons episodes together. We talked about the power of satire and comedic timing.
His dad was on a business trip in Japan, and we took advantage of Dad’s absence to bend the rules on screen time. We called it research. My homework is done, Mom, my son would say. Let’s do research! He was ready for the movie by the time his dad returned.
The first Simpsons movie features a choral version of Spider Pig that will stay with me forever. It plays during the credits. Pure genius.
I don’t watch the Simpsons much any more, but there’s one other gem that Dom imparted to me: the concept of buck-a-use.
Buck-a-use is a system for figuring out how much to pay for something. Let’s say you are planning to buy a kitchen table. You like a rather expensive table, but because of your Depression-era parents (this may be me I’m talking about) you have a hard time deciding to spend that hard-earned cash.
Buck-a-use says this: If you’re going to use the table once a day, every day for ten years, then you can feel good about spending a maximum of 10*365*$1 = $3650 for it. You will have used it 3650 times, at a cost of $1 per use.
Granted, you can bend buck-a-use to your will, using arguments like: but I’m going to give the table to my stepson when he grows up, and he will use it for ten more years. In this way, you can get away with spending a bit more on something you really want.
Let’s think about a car for a moment. If you spend $40K on it, you’d have to use it 40,000 times before trading it in. If you drive to work and back, and then to the store and back, that’s four uses a day. Ten thousand days is a heck of a long time to keep a car, even for me. Twenty-seven years and change. Plus you have to go to the store every day.
If you keep a car for five years, two trips a day, then buck-a-use guidance would indicate you should spend not more than $3650 for the car. A car that cheap, you might have to reserve some additional bucks for major repairs. That would eat into buck-a-use.
Fudge factor to the rescue: What if you define use a different way? Every time the car starts after a stop could be construed as a use. Red lights become joyful instead of frustrating, as your personal wealth grows. You come to a complete stop at every stop sign. Buck-a-use can be transformative when applied in just the right way. Bingo! Get any car you want!
You know what purchase absolutely violates buck-a-use? Any dress, shoes, bag that you buy for a specific occasion. Dom and his wife probably don’t own anything like that. Can’t even rent a tuxedo, let alone buy one.
Thirty years later, Dom, I want to save us all by introducing the concept of buck-a-use offsets. Like carbon offsets, these work by identifying items that cost you much, much less than a buck per use. Overall you’re aiming for buck-a-use neutral.
Here’s my absolutely favorite example. When I first moved to California, at age twenty-one, I went to a ladies’ auxiliary sale at the local high school to get some kitchenware for my roommates and me. I bought clunky mustard-yellow dishes, an incomplete set. Some chips here and there. They got me through graduate school, and I donated them shortly afterwards. But what I still have is the pepper grinder I bought that day. I paid twenty-five cents, back in 1982. I refinished it once, a couple years ago, when the surface was just too gunky. Well, partially refinished. I sanded it but then wasn’t sure what to do with the new surface. Tung oil? Meanwhile I’m just using it naked.
The pepper grinder, I mean.
I have used that pepper grinder nearly every day for the last 39 years. I love the wide size distribution of the pepper chunks it generates. Its blades are still sharp. Defies all laws of physics that I remember, which is not many.
For simplicity, let’s say I have used that pepper grinder 200 days a year for 40 years. At least one other person in the family will have used it that day too, so let’s multiply by two. That’s 200*40*2 = 16,000 uses. I triumphantly calculate slightly more than one point five thousandths of a penny per use. Not thousandths of a dollar, thousandths of a penny.
Yes, I’m neglecting net present value. This is not a primer on finance, it’s a story.
Moreover, that $0.0000156 per use is today’s value! I plan to use this wonderful pepper grinder for the rest of my life, and then bequeath it to one of my kids. Who I hope will pass it on to one of their kids. At some point they’ll have to use scientific notation to express the value per use. I probably should have done that already.
I don’t know how to do the math to figure out whether the pepper grinder offsets the dress I purchased for my sister’s wedding last September, but if it doesn’t, I can point to some old socks.
[Photo creds for image of pepper grinder: Me.]
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