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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(Yesterday was a Bugs & Cranks day, so hop on over and read So, You Don’t Think They Can Dance? if you’re so inclined.
Or follow me on Twitter for up-to-the-millisecond notification of what’s going up where, and when. The why, you’ll have to figure out yourself. If you can.)
My wife and I have very similar views on many aspects of life. We’re both easygoing, flexible, low-maintenance sorts of people. We’re usually on the same page — or at least in the same chapter — and can come to some compromise on whatever issue might arise.
I’ve recently discovered, however, an are where we’re — literally — miles apart: gasoline. Specifically, when to replenish the gasoline in the fuel tank in the car.
The missus is a ‘quick filler’; when the needle slides near the quarter-tank mark, she starts scoping out the Chevrons. Heaven forbid the car should have less than a few gallons sloshing around in it, ever. An approach I could understand if we were were, say, riding a horse down the interstate. You don’t want your flesh-and-bone-and-swishy-tailed ride to tucker out, so I would totally support regular water breaks if we traveled by pony.
“What we lose in garage fees and parking tickets, we gain back in not having forty-eight pounds of poop a day to dispose of.”
But we drive a Maxima, not a Clydesdale. Each has their advantage. What we lose in garage fees and parking tickets, we gain back in not having forty-eight pounds of poop a day to dispose of. Also, the saddle sores tend to be less of a problem, given that we’re not mounting the car from above.
(Usually. There was the unfortunate incident when I tried to demonstrate a certain Whitesnake video to a friend who had never seen it. But that was just a one-time thing. And the dent’s never completely come out of the car hood.
Or my thighs. That stunt gave my legs dimples where no dimples have any right to be.)
My take on gas refills is the exact opposite. To me, filling up with a quarter-tank left is just ‘topping off’. Things don’t start to get interesting until the empty warning light comes on. And even that doesn’t send me careening into a service station. That’s just when the game begins.
See, I was once told — by a car salesman, so you know it’s true, right? — that when the warning light comes on in most cars, you have somewhere between twenty and maybe fifty miles left before you’re completely bone-dry and stranded and listening to ‘I told you so‘s.
I asked, ‘Is that true in this car — the one you’re selling me right now?‘
He said, ‘This one? This car’s good for a hundred miles with the warning light on. In fact, they don’t even call it a warning light. On this model, it’s a ‘tank half full’ light. No lie.‘
‘Of course‘, he followed, ‘we can only activate that feature if you sign in the next five minutes. So, you know — tick tock.‘
Clearly, I signed the papers. You don’t just fritter away a shot at an added bonus like that. And the guy didn’t even charge me extra for it — other than a one-time nominal feature activation fee, of course. Which I barely even had to take out a loan for. Sucker.
So my strategy is very different. I don’t even look at the gas gauge until the light comes on. And then I laugh heartily in its direction, and keep driving. Cosmo Kramer would be proud. I know I’ve got plenty of miles before the last gasp of gas will finally wisp out of the tank — so why rush to splash more in there? I want the gas left before a refill to be measured in teaspoons, not gallons. If I coast into the filling station on the last faint memories of gasoline fumes, then as far as I’m concerned, I’ve done my job.
This upsets my wife tremendously, She has visions of us stranded, cold and hungry, on the dark narrow shoulder of some remote backwoods road.
(Because apparently, getting low on gas encourages you to take deserted highways in the middle of the night for no good reason. And to throw your coats out the window, to fast, and to smash your cell phone and AAA card to pieces.
Probably, there’s also some sort of mating call to attract highwaymen that I should learn. I’ll ask about that next time it comes up.)
I have no such qualms. I prefer to gamble a little, to push my luck in the name of adventure. While my wife prefers to regale me with tales of the wild coyotes spotted around Boston, and how when — when! — we run out of gas, I’d better protect her from rabid scavenger beasties, or I’m totally walking home by myself. And that’s through angry moose and stampeding elephant territory, so I’d better just straighten up, mister, and find a damned gas station before that needle drops under the quarter-tank mark.
(She threatened once to withhold sex if I didn’t make a fill stop. I pointed out that as cold as she expects it to be, we’ll have to have sex just to stave off the frostbite. Also, the male musk glands exude a pheromone that’s a natural coyote repellent, so she’ll want to rub up against those as thoroughly and sexily as she can.
See? Two can play that little mind game. I catch on fast.)
But the fact remains — she doesn’t like my methods, and I don’t especially approve of hers. And the poor gas tank goes from feast to famine; either we fill it up every ten minutes, or wait until we can see our reflection in the bottom before refueling up. If the tank were our child, my wife would be the enabler — and I’d be the deadbeat dad who can’t remember what grade it’s in or who its friends are or whether or not its mine. Also, it would be four hundred pounds heavy from my wife’s constant feeding, and emotionally crippled from the whole ordeal.
(This is why we don’t have kids. When we’re seriously considering sending our gas tank to a therapist, bringing children into the equation is clearly out of the question.)
So we deal with our gap. When we’re driving alone, we’re free to exercise our best judgment — or lack thereof — as we see fit. When we’re together… well, it depends on who’s driving. If it’s her, we pull over for gas as soon as the dial flutters gently under a half tank. And if I’m driving…
Well, it takes maybe thirty seconds longer for her to notice, then she says something, and then we pull over for gas. Essentially the same thing, really.
But those thirty seconds of carefree, gas-pushing, fortune-tempting, dammit-a-man-has-to-live driving? Priceless.
So she’s winning now, mostly — but I do get my moments, however brief and fleeting they may be. She thinks she’ll break me some day, bring me around to her way of thinking. She imagines she’ll have me self-policing and scanning for pumps all on my own.
I’ve got a better idea. I’m saving up money, so I can buy her that horse. Then we’ll each have our own ride, and she can water hers to her heart’s content.
I just hope she knows where to stick the nozzle.
Permalink | 1 CommentSome days, I don’t know why I bother to go into work. If there’s some stipulation in my contract that I have to meet a certain quota for public embarrassment, humiliation or severe flusterment, I hit that milestone long ago.
I could coast on accumulated office shame-to-date until well past retirement age. I assume that when I decide to leave my current job, they’ll pay me in back-embarrassment by hiring people to come to my house and spend their evenings hooting and mocking and pointing at me.
So I’ve got that going for me. Which is… ‘nice’.
Meanwhile, every day I make new contributions to my discomfort fund. My little nest egg of chagrin looks like it was laid by an ostrich. Or an elephant. Or a really fat tyrannosaurus.
Take yesterday, for example. Our group has a couple of open positions — “hey, come work with me; no lines, no waiitng! — and I was on the list in the afternoon to interview a prospective candidate.
“I covered all the bases I could possibly think of. I was like a base-smothering octopus out there.”
Now, I did everything right. I’m fully aware that ridiculous humbling nonsense is going to befall me, so I plan against all of the obvious goof-ups. I showed up on time — after checking for food in my teeth in the bathroom — and not running any water in the sink, for fear of accidentally soaking my pants — and making sure my fly was zipped, my shoes were tied, and my shirt was on the right way around. I covered all the bases I could possibly think of. I was like a base-smothering octopus out there.
When the interviewee wrapped up his previous appointment, I was the very picture of gracious hospitality. I shook his hand and chatted a bit, offered him water, and walked with him toward the conference room in which we were to talk, because the cardboard box I sit at in the janitor’s closet might sour him on might be a tad ‘unsettling’.
(Especially on a ‘Toilet Brush Air-Out Tuesday’. It’s like the fricking Hanging Gardens of Ty-D-Babylon in that place.)
So I walked into the darkened conference room and felt for the light switch. Which, I soon discovered, didn’t exist any longer. As part of an effort to ‘green up’ the building, the conference room light switch had been replaced with a sensor panel. The panel detects motion, and the lights come on. No motion for a few minutes, the lights go off. Electricity unwasted, money saved, switch-flicking finger injuries plummet wildly — good times all ’round.
At least, that’s how all of the other sensors in the building work. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That is, in fact, the very definition of ‘work’ in this instance — people move, the lights come on.
These lights? Didn’t work. I waved my hand around near the sensor for a bit — mostly still feeling for a light switch, until my eyes accustomed to the rather persistent pitch black of the room. Nothing.
I chuckled apologetically to our guest and took a step further into the room, enveloped in the inky shadows within. The inky shadows put their feet up on the desk and fiddled with their cell phones; they weren’t going anywhere.
I said, ‘Gee, I’m sorry. This has never happened before.‘
He looked at me with that same sad, disappointed look universally given to people who say, ‘gee, this has never happened before’. At least, I assume he did. I couldn’t actually see him at that point. Or anything else, for that matter.
I then decided — for reasons unknown — that this particular sensor was perhaps not sensitive — or sensor-y — enough, that probably its blind spot was just rather large, but it would eventually activate if I found the right spot. So I apologized again, and set off to walk the full circumference of the conference table.
That got me several angry bruises as I bumped blindly into chairs and walls and table edges. But no lights.
Maybe, the thought occurred, this sensor depends on speedier movements than most. So I walked faster. And the bruises got angrier. While the lights turned no lightier.
Ah, but what if the sensor is pointed too high, or it’s triggered by sound instead? I set to flapping my arms and leaping recklessly around the table, making high-pitched ‘yiiiip!‘s in a desperate attempt to illuminate the room.
Panic set in as I considered what to do next. It’s the only conference room on the floor; I had nowhere else to go for the interview. As I flapped and leapt and yiiiipped my way around the table, I searched furiously (in the dark) for a ‘Plan G’. Perhaps a series of mirrors to redirect light from outside? Maybe we had a Bunsen burner or old gas lantern lying around. I could always light the desk and work by firelight — but that would really put a tight squeeze on our timeframe before smoke inhalation set in. I might have to skip a few of the questions.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t noticed that the interviewee had excused himself, found our floor manager in the hallway, and was asking her about the lights. Apparently, there’s a little button below the sensor panel for when you want the lights really off.
He pressed the button. Light flooded the room. Mid-yiiiip and suddenly blinded, I crashed to the floor in a pile of cheap plastic office chairs. With the last tender sliver of dignity I had left, I dusted myself off, thanked our admin, took a seat across from our guest and began the interview.
Me: Ahem. So. Tell me why it is you want to work for us, then.
Him: Um… I’m sorry. But it’s time for me to see the next person.
Me: Ah. Right, so it is. Well. I’m glad we had a chance to chat. Hope to see you again soon!
And then I hid under my cardboard box for the rest of the afternoon, rocking back and forth and mumbling, ‘I’m a good interviewer… I’m a good interviewer… nobody needs to see me; I’m a good interviewer…‘
If the guy comes to join us, then he has a great sense of humor, the patience of a sedated nun, or he just figures that I’ll be fired before he’d start in the office, anyway. Or he’s a vampire, and actually prefers the dark. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, I’m going around to every ‘greened’ office I can find and pushing in those little buttons. Maybe somebody else didn’t know about them either, and I won’t be the only flapping idiot in the building.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my little retirement ‘Fool-01k’ plan, it’s that it’s important to share the wealth. And there’s plenty to go around.
Permalink | No CommentsI’ve made a pact with myself to write something every day. Often, that something will show up here. But other days, it won’t.
This day is one of those days.
The good news (if one can call it ‘good’) is that whatever I write will show up somewhere. It could be on Bugs & Cranks. It could be on another site. And — on a fairly predictable schedule for the hopefully foreseeable future — it’ll be on ZuG.com.
“Hop on over for a look, if that’s your cup of tea. Or cup of flu. Whichever.
It’s time for the latest in the Zolton Does Amazon series: Kung Flu Fighting. Hop on over for a look, if that’s your cup of tea. Or cup of flu. Whichever.
Meanwhile, I can’t guarantee that I’ll always stop by here for a post like this — a brief, dry and plaintive plea for you to click through elsewhere for your daily dosage. It’s not my favorite kind of entry, frankly. If I wanted to feel cheesy and desperate, I’d go back to cramming flyer ads under windshield wipers.
(I’d probably not aim for moving cars on the Turnpike this time, of course. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be. But you get the idea.)
Instead, I’ll point interested and curious parties to my increasingly adequately-utilized Twitter account (also linked atop the sidebar), where you can stay up to date on all the postings, entries, articles, missives, diatribes, rants and manifestos, wherever they happen to land. Plus the occasional extra.
Follow along (and be followed back, most likely), if you dare.
Permalink | No CommentsI spent the weekend on a not-skiing trip with the missus and a few friends.
(You may have read something about it already.
I know, I know — this is becoming “the trip that keeps on trippin’.” Fear not. This is the last post about it. Cross my heart and hope to shush down a mountain.)
One of the most difficult things to strategize for a getaway of any length is what I call the Probable Individual Gorging equation — or the PIG equation, for short.
Solving the PIG equation involves predicting as accurately as possible how much food and beverage is necessary for the trip, based on which people are likely to eat and drink which consumables how often and with how much gusto.
The variables you plug into PIG are myriad, different in every case, and each comes with a degree of uncertainly. For instance, what’s the ratio of men to women attending? That can often — but not always — indicate what proportion of, say, beer to wine may be needed. Is anyone vegetarian? On a diet? Coming off a bad breakup? How about pregnant — and just exactly how pregnant are they? You might not need booze for them, but if you run out of pickles and ice cream, everyone on the trip could die in a murderous rage.
So then you wouldn’t need any food for the last few days. Maybe crackers for the survivors, but no real ‘meals’, probably. These are important considerations.
The most maddening thing about the PIG equation is that almost no one gets it right, ever. Or anywhere close. The more people attending, the longer the trip, and the more the shopping list is split up between attendees, the less and less likely it is that the appropriate amount of eats and cocktails will make it to the party. Attend any ‘potluck’ kind of getaway lasting longer than a week or involving more than six people, and you can expect to either schlep home (or toss) enough extra groceries to open a small 7-11, or you’ll run out of beer on the first night because you thought Bob was getting beer, but Bob thought the twins were bringing beer, but no one knows why because the twins don’t even drink beer, and Joe brought beer, but only enough for himself and we could all drink Susan’s case-ful of pisswater white wine she brought, but why in the world would we do that to ourselves, and what’s Susan doing here anyway because I thought she and Scott broke up already and nobody was friends with her first, and let’s just get wasted on Scope or something now because no one wants to drive out to the store again this late, and why do I even hang out with you people when you never do anything right and I hate each and every one of you with the searing hot fire of a thousand suns?
(Your mileage may vary. But Bob’s kind of a douche, so probably not.)
I tell you about the PIG equation to tell you this: our recent trip was for two days and nine people, and we split the shopping list four ways. Disaster, she is on the wind.
I don’t know what other people lugged home with them, exactly. I do know this — we agreed to buy the supplies for breakfasts. Breakfasts which — someone with a PIG calculator should perhaps have foreseen — no one ate. Neither morning. No people. It was breakfasta non grata in the beer chalet all weekend.
“We’d make the Big Bad Wolf look like Mother Theresa, if some little piggy ever got a glimpse of his friends’ parts stuffed into every corner of the chill chest.”
So right now, as I type, we have in our refrigerator seven cartons of eggs, enough milk to feed several hundred head of juvenile steer, and the bacon… oh, the bacon.
How many little piggies went wee wee wee!!! all the way to the slaughterhouse for this bacon? It’s impossible to know. We may have euthanized an entire little village of piggies for all of the bacon currently sitting in our fridge. We’d make the Big Bad Wolf look like Mother Theresa, if some little piggy ever got a glimpse of his friends’ parts stuffed into every corner of the chill chest. We’re like porcine Jeffery Dahmers. It’s gruesomely delicious.
And I’m not one to waste food. So if nine people aren’t going to consume all this breakfasty goodness in two days, then by god the two of us will gobble it down in nine days. Or until the milk goes south, whichever comes first.
At any rate, the next week of meals around here will be all-breakfast, all the time in an effort to whittle down these extra supplies. It’ll be bacon and eggs, BLE (bacon, lotsa egg) sandwiches, bacon quiche, egg salad with bacon bits, and eggs Bacon-dict morning, noon and night — all washed down with glass after glass of milk-staching moo juice.
Maybe we’ll mix it up and go dessert style with the eggs and milk. We could bake a cake — and then frost it with bacon. Or a nice bread pudding, with a side of bacon. Or three sides. Who’s counting, at least until the refrigerator door has the room to close again? I’ll be seeing bacon and eggs in my sleep. And possibly on my pillow, if I don’t start taking breaks between glasses of milk.
So that’s our week ahead, thanks to a predictably faulty PIG snafu. If anyone’s hungry for breakfast food this week, don’t head for your local diner. Stop by Chez Charlie for all of your bacon, egg and milky needs. We’ll leave the PIG on for you.
Permalink | 2 CommentsI learned something new today.
I learned that there are few situations that can make me feel as helpless as waiting for AAA to come winch my car out of a snowbank.
In a parking lot, roughly three feet from where I’d been parked all weekend. In front of a locked ‘beer chalet, to which I no longer had a key.
“The only way it could have been worse is if there’d been hungry wolves surrounding the car when I got out to shovel, and I’d worn my ‘Bacon Drippings and Fear’ cologne.”
It wasn’t a great time. The only way it could have been worse is if there’d been hungry wolves surrounding the car when I got out to shovel, and I’d worn my ‘Bacon Drippings and Fear’ cologne.
It just happened this morning that we were the last guests to leave the weekend spot, and that we were in just the right parking spot at the edge of the lot to slip sideways over the lip when we tried to back out. And once we were there — with one tire ass-deep in snow and another spinning helplessly on ice — there was no getting out. Not without a gentle yank from a tow truck, anyway. The missus and I both tried our hand; no luck getting out, and our efforts only pushed further diagonally off the lot and nose-down toward a snow-covered ravine.
(And we’ve read those Donner party stories. No way were we ending up down there and gnawing each others’ legs off for lunch. That’s no picnic. And anyway, we only had white wine with us in the trunk. We’d never pair that with tough, gamey human.
We might be cannibals out of necessity someday, but that doesn’t mean we’re uncivilized.)
So we called for a tow, three minutes (and three feet) into our trip home. Not exactly the speedy start we were looking for, but it couldn’t be helped. So we sat in the car — couldn’t get back in the house, and it was too cold to stand outside — and waited.
And waited. And waited. It took a little over an hour for the tow truck to get around to us — sadly, it appears that we were not the only damned fool drivers in ski country today — but it felt like days just sitting in the car going nowhere at all. There are only so many snowflakes you can watch crash against the windshield before asking, again:
‘Is it time yet?‘
And getting the answer, again: ‘It’s only been two minutes since the last time you asked. Shut up already. And quit chewing on my leg, damn you.‘
Eventually, the wrecker arrived, maneuvered into position and winched us out of the snow. It took all of thirty seconds to undo our mess, which we’d had to sit in for over an hour, and think about what we’d done.
So it could have been worse, but it was not the ideal start to our four-hour afternoon trek that lay ahead. If only they’d taught some sort of 72-point shimmy-rev-rock-turn on our driving tests, maybe we’d have been equipped to get ourselves out. As it was, we were at the mercy of ‘Bob’ the tow guy and his prodigious plumbers’ crack to get us back on the road.
(They both said ‘hi’ and smiled at us. Which was about as unsettling as you might expect from a crack, and the man who lives above it.)
Fortunately, it didn’t take long to unstick us, and we were on our way. But the next time I dig the car into a wall of the white stuff, and it won’t respond to any amount of digging, pushing or finagling I can muster, I’m just going to leave it there. It’ll probably be faster to just walk wherever I’m headed, and I won’t have to worry whether my wife is simply ‘annoyed at the inconvenience’ or ‘desperate enough to eat me’.
There’s a very fine line there, but the distinction is sort of important. Particularly if you’re looking forward to making it home, rather than being served with mustard relish and a side salad. Better to abandon the car and keep a few emergency granola bars handy, just in case.
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