In which I get some bad news u guise! I have to get holes drilled in one of my teeth!!!!1!

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have never had a cavity IN MY LIFE*. 

I’m that one person who can say, “I have never had a filling. Ever!” (I have bad skin and have to wear glasses, not to mention the horrible tartar, so I figured I deserved it.) UNTIL NOW.

Now I have not just a cavity, but two! In the same tooth! And an appointment to get a filling! In April! No shit!

When I went for my exam yesterday, the dentist, whom I’d not previously met, asked me what I do. “I’m a rock star,” I said. “I play blues festivals all summer.”

He quizzed me a little more and of course I revealed that one doesn’t live on gig money, that I’m a sysadmin by day, blah blah blah. He apparently made the leap that I must understand electronics.

My cavities, such as they are, are very small and going weird directions and failed to show up on the films, so the good doctor took another couple because I said I wanted to see them, my very own cavities, but still no joy. So he brought out an oral wand camera thing, stuck it in my mouth, and took a picture.

My cavities, such as they are, are two little brown spots on my upper left rear tooth — not very dramatic at all, but I guess one gets them drilled and filled to stop them getting worse. Whatever. (I thought it’d be this Terrifying Black Nastiness that Clearly Needs Intervention to keep it engulfing my entire brain pan, and not a boring little brown spot. I mean, sheesh.)

When the wand came out of my mouth, my dentist began to quiz me about the two broken ones he has. Apparently they short out easily and he’s sent them back for repair but keeps being told to buy new ones. He showed me two bad ones from different manufacturers; he even plugged them into the XP box in the exam room to show me the exact ways in which they were malfunctioning.

“Well, this one’s obviously just loose wiring,” I told him. “See how the casing around the wire is loose? That should be way up inside the cowling, not visible like that. I bet this whole assembly opens and then can be pulled down… you could cut this part off, strip the inside wires and re-solder it…”

One of them was a two-piece device; the USB cable unplugged from the wand camera. The connector was a round pinned thing reminiscent of a serial adapter. The cable was the male end, the wand was the female. “I’d expect this cord to have six or eight wires in it, kind of like CAT-5,” I said. “Or maybe actual CAT-5. And this doodad should either pop open or pull down to expose the end of the cable. You’ll just strip off the casing, mark your wire colors, and then cut off the portion you think the short is in…”

He got one of them apart based on my guesses and we discussed disassembly. By then there were two techs observing and broken oral wands all over the place. (No, I’d never seen an oral wand camera in my life, but I guessed how they were made by looking at one.) Long story short, I was late back from lunch because my appointment was really long while I explained to my dentist how I’d fix his expensive camera-on-a-stick devices. It was hella fun! #YesIAmANerd

Maybe I’ll start a side business fixing expensive dental equipment that is, in actual fact, just shitty cheap imported USB devices. Heh.

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* This is a lie. I had a cavity in one of my wisdom teeth, but those were extracted a long time ago so it doesn’t fucking count. Sez me.