READY, FIRE, AIM: It is Forbidden To Use After Expiration

The masks were made in China. In Guangzhou, to be exact. By a company called ‘Sunrise Nursing’. And they are expiring. Slowly.

A box of 50. Just your basic, disposable, three-ply mask, with “unique elastic material to reduce ear pain and bruising.” The type of mask you’d want to wear, if you want to avoid being bruised. But also, the kind of mask you would not use if they have reached their expiration date.

“It is forbidden to use after expiration. Production date and batch number of the masks are stated in the packing box.”

During these trying times, I find myself reading product boxes, and labels. Partly because I’m mostly sitting around, doing nothing, and partly because I don’t want to do anything that is forbidden.

Not only do I find myself reading product boxes; I also think deeply about what I am reading. I make an effort to consider, for example, how a three-ply nursing mask would expire after two years. What would it mean, exactly, for a paper mask to expire?

I would never think of eating cottage cheese that had expired, if for no other reason than it’s probably covered in bluish-green mold. But my house is full of various paper products, and as far as I can tell, none of them have expiration dates. (Note: I have read the packages.) I have some paper towels that I bought, maybe five years ago, and they seem to still be working just fine.

It’s possible that, in China, paper products are believed to expire after two years. Or maybe the Chinese government is just trying to keep the wheels of industry turning? Planned obsolescence and so on? Like the way my iPhone 4 became obsolete when Apple stopped offering software updates?

Of course, it’s also possible Sunrise Nursing is constantly improving their disposable masks, and they don’t want customers to be using an outdated product.

Few people would attempt to use an iPhone that was built back in 2013. But it’s possible the advancements in nursing mask technology are progressing at a slower rate.

Like I said, I think deeply about these things. Another thing I found myself thinking about: the company name, ‘Sunrise Nursing’.

My research into etymology suggests that the word ‘nursing’ derives from norice, nurrice, “wet-nurse, woman who nourishes or suckles an infant; foster-mother to a young child,” from Old French norrice “foster-mother, wet-nurse, nanny.” The word is related to “nourish.” In fact, if you had a mouthful of very cold ice cream, and were simultaneously trying to pronounce the word “nourish”, it would end up sounding like “nurse”.

For some reason, around 1400 AD, the English began using the word “nurse” to refer to the care of sick or infirm people in general, no matter what their age. People who you wouldn’t be suckling, in other words.

So we saw this slow, gradual transformation of the word “nursing” from meaning the provision of nourishment, to the wearing of paper masks that expire after two years.

These are the kinds of remarkable intellectual revelations that have resulted from the global pandemic, and that make me excited about the future.

“… they said that her phone is too old as well. Their app will only work on Android 10 and above for our “safety”. Her phone and over half of the Android phones being used are no longer capable of using our bank’s banking app. Even though many like my wife’s are less than a year old.”
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Android phones are made by many different manufacturers. Sadly, many will stop updating the software on a particular model very quickly allowing it to become functionally obsolete. We use Apple phones and keep them for many years during which Apple issues frequent online updates. I’ve never had a problem with a bank’s (or other financial institution’s) app not being fully functional. Of course that could because not only Apple keeping its phones up-to-date but having a good bank (USAA).

the word ‘nursing’ derives from norice, nurrice, “wet-nurse, woman who nourishes or suckles an infant; foster-mother to a young child,” from Old French norrice “foster-mother, wet-nurse, nanny.” The word is related to “nourish.”

And the word entered the British Isles with the Norman invasion. The word "nourice" also reminds me of one of my favorite ancient Scottish folk songs ever, "The Great Silkie", about a mythological creature who "is a man upon the land, and a silkie [a seal] in the sea." He sires a "bairn" [baby] with a human woman, and later returns and tries to buy her off with a "nourice fee", in effect paying her to have wet-nursed the child, whom he aims to take away and train to swim. The song ends with a dire prophecy.

"The Great Silkie" was popularized in America in the 1960s by folksinger Joan Baez. In this recorded version she sang the word as "nurse"; in live performances she sometimes sang "nourrie" or "nourice."

Scottish dialect notes:
"little ken I" means "I know very little about"
"not comely" means "not good-looking"
frae = free
stane = stone
fame = foam (sea water)
e'er = ever

Kinda like having a Model T in pristine condition, yet unable to meet street-legal regulations, gas mixtures, highway speeds, safety features, maintenance, etc.

It is funny that you should come up with such an example. I am currently restoring a very rare 1942 Cadillac. They made them only up until February of 1942. The vast majority of those were purchased by the military to be used as staff cars some of those which had already been delivered were forcibly purchased from private parties. We have owned and restored other vintage cars as well. At least in our state there are no restrictions on their use.

While the hardware may be fine, the information ecosystem it functions in has evolved beyond the hardware's capacity.

An interesting way to put it. I still have an original IBM XT clone that I put together about 40 years ago. I haven't tried to fire it up lately but unless the capacitors in the power supply have dried and the floppies and drives have gone bad (there is no hard drive) I would expect it to boot up and run Word Perfect and Lotus 123 like it always did. It is the same with the phone that I have recently retired. I have a bunch of apps old and new that still run fine on it, but there are a select few that I use frequently that now don't work at all or very well.

Yes, that is very similar to the one that we have. Ours was owned by a woman named Winnifred Filson who with her husband Clinton started C.C. Filson’s Pioneer Alaska Clothing and Blanket Manufacturers in 1897. Clinton died during the real pandemic in 1919 and Winnifred ran the company from that point forward with assistance from her nephew. The Filson clothing company is still in existence.

We purchased the car with plans to paint it up as a staff car, but are probably going to go with its original Robin's Egg Blue paint scheme. The Cadillac color was actually darker and less green in 1942 than in later years. Fortunately we have some interior paint that is not very faded to help match. It looks like the center of this 1958 Buick trunk.

The color varies depending on the lighting.

I’ve tricked them all:

MY phone is so old it doesn’t have enough memory to load up a crap ton of apps, so I run lean. Supposedly my Credit Union has an app, but I actually go to a co-op ATM and use my FCU’s website, and log everything in my pen-on-paper checkbook.

If my FCU said tomorrow I had to use their app, by tomorrow night they wouldn’t be my FCU, anymore.

My poor parents are in their 80s and really got along well with their flip phones. My dad's fingers are all beat up and bent from injuries and arthritis and they are very dry with poor circulation. He has a hard time getting a modern cell phone do what he wants it to.

My mom likes to play casino type games on her phone and actually navigates it fairly well. But neither of them have any idea how to do much of anything with their phones. Even tuning the volume up and down with the rocker switches can be a challenge for them. Trying to change the screen brightness... pretty much does not happen for them. They are able to use “contacts” that other people have entered for them but may or may not be able to enter them themselves depending on the day of the week.

At one time I was kind of a “phone person”. I purchased what I would consider to be the first widely available smart phone... the Sprint PPC-6700. It had the windows mobile version 5 operating system to start with and came with the portable versions of the Office Apps. It had a resistive screen with a stylus, but worked fine with your fingers as well and it had a pull out qwerty keyboard. It was completely customizable and had a following of phone aficionados who figured out how to get the best performance out of it. It had 3G and wifi connectivity built in and Sprint included the cable and gave instructions on how to tether your laptop to it. They provided unlimited data for no extra charge over what I had been paying previously for my flip phone. It worked every bit as well for data as my brother's Verizon 3G PCMIA card. At the time the speed was typically around 1 Mbps download 350 Kbps upload with fairly high latency. But after going from “56k” modems just a few years before, the speed seemed miraculous and was almost as fast as what ATT was providing with cable and DSL.

When the first iPhone came out a couple years later it was a joke by comparison, though there are those here who would argue that point to the death. But I had experience with both; the iPhone started out as an expensive toy with a good screen, almost no software, and 2G connection speeds the same as a flip phone from the time period. If you had wifi available which was basically only at home or in an office at that time... then you could do a few tricks with it.

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