I have a motorcycle. It’s a Harley-Davidson. Immediately, everyone is picturing a large and unpleasant looking bearded man riding a huge, noisy, vibrating, chrome bedazzled air cooled motorcycle without a helmet from one bar to the next.
My harley makes about as much noise as a Toyota Camry. I wear full protective gear when riding it, including a bright and attention-getting helmet. It doesn’t get ridden to bars, because drinking interferes with my motorcycle addiction.
The large and unpleasant looking bearded man part is accurate, though.
I worked night shift in a metal fabrication shop about 11 years ago.
Two bastions of humanity figured out that they could light an oxyfuel torch and adjust it to a neutral flame, snuff the flame out of a glove or something, and then use the torch to fill a plastic sandwich bag with a perfect mixture of oxygen and acetylene. They would then place this bag somewhere and light it on fire, which made a lot of noise. They had great fun until they tried it with a small office-sized trash bag. The word of the day is brisance. It made a tremendous bang which cracked some glass in the shop, but of course our two heroes were caught in the blast amd burned, because a sandwich bag made a loud pop, but a trash bag was more of a bomb. They lit the trash bag like they did the little bags, by holding a lighter to the plastic.
This happens in the world of CNC machines too. I used to run a two million dollar Mazak 300 Fabrigear that was made in 2008. When I started the machine up, Windows 98 booted up before starting the FANUC control program that actually ran the machine.
When my little 4-cylinder truck wore out in 2021, I looked so hard for one of the little kei trucks. But all of the ones I could find were $20k, or they were $15k and needed a lot of work to be driveable. And none of them were within 200 miles of my location.
I ended up with a used base-model F150 which only cost me $12k. It had 81k miles on it. As near as I can figure out, it started life as a rental truck for a hardware store called “Menards”. It has an 8ft bed, no carpet, no power locks, no power windows, no back seat, no touchscreen, and no color LCD screen in the gauge cluster. I use this truck for a small farm that my wife and I run, so it doesn’t get driven every day.
The one pictured does look like a municipal manhole cover instead of one belonging to AT&T or another communications company, just because of the design on it.
Last time I had to be knocked out for surgery, I remember feeling myself fading out, and just before everything went out I felt the nurses and technicians getting me uncovered, when one of them exclaimed “Wow! Look at all that red hair!”
I’m a large, unpleasant looking man living in a red state who has a pickup truck, and a harley. I’m married to a methodist lay speaker. I have a few firearms.
So naturally I must be the biggest trump supporting, red-hat wearing, religious conservative twatwaffle in existence, there is no other option.
As a result, the actual redhat cockwombles I work with think I’m going to be OK with their racist comments, and are shocked when I’m not. The thing that helps me with these guys is the fact that they are having to work from prints that have my initials on them so they can whine about the LiBuRl all they want, and I’ll still be helping them get their jobs done.
The traits they are assuming make me One of Them™ are just incidental things. I have a battered old truck because my wife and I have either a large garden or a small farm, depending on how you look at it. A Honda Civic won’t carry the stuff I need. (Neither will a van) I have a harley because the local motorcycle dealers are pretty terrible tp deal with, but the harley dealer is nice, helpful, and act like they want to sell a bike. I’m large and unpleasant because of genetics. And I have firearms because for most of my adult life I have lived somewhere that has an hour’s response time for law enforcement, and I’ve had to defend myself in the past. None of these things made me hate any particular group of people.
Speaking as an American - an electric kettle. Just a thing that plugs into the wall and boils water.
I use it for tea, of course, but I also use it any time I need boiling water for something, because it’s faster than a kettle sitting on the stove and it doesn’t use gas.
It’s even worse for me. I can leave the snacks at the store all I want, but I can’t escape because I can bake. If I get bored I’ll end up making cookies.