Two extremes?
That would be work and home and that’s what “Pendler” means in German – oscillating between the two.
Pendulus
Latin
From pendeō (“I hang”) + -ulus.
hanging, hanging down, pendent, suspended
Either by car, public transport or bike.
(Although Ms MDP once had a co-worker in the Sandwich Mechanic side of the airline business who LIVED in LA and COMMUTED to FRANKFURT for her operational role. About 25, from the bags under her eyes, looked 70..)
“And if you’re commuting by bike, we might as well give you a bike motorway” said the good people of Bingen, Ingelheim and Mainz
“And while we’re at it – here’s one all the way to Bad-Kreuznach for good measure
Only took them 10 years to (not quite) finish it, but what’s there is as flash as a rat with a gold tooth, with green and white marking to keep us on the straight and narrow.
Which means that I can bike the 100km up to Koblenz with hardly getting involved with motorised traffic.
Apart from e-bike Erwin who’s a bit of a menace.
And if you don’t oscillate, you have a plumb bob to establish a vertical datum.
True story.
Used to work with a bunch of programmers our company hoovered up from the Brisbane City Council.
We’d developed a tradition of unusual birthday presents – one guy used to brush his teeth before and after any intake of nourishment (we’re talking 10 times a day and OCD hadn’t been invented back then…).
He got The Golden Toothbrush – a gold-painted metre-long cardboard tube with a wallpapering brush attached, decorated with canned whipped cream and stripes of strawberry jam to emulate Signal toothpaste
(IIRC it was inherently unstable and ended up decorating the recipient’s shoes…)
And we’d wind up our boss, give him a couple of key words and let him loose on a 5 minute off-the-cuff laudatio.
Plumb bob.
One of the guys, Rob Jamieson, was getting a bit homesick – I think it was when the temperatures dropped below 20°C which is winter in Brissie – so we worked out an escape route.
Can of Fosters attached to a piece of string and a shovel.
Beer bob (as in “Robert”
Us to boss: We’ve build a beer bob for Rob and all he has to do is to dig straight down, using it as a vertical datum. At some stage, he’ll come out in Australia.
Boss rubs his hands with glee and launches in to a superb monologue about the first white Aussies being deported villains from England and it took months to get there by sailing vessel and it’ll take you probably just as long (and I’m not saying that you’re a villain, although when I look at your time sheets and your hourly rate I’m not so sure) and anyway I hope you’ve been saving your ill-begotten gains because asbestos outerware doesn’t come cheap and you’ll certainly need a shitload of that when you approach the core.
Etc etc.
Mainz Daily Photo 