View from the Porch Swing

FROM THE PORCH SWING

OLDER THAN DIRT

GETTING OLD AIN’T for sissies. In some ways it seems fairly easy, just keep on living. But old age will sneak up on you. Bones become brittle without you knowing. Muscles don’t stretch like they used to, but the loss of flex and elasticity is so gradual that most people don’t realize it’s happening. About the only way that age doesn’t sneak up on us is in getting facial wrinkles. And despite determined attempts to stay positive, who has ever truly happily uttered “Oh good, my first smile line!”?

Once it’s here, though, the hard part begins. Sure, the physical ramifications aren’t easy to deal with. Pulled, strained and aching muscles are frequent, from playing your favorite sport and not being able to walk the next day, to the twinges your back gives you when reaching something high up in a cabinet, to attempting to lift something you’ve lifted twenty-eleven times before and getting locked into a painful body position. And sure, the changes to your appearance accelerate dramatically, sometimes to the point that you walk past a mirror and have to turn your head to get a better look at that strange person who was reflected back to your peripheral vision. But, I think the emotional adjustments are the hardest of all.

The strains and aches keep coming if you refuse to acknowledge your age, and unwillingness to acknowledge is an emotional issue. And there are a host of other behavioral issues that come with denial. How many broken hips have occurred because a senior citizen refused to hold onto something for balance when stepping out of a shower? How many tumbles on stairs, some deadly, have occurred because a senior citizen was too proud to use the handrail, both down and up? How many senior citizens have succumbed to diabetes or heart disease because they refused to acknowledge that they shouldn’t continue eating the way they’d eaten the previous part of their life? And, oh my goodness, how many debilitating or fatal medical conditions could have been prevented and/or treated if senior citizens went for medical care more often than they did when they were middle-aged? From this Porch Swing, this old person thinks that all the physical stuff related to aging is so much more successfully dealt with when one admits and accepts that one has become old.

So, I am old. Truly. I am not quite as old as time itself. I’m pretty sure that I’m older than Adam lived to be, but not as old as the 969 years Methuselah is said to have made it to. But, I kind of like to express my age in geologic terms. Not only am I older than the hills, I’m older than dirt. Yep, if I ever retire and get new business cards, they’ll say “Gene Sanders, Older Than Dirt”.

In many ways, though, it is good to be older than dirt. For every 10 people that think I’m automatically senile for being over age 60, there’s one who thinks I must be wise. Gosh, I’d sure like to be wise, but I’m happy when someone mistakes me for being that way. When someone asks about a DG/HazMat regulation “why the hell did they do it this way?”, I sometimes know the answer. And I saw the sun come up the morning I wrote this. Someday I won’t be able to say that, and I will no longer be older than dirt, but be on my way toward becoming part of it.

Speaking of HazMat/DG history and of death, I think it’s important to honor those no longer here who had a hand in DG compliance, and thus helped keep the rest of us safe. My list will be different than yours. I’m only listing those I had direct contact with. And while contributions varied, all were important to me in one way or another. Someday, later, I may explain about why each of these people were important to me and to DG, but now’s not that time. When you glance over my names, please take a moment to reflect upon who would be on your list of names.

STEPHANIE FOSTER RUSS BOWEN PAUL D’HONDT KEN HOLLOWAY TERRY McADAMS GLENN SCHMUCKEL SPENCER WATSON DESMOND WAIGHT DAVID HIBBS

Thank you. Oh, and consider checking out https://hcblive. com/tag/obituary. You may know some listed there, too. And maybe I could honor the memory of those on my list by submitting something about them and their role in DG for that page. Thank you, HCB.

It’s not just people that pass on, but so do old ways, too. I remember Al Roberts teaching me about some of the first HazMat regulations ever, that required a pillow or mattress at the end of the ramp upon which barrels of explosives were rolled down out of boxcars (railcars). I wasn’t around for those, as they were more than a century ago. But, I do remember some DG stuff that dates back to the beginning of HCB 40 years ago. In no particular order, here’s some old DG/HazMat stuff I remember, and how it’s changed, and speculations on where it might be going. • Blue binders for the IMO’s IMDG Code regulations. Each year we’d take out the pages that held regulations that had been removed or altered, and added pages that had new or updated regulations. Page numbering became wonky, as we might take out three pages and replace them with five new ones. So, if I remember correctly, we might replace pages 86, 87, and 88 with 86, 87, 88-1, 88-2, and 88-3. And, as with most loose-leaf binders, the most frequently used pages would sometimes tear out. Hopefully, you’d notice as one of them fell out while carrying the binders from the bookshelf to your desk or workstation.

These days, we don’t even need paper regulations very often. I prefer them sometimes, especially when you have a general idea where something is, but not quite exact. For, example, if I was trying to find an exception for the use of orientation arrows on small packages, I would go to somewhere in the marking requirements and flip pages until I saw the picture of the arrows. Then, I’d be where I wanted to be.

Of course, the young DG professionals sneer at me for that. I tell them it’s better than using a menu driven system to navigate through a set of online regulations. And, they tell me that menu driven systems are almost as old as I am, and ask if I’ve ever heard of ctrl-F or command-F or seen an icon that looks like a magnifying glass. They’re happy to race me finding something in the regulations, and quite often the whippersnappers and their smarter-than-i-am phones beat me to it.

So, e-regs are the future, I’m sure. Eventually, there won’t be any need for a periodic corrigenda or errata, as the corrections will just ‘magically’ appear soon after a device is connected to the Internet. Heck, we might not even need a biennial issuance of the regulations, if all the changes can be made in what’s virtually real time. And except for a few dead zones coupled with dead batteries, we may not even print paper copies of the regulations at all. Eventually. • Packaging used to be manufactured prescriptively, with regulations about how far over the first side of a fibreboard box the fourth side had to overlap, and whether that ‘join’ could be made with staples or glue and, if staples, how thick the staples had to be and how close together they must be. We went from prescriptive packaging to POP. And no, it’s not “POP packaging” because that would be redundant. Now, along with the POPs, we have ‘closure instructions’ or ‘manufacturer’s instructions in writing’ that must be retained as documents subject to inspection. All of which make sense.

For what’s next in packaging though, I look at what they’re trying with lithium battery packaging. No longer does a package just have to survive normal conditions of transport, it may have to survive fires, it may have to contain reaction byproducts, and it may have to have not just cushioning and/ or absorbent but neutralizing or hazardmitigating components. If lithium battery packaging developments are our guide, we may have to have spill kit neutralization in between inner containers of acids and their outer packaging, we may have to have antimicrobial or virucidal cushioning around Category A 6.2 materials, and we may have to contain runaway 4.1 self-reactions within a package.

There’s also the surviving of conveyor belt