I was peering into the washer, and thought how each piece of fabric was like a piece of the y2k puzzle, sloshing about in a sea of uncertainty. Power. Oil. Satellites. Telecoms. Nukes. I'm easily hypnotized today; must be the disrupted sleep. Anyway, up comes this memory of a skit I once saw on Saturday Night Live. It describes so well just why so many of us find our sleep disturbed these days:

Main control room of a nuke plant. The Super is heading out the door for a well-earned vacation. He says goodbye, and then, Colombo-style, turns around and says to the crew: If anything happens, just remember one thing. You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor.

Super is blowing clouds of dust as he heads away in his car with his family, waving goodbye. Suddenly a red light begins flashing on one of the control panels and a warning chime begins to sound. One of the engineers looks at the gauge and begins hurriedly turning a dial.

"What in blazes are you DOING?" a fellow engineer shouts. "Fred said, 'You can't PUT too much water in a nuclear reactor.'" "You damned fool, he said that you can't put too much WATER in a nuclear reactor." "No, he said that you can't PUT too much water in a nuclear reactor." "He SAID that you can't put too much WATER in a nuclear reactor."

The dialogue repeats and repeats as the camera pulls outside the plant, farther and farther back. A mushroom cloud billows into the sky . . .

Yup. Guess it will all come out in the wash.

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), November 28, 1999

Answers

Faith,just recieved your e-mail today.Can you believe it?I don't understand why it took that long to show up.

-- Maggie (aaa@aaa.com), November 28, 1999.

Faith: THAT was a brilliant post. Hey, it'd make all our whites whiter.

-- silver ion (gotaplunger@nd.bucket), November 28, 1999.