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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(Up first, updates from the Bugs & Cranks side of life:
(Two-)Grand Finale: “Cox is listed 4th all-time with 2355 wins right now, but that could change day-to-day, based on the Canuck economy, Cito Gaston’s stock price, and the state of the beaver pelt futures market.”
Wednesday Walk Watch: Week nWine: “Basically, if you want to give one of these guys a free pass, then you’d damned well better smack them with a fastball.”
And up second… well, you’ll just have to read on to see that, now, won’t you?)
My apologies for being somewhat scarce this week. Or, if you prefer, ‘entirely absent’.
In my defense, it’s not especially my fault. In addition to the usual workplace madness, my pesky pooch, the demands of the missus, and a handful of truly trying fantasy baseball teams, the wife and I are also in the dual-barreled process of selling our current house and buying a condo.
“Evidently, I’ve been barking up the wrong binky.”
Which is not to say that I’m ‘too busy’ to write, exactly. It’s just that I spend an awful lot of time these days staring blankly into space, or curled into a fetal position under my desk, rocking slowly back and forth.
The latest potato up my proverbial tailpipe, homeowner-wise, is the fact that the closing dates to sell our current place and to take the reins of the new one are separated by thirty-five days on the calendar, give or take an afternoon. Which means the missus and I — and that muddle-minded mutt of ours — are effectively temporarily homeless, starting in late July. Which is just a few short weeks away. All we have to do by then is pack all our crap, find a place to store it, find a place to live for a month and change, find someone to move us out as well as in, thirty-odd days apart, and manage to make it to work most of the time, so all that stuff we told the mortgage people about having sources of income are still true. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick…
That fetal position? Looking pretty good right about now.
In lieu of checking out completely and regressing to our thumb-sucking, binky-clinging ways, my wife and I have begun a search for temporary digs. You’d think, had you never done so, that locating a place to rent for just a month or so would be way easier than finding an entire house or condominium to buy for scads of money and live in for years and years.
I thought so, anyway. Evidently, I’ve been barking up the wrong binky.
Our main source for this search has been the Boston-area branch of Craigslist, that popular virtual local bazaar for everything from personal ads to modeling jobs, from ‘adult’ services to NSFW gig postings, and from adverts for ‘therapeutic massage’ to something apparently kinky called ‘ridesharing’. Yowza.
(Me, I’ve only ever used Craigslist to sell a TV, and to buy the occasional Red Sox ticket or two. Those transactions have only rarely involved any sort of ‘modeling’ or ‘massage’, and it’s never been anything I’d call ‘NSFW’.
Mostly.
But man, those were some sweet tickets.)
Anyway, it’s been a bit of a demoralizing experience. It feels a little like going on a fishing trip — only you don’t know what you’re fishing for, exactly, you can’t predict what bait might work, and the ones that manage to wriggle off the hook come up to the surface to taunt you. Also, they can talk. And the little bastards are snarky.
Take yesterday, for example. I got up in the morning, fired up a browser, moseyed over to Craigslist and carefully pored over every word and image in dozens and dozens of ads.
Then I figured I should probably look for housing. So I navigated out of the ‘naughty exhibitionist women seeking internet voyeurs’ personal ad area, and into the ‘sublets / temporary’ housing section.
(Hey, it was Saturday morning. Some people watch cartoons. And you don’t see me over here judging them.)
After a bit of a browse, I found four properties that met our troika of criteria — August availability, allowance of pets, and asking less than an arm and a dewclawed hindlimb in rent. Flushed with excitement — or the pic of one of those exhibitionists I’d adopted as my new desktop image — I cast four lines into the murky waters of internet-mediated sublet negotiations. Now, I haven’t fished in years, and I don’t recall ever fishing with four poles at the same time. If my utter lack of success with one pole was any indication — or if I’d worked out the math that ‘nothing times four’ still equals a big fat bupkis — then I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next.
But hope springs eternal, I guess. Hope’s kind of an idiot that way.
Springy idiot wishings notwithstanding, the answers to my queries reeled themselves in over the course of the day. First was the message deemed ‘undeliverable’. Too old an ad, and the apartment long taken. Then, the guy who wanted to rent for July and August — no exceptions, no discounts. Next, the lady who apologized because my email came just after she’d already rented the place. Hope her tenants turn out to be rowdy frat boys — or a guy with a surname of Bundy. Al or Ted, it doesn’t much matter.
Finally, the last response came back — a short, curt ‘sorry, can’t help you’. Maybe the guy didn’t like the way I worded the inquiry. Or he wanted to put ‘dogs allowed’ in the ad to seem friendly, but really wasn’t. Or maybe he’s read this site. Something. But he wasn’t having any part of us, so we struck out. On four poles. Maybe if someone would teach this man to fish, I could find an apartment for life. Or at least August. Evidently, I just need to learn to fish a little.
Anyway, the search goes on. Tomorrow, I’ll be up early again and casting poles in the direction of any housing ads that seem to be up our alley. But why do I get the feeling that the landlords are the sharks — and I’m just the chum in the water?
Permalink | 7 Comments(First up, a bit of news from the B&C front:
First Date with Nate: A Day Late, Not Great: “So much for making a ‘big splash’ in your debut performance. This display of ‘hitting’ looked more like a post-nasal drip.”
Now let’s move forward to this week’s look back. Onward and backward!)
” I can only conclude that there are some real perverted pieces of personry out there — and that I’ve written some pretty oddball combinations of words that probably shouldn’t be considered legal in the English language. Or this state. Or possibly humanity as a whole.”
One of the many kicks I get from blogging — most of them to the groin, as it turns out — is browsing through the logs to see what searches are bringing people to the site. Every so often, I’ll highlight some of the more disturbing query fare with a post in the Googlicious! category. Whether those searches reflect more scarily on the mommy’s-basement weirdos making the searches, or the unbalanced, twitchy blogger who wrote the pieces that led Google to send them this way, I can’t really say. I can only conclude that there are some real perverted pieces of personry out there — and that I’ve written some pretty oddball combinations of words that probably shouldn’t be considered legal in the English language. Or this state. Or possibly humanity as a whole.
Sometimes, though, the searches leading here are more innocent, if no less scary. Unlike the vast majority of searchers, these are folks not actually looking for comedy websites, nor for ‘kinky grandma wrestling’, nor for ‘shaved ostrich porn clips’. Instead, they’re genuinely looking for information — trying, in possibly misguided ways, to better their own lives. And using the web to do it. So that’s a couple of strikes against them for starters, even before they wind up here.
Take, for instance, an early post of mine entitled, ‘So, How Many Weight Watchers Points Would ‘M&Ms Chili’ Be?.
(Yeah, I know. Back in the day, the titles were nearly as long-winded as the posts. Shaddup, you.)
In this entry, I mentioned that I’ve been trying to eat ‘healthier’, and poked a little fun at the series of ‘I lowered my cholesterol!‘ TV ads that were airing back then, before many of you were actually born. The actual content of the post isn’t so relevant, in this case. Embarrassing, perhaps. Riddled with parenthetical asides, naturally. But relevant — not so much.
By one metric, though, that post is one of the most ‘popular’ on the site. It’s because of the juxtaposition of those two elements in the title: ‘Weight Watchers points’ and ‘M&Ms’. A fair percentage of people visiting this site do so because they’ve seen fit — and I use the term ‘fit’ loosely — to enter those two terms into Google. And Google sends them to me.
No. I’m not making this up. A lot of people really seem to want to know the WW score for M&Ms. Sometimes, they’ll be more specific, asking about ‘peanut butter M&Ms’, or ‘M&M minis’, or ‘a party-sized bag of M&M candies’.
I’ve never been in Weight Watchers, myself. But I can’t imagine these people are doing it right.
I’ve also wondered how many of these questions come after the fact. A lot of people overeat on impulse, or in response to stress. I find it hard to believe that many of them are taking the time to fire up their modems in the middle of a chocolate-fueled candy lust to ask how many points they’ll incur if they go through with that plan to snarf a whole bag of treats. My guess is they’re mostly sitting there afterward, with heaving breaths and sticky brown fingers, hoping they’ve still got enough points left to eat something besides rice cakes and celery stalks for the rest of the month.
Dubious as they are, though, these searches are pretty common, so I’ve gotten used to them. Ditto most of the other WW queries — I mention a lot of other (really, terribly unhealthy) foods in that post, so Google will sometimes send people looking for ‘Weight Watchers points’ and ‘chili’ or ‘milkshakes’ or ‘Snickers’ or hot fudge’ my way. Not that I’m of any help to them, or that they read any further than a sentence or two, I’m sure. But the stream of seekers is steady and unwavering, and over time, I’ve come to expect just about all of them.
Until yesterday. In the afternoon, I was looking through the logs and found a new one to me. Someone out there had popped onto the site by Googling:
‘Weight Watchers points for a 72-year-old man‘
Yow. And I thought a bag of M&Ms was binging. Somebody out there has seriously got the munchies, and I’m afraid his surname may be ‘Lechter’.
Still, it’s probably healthier than that M&Ms chili I was on about. Plenty of lean meat on those septuagenarians, if you know where to look. I just hope the person has a side salad instead of the French fries — it pays to cut back on calories whenever you can. Just ask Weight Watchers.
Permalink | 2 Comments(Lots of baseball buzz going on lately over at Bugs & Cranks. To wit:
Dancing with the (Dirty Bird) Devil: “There’s no hurler this side of C.C. Sabathia in a padded suit of armor that’s going to stand in there with Vick chugging up the first base line.”
The Big Zero: “But thanks for the memories, Tommy. You did all right for a kid with a slapshot better than his fastball.”
Wednesday Walk Watch: Week eiWght: “You’d think just by dumb luck, these guys would garner more than a walk a week. I guess some luck is dumber than others.”
For those of you not into leather and horsehide and pine-tarred bat knobs — and you don’t know what you’re missing, folks — here’s a bit of non-baseball buzz to tide you over, too.)
Some things, I just never seem to grasp.
I’m not talking about the really tricky ‘thinky’ sorts of things, like religion and politics and the importance women ascribe to long eyelashes. I don’t grasp any of those things, either, but I figure I’m not really meant to. None of them has much to do with me, and that’s the way I like it.
Sometimes, though, there’s something I should be getting. I’ll be told something very simple and straightforward — usually by my wife — and it’ll slip through the holes in my brain like champagne through a sieve. I want to remember these things. Often, I need to remember these things. And — if it was indeed my wife who told me — I’m desperate to remember these things, lest she shake her head sadly at me (again) and say:
‘You just don’t listen, do you?‘
Well.. yeah. I listen. I just don’t remember, so much. If you’re looking for a faulty organ in this circuit, the ear is definitely not the problem. Don’t shoot the messenger when it’s the recipient that’s an idiot.
“I asked for everything I could possibly think of — ‘pork and beans’, ‘dog and pony’, ‘spit and polish, ‘Cagney and Lacey’, the works. None of it got me anywhere.”
Segue now to the home inspection on the new place my wife and I are buying. We walked through with the inspector, and found the unit largely free of major problems, with one exception. When it came to the electrical system, he took issue with the age and type of much of the wiring used. He told us that this particular type of wiring was quite old — not too surprising in a New England brownstone built near the turn of the last century — and that many insurers refuse to cover homes with this type of wiring present.
The type of wiring in question? ‘Knob and tube’.
Knob and tube. He must have said it fifteen times during the inspection. Knob and tube. Knob and tube. Knob. And tuuuuube.
Thirty seconds later, and it was gone from my head. All I retained was the ‘and’; I knew it was ‘something’ and ‘something’ — but what? And what? I asked my wife what he’d called it.
‘Knob and tube‘.
Whoosh. Gone again. What was it, honey?
‘Knob and tube.‘
*zzzzzttttt!* Lost it. Do you remember what kind of wiring he said?
‘For the love of god, knob and tube.‘
Nope. Still not getting it. One more time, please?
‘*sigh* You just don’t listen, do you?‘
Indeed, I do. We’ve been over this, dear; don’t call me ‘deaf’, when ‘dumb’ will do.
Sadly, the frazzled nerves and gentle barbs of my ever-patient wife were not the end of this particular ordeal. The discovery of this bit of electrical archaeology represented a serious kink in our home-buying plans — and a possible hurdle, depending on the scope. My wife asked if I’d mind getting an estimate for the cost of the upgrades we’d need.
That meant calling an electrician to have a look around — and that entailed describing the problem to someone with whom I haven’t exchanged marriage vows, and who is therefore under no obligation ‘to have and to hold, to honor and cherish, no matter how addled and jackassed he gets’.
(Yes, we wrote our own vows. She used hers to be sweet and romantical. I saw mine as an opportunity for contingency planning.
Sure, she wasn’t happy at the time. But just wait until the dementia sets in, and then we’ll see who’s stuck with whom. That’s some ironclad betrothing language there, kids.)
I found an electrician in the phone book and phoned in to set up an appointment.:
‘Yes, I’d like someone to come out to get an estimate on having some old wiring replaced.’
‘No problem, sir. What type of wiring is it?’
Damn. Ten seconds into the conversation, and I was already in a pickle. And my wife was at work, so I was on my own here. Maybe if I got close enough to the actual name, they’d just figure it out.
‘Uh… rack and pinion?’
‘Excuse me, sir? What kind?’
‘Er, um, bread and butter, I think it’s called. They’re bread and butter wires.’
‘Sir?’
‘Tom and Jerry?’
‘Sir, I’m not sure I can help you here.’
‘Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.’
I hung up and tried to regroup, racking my brain for the stupid name of the stupid type of stupid wiring I was supposed to be mentioning. Nothing. Lyrics to an old Marcy Playground song jumped into my head. Then nothing again. Then I remembered where I’d left my car keys back in college, when I thought I’d lost them and had to have a new set made. And finally, nothing.
Undaunted, I picked up the phone again and thumbed through the Yellow Pages. Things like this are why they list so many electricians in there in the first place, right?
I asked the next guy how much it would be to replace ‘cloak and dagger’ wiring. He said he didn’t know, and to try calling the CIA. The guy after that agreed to look at my ‘chutes and ladders’, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about wiring any more. One by one, I called up electrical specialists, and one by one, they shrugged at me over the phone, nonplussed. I asked for everything I could possibly think of — ‘pork and beans’, ‘dog and pony’, ‘spit and polish, ‘Cagney and Lacey’, the works. None of it got me anywhere.
I was on the last listing in the book — must have been Zimmerman Electric or Zarathustra Contractors or something — and was just about prepared to ask to ‘have my S and M wiring torn out’, when fortune finally shone on me.
‘Yeah, I’ve got some old wiring I need looked at.’
‘Old? You mean, like, knob and tube wiring? That old?’
Sweet merciful heaven. ‘Knob and tube’. Finally. If I made a habit of making out with gruff-sounding electrical contractors, I’d have tongued the guy’s ear through the receiver. Hallelujah to you, my sweet plumber-cracked angel.
‘Yes, that’s it exactly! Our inspector found–‘
‘Ah, sorry, we don’t do knob and tube. Too much of a hassle. Maybe try somebody in the phone book.’ *click*
So much for angels.
Still, now I had the info I needed. After an hour of making up ridiculous nonsense, now I could simply look up one of those other guys, call back, and tell them that I needed them to fix my…
Uh.
My wiring. That old kind, that’s the… um. ‘Something’. And ‘something else’.
Shit.
Forget it. I’ll just pretend I never tried to deal with it, and tell my wife later that she was supposed to call.
It’s not like she’ll remember the arrangement we had. She never listens, anyway.
Permalink | 1 CommentI’ve noticed something odd around the office lately. Maybe it always happens, and I’ve just begun to notice. Or maybe it’s a new strategy for influencing peoples’ behavior, or covering one’s ass via email. And maybe it’s high time I actually told you what the hell it is I’m referring to.
Fine. I’m getting to it. You don’t have to be so pushy about it.
“I’ve never been sure how to feel about ‘warm regards’ in the first place. Are these regards that were in the oven, and have now cooled enough to touch?”
The thing is this: I’ve noticed that as the amount of work requested in an email increases, so does the length — and warmth — of the final signoff. It has little to do with the actual gratitude expressed in the body of the message — some people gush profusely for a small favor, while others ask for the moon without bothering to offer thanks — but always the last line before the signature reveals the magnitude of the task involved. I’ve gotten to the point where that’s the first thing I read in an email, just so I know what’s coming.
Take my usual batch of work emails, for instance. Most are memos or meeting announcements, that sort of thing. Innocent stuff; real ‘no action necessary’ material. You skim to the bottom of those emails, and you’ll see a lot of ‘Thanks,’ or ‘Yours,’ maybe the odd ‘Sincerely,’. But that’s it. Nothing personal or flowery to suggest that real effort is going to be asked of you. Most of these wind up in the virtual trash bin.
(Occasionally, I’ll keep one that ends in ‘Yours’, if it’s from someone I know, because it’s fun to think about having your own personal lackey to command around. I take things literally that way sometimes.
Unfortunately, the senders of the emails do not, as a rule. I ‘commanded’ one of them to get me a cup of coffee once, and they pennied me into my office. If the janitorial staff hadn’t come in over the weekend, I might still be locked in there. Personal lackeys aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, I’ve found.)
Next, you get the closings meant for one person specifically. These are fine, so long as they’re not overly wordy — or if they happen to be pointed in someone else’s direction. So a ‘Best Wishes,’ or ‘Cheers,’ or ‘Thanks,’ is usually okay, if you’re the intended recipient. But if you see ‘Many Thanks,’ or ‘You’re the Best,’ or ‘Warm Regards,’ then be afraid. Be very afraid. Or hope to hell you’re only being cc’ed.
(I’ve never been sure how to feel about ‘warm regards’ in the first place. Are these regards that were in the oven, and have now cooled enough to touch? Or are they room-temperature regards that sat out too long, and now they’ve gotten all swampy? Are regards best stored in a cool, dry place until use?
I’m frankly a little uneasy about handling another person’s ‘regards’, no matter the temperature. We’d have to exchange a whole lot of ‘sincerely’s before I’d be comfortable with any of that business.)
Of course, this was all just an amusing little observation until this afternoon. About an hour ago, sitting at my desk, I received an email from the head of our department. It was addressed to me, with several other people cc’ed on the note. The message was six or eight paragraphs long, so I buzzed to the bottom, fully expecting to find a nice ‘Thanks,’ or ‘Regards’ there. Instead, I found this:
‘Many thanks with warmest regards and all the best wishes,‘
Ho. Lee. Crap.
I didn’t even attempt to read the rest of the email; I bolted from my chair and ran screaming into the bathroom. I’ve been holed up here in a toilet stall ever since, with a nice big fort of toilet paper rolls barricading the door. I’m prepared to stay in here forever — or at least until I can feel my legs again, seeing as how they fell asleep ten minutes into my ordeal. But if anyone finds me here, I’m prepared to beg, bribe or abduct them to avoid having to read that email. Or worse, do whatever it’s asking of me.
Better to live as a numb-legged toilet-paper-eating hermit than to deal with something that closes with that bombshell above. Not to mention that it includes ‘warmest regards’. I might need an oven mitt to deal with those things. Or an extra-long set of tongs. Yow.
Permalink | 1 CommentI mentioned earlier that I recently saw my doctor, and was bamboozled into submitting to a full physical exam.
Well, maybe not ‘bamboozled’, exactly. It was for my own good, I’m sure. And there was neither bamboo nor booze involved, so far as I know. Certainly not both. This is not some sort of voodoo tiki doctor I’m going to here. Moving on.
“I’m surprised they didn’t send some burly guy named Vinny to work some blood out of me in the meantime. Some of these HMO docs are hardcore.”
At any rate, part of the deal in getting my foot healed up was submitting to a battery of lab tests. I told the doc fine, I’d run by the outpatient place near my house the next morning. Or the day after. End of the week, at the latest.
Later that day, our house went on the market — which is a whole other extended saga, but suffice it to say that having holes poked in my arms and fluids sucked from my body was really low on my list of priorities. For about three weeks. I’m surprised they didn’t send some burly guy named Vinny to work some blood out of me in the meantime. Some of these HMO docs are hardcore.
Finally, I made it over to the lab. By that point, I’d forgotten exactly what I was being tested for — cholesterol, cholera, swine flu, goose rabies, cat hair, who the hell knows? But I drove in, really to step up, bleed out, and be on my way. I strutted up to the counter to check in, gave the girl — who pretended to be very unimpressed with my strutting, I might add — my name, and waited to tell her into which arm I wanted the needle jammed. Instead, she threw me a curveball:
‘Fine. Here’s your cup. Bathrooms are down the hall.‘
Um… a bored bitter nurse says wha, exactly?
She didn’t look like she wanted any guff — which I could tell with great certainty covered a question like, ‘Great. What in the hell do you expect me to do with, or in, this little thing?‘
So I took the cup, found a bathroom and pondered my options. I knew the doctor mentioned blood tests. Maybe this was some sort of ‘self-service’ lab where you draw your own blood, pour it in the cup, and save a frazzled tech some work. But I didn’t see any needles in the room. Not even a razor blade to slice with. If I sawed back and forth on the toilet handle just the right way, I might break the skin, but it was sort of a long shot. If they wanted blood from me, they were going to have to be a little more straightforward about it.
That didn’t leave many options. I could only think of four or five other things that I could possibly deposit into the cup for the doctor — and only two that any sane person in modern society might be willing to hand to their primary caregiver. Still, two is more than one, so I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to be doing in that bathroom.
So I went back out to the reception area, empty cup in hand, and tried to play dumb. Not much of a stretch, under the circumstances. The nurse lady rolled her eyes and informed me:
‘Some of the tests here require a urine sample. Get that done, and then we’ll take blood afterward.‘
‘But… I didn’t know I’d be giving a urine sample.‘
‘Well, just do the best you can.‘
‘But I just went to the bathroom before I came here.‘
‘Just do. The best you can.‘
That last bit was spoken with one of those implied ‘or I’ll stab you in the eyehole‘ looks that mothers, teachers — and nurses at reception desks, evidently — are so very good at summoning. I decided to be a good little urine patient and toddle back to the bathroom to do the very best that I could.
Which meant standing for ten minutes in front of a toilet, with an empty sample cup in one hand and the business end of an empty bladder in the other. As hard as I squeezed, no matter which muscles I could think to clench, over and over, not a lot of progress was made. There was room in the cup for one hundred millileters, maybe one fifty. Lot of big water drinkers in the medical profession, I guess.
Me, I managed about thirty. With a lot of effort. At least I could tell the doc I’d done some abdominal exercises that week. So I’ve got that going for me.
Of course, when I returned with the cup, I had to endure the disparaging looks from the nurse lady all over again. I’m sure I personally made her rethink her entire career path that day. ‘Why me,‘ she must have asked. ‘How is it I get patients who can’t even find a way to pee right?‘
That’s me. Lowering other’s expectations of humanity since 1970. I should get T-shirts printed.
Luckily for us both, there was juuuuust enough liquid gold in the cup for them to run their tests — and it was a different nurse who wound up taking my blood. If the woman at the desk had done it, she’d have probably stuck me with a lawn dart and hooked me up to a funnel. Six quarts later, and I’d either be dead or I’d have the local blood bank renamed after me. And possibly both.
Instead, I made it out alive and with the merest shred of dignity left. If nothing else, I did have the good sense to ask, eventually, precisely what it was that was expected of me. I didn’t go and deposit any of those unspeakable things I’d thought of into the cup on a whim.
On the other hand, I feel sorry for whoever opens the medicine cabinet in that bathroom next. Hoo boy. Man, if they didn’t need a doctor before, they’ll sure as hell need one after.Some biological samples, you just can’t unsee.
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