Thursday, February 24, 2005

Gold dust on the floor

Yesterday was the final step: take out the temporary and put in the permanent crown. I'd had it done several times before. Yeah. Bad teeth. Today's visit went pretty smoothly.

The doc had just popped-out the temporary metallic crown that had been generating an electric current in the back of my mouth for the past two weeks. My belt began to vibrate. There was a break in the action, so I decided to answer the silly phone.

"Hello. Can I call you back in a few minutes?"

"No, it's just a quick question: where are the web-page documents stored?"

"On the web-server: in the /sys/apache2/htdocs sub-directory"

I had to repeat myself a couple times before he understood my answer. I spoke clearly, my mouth didn't even have stuff in it.

He thanked me and I put the phone away. I was happy that I'd been able to answer quickly and succinctly. I hadn't delayed the dentist for more than 1 1/2 minutes. Still, I'm sure it was rude of me to answer at that moment. It won't happen in the future.

The process slowed down when the doc was fitting the permanent crown. It seemed to take extra long before the crown fit just right. He would pull it out and grind off a bit here and a bit there on the little gold piece, then put it back in and try again.

Eventually I told him that I could see the gold dust piling up on the floor below his stool. I had visions of the gold rush of '05. I told him that my ggg grandpa had been at Sutter's Mill and I'm looking for a similar experience in my life.

I don't think the dental assistant appreciated my attempted humor, much.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, bro. Didn't know you were such a writer. Couldn't stop reading til I read everything. Keep going. You are very, very good. Evan's up. Got to get him ready for school. Sure love you,

Linny