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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Sometimes having a thing is worse than not having it in the first place.
Obviously, that’s true in some cases. Like court dates, or the herpes, or a lunch date with Amanda Bynes.
(What’s that? Too soon, you say?
Well, how the hell should I know when your last court date was? Jeez.)
But occasionally, even an ostensibly good thing is worse than nothing at all. Like our home alarm system, for instance.
My wife and I have lived in our condo for almost four years now. At first, we took advantage of the fancy alarm system the previous owners had installed. It was from one of those big companies, with ads on TV and colorful signs you stick on the door to tell would-be robbers to stay the hell away.
“The old windows were original to the building, made back in the twelfth century or whatever, and probably made from pounded quartz and flecks of rock and old dinosaur scales.”
(So goes the theory, anyway. Other people say that just tells them which screwdriver they’re going to need to get around the keypad.)
A couple of years in, though, we decided to have all the windows replaced. The old windows were original to the building, made back in the twelfth century or whatever, and probably made from pounded quartz and flecks of rock and old dinosaur scales. They were heavy and drafty and a pain to raise and lower, and so we decided to drag ourselves into at least the 1980s and install windows that actually kept a different temperature on either side.
Obviously, these new windows had sills too narrow for the old alarm sensors. Because what fun would life be, otherwise?
So for a while, we went alarmless. Or, as Douglas Adams might have put it, “mostly alarmless”. The door sensors worked, and there was still a motion detector perched in our foyer. But most of the possible surreptitious entrances were unguarded. And sometimes, knowing this, we didn’t bother to set what was left of the alarm at all.
(Besides the fact that the system was always chirping at us about window sensors it thought were a problem. Ooooh, it gasped, I’m detecting that the sensors for window number five may have separated!
Yeah, ya think? The top one’s in a pile with twelve others on my dresser, and the other one got thrown away with some old papers six weeks ago. It’s probably in a landfill in western New Jersey by now. I’d say the two are separated, chum.)
Eventually, we got tired of the situation. Not that we did anything about it, mind you; that would be ‘work‘. But we did decide we were fed up, and should totally look for a replacement alarm system. At some point. Later. After this episode of Elementary, for sure.
Soon after, my wife got an email from an alarm company, basically asking: “You want we should install an alarm system for youse?”
I’m paraphrasing. But not much.
She set up a meeting with them, which was all well and good until I saw the email. I did a bit of online digging, and shockingly — shockingly, I say — they weren’t the most reputable bunch of cold-emailing, poor-grammaring, blat-out-an-ad-and-see-who-comes-running security experts. I know, right? Shockingly.
That did serve to light our fire — in the form of my wife saying, “well, if youse don’t like them, then youse find us a new alarm, pal“.
(I’m paraphrasing again. More, this time. Probably.)
So I did. I searched reviews, checked around, and hooked us up with a highly-regarded, reasonably-priced, self-installed-but-well-supported alarm system. State of the art — monitoring, sensors, keypad, the works. And their home security doohickeys fit our new windows, so we were happy. And we set the alarm, every time, right before bedtime and before leaving the house. All was well.
Until summer.
You may be aware of the heat waves that have swept through the East Coast in the past couple of months. You may or may not know that our condo — for all its fancy windows and anti-invasion thingamabobs — does not have air conditioning. Instead, we have ceiling fans in three rooms that we turn to everloving supersonic high in the summer, and sit underneath wishing the couch was made of liquid nitrogen. And we open all the windows. And leave them open, at all times, to avoid the facial melting and spontaneous human combustion.
This poses a problem for our alarm, apparently. See, normally, our alarm coos to us in a sweet, reassuring British-accented female voice that all is well. “Alahm activated!“, she’ll purr. Or “Please entah pahsscode!”
(I don’t know why the voice is British, like that’s supposed to make us feel more secure or something. Seriously, what do they know about home security? They did a pretty piss-poor job of holding onto their colonies; I’m just saying.
Frankly, if you want to make me feel good about my home alarm, program it with Pulp Fiction-era Samuel L. Jackson’s voice. I want to arm that thing and hear:
“Yo, your shit is muthafucking locked down, dog! I will cap a bitch that comes up in here without a passcode!”
See, that would make me feel secure. It would make me want to get the hell out of the house really fast — but I wouldn’t be worried about burglars. Does my alarm look like a bitch to you?)
So. The windows. Here’s the thing. When we had no alarm — or a mostly crippled one — the house was probably less secure. But no one knew that, and it was fine.
Now we have a fully-operational system, with a motion sensor and all sorts of other gizmos. But we’ve cracked a few windows — the better not to steam ourselves like a couple of underclawed lobsters — and when we set the alarm, it tells us about it:
“KITCHEN WINDOW ALAHM BYPAHSSED!”
Did I mention it’s loud as all hell? As in, loud enough to alert any hoodlums walking by — just outside our open windows — precisely where our soft targets are?
“REAH WINDOW ALAHM BYPAHSSED!”
I can almost see a gang of home invaders, camped outside with hands cupped to their ears and scribbling in little notebooks.
“BAHTHROOM WINDOW ALAHM BYPAHSSED!”
I’ve tried to muffle the warnings. I put my hands over the speakers. I shut the keypad unit in a desk drawer. Nothing works. It’s like a beacon; an inextinguishable lighthouse sending beams of security flaw information to every criminal for miles around.
“LIVING ROOM WINDOW ALAHM… BYPAHSSED!!”
Maybe I should leave out milk and cookies. Would that make them go easier on us? I could unplug all the electronics, so they don’t trip on anything while they pack it up to hock it.
“BEDROOM WINDOW ALAHM ACTIVATED!”
Oooh, we got one!
“JUHST KIDDING, OLD SPORT! BEDROOM WINDOW BYPAHSSED!”
This is why I say: we were better off without the alarm. We might not have been secure, but at least we weren’t broadcasting schematics of all the available entry points onto the street with a loudspeaker.
Luckily, no one’s taken the bait yet. If ever someone does, I’m sure they’ll haul away all of our precious things before one of them tries to leave via the back door — which is actually alarmed when the thing is set. And woe to him. Because some smartass English chick is going to be very cross about it. She might even call the local constable.
Either that, or she’ll give them directions to our car. Who’s idea was this stupid alarm, anyway?
Permalink | No CommentsI recently mentioned that I’ll be visiting Glacier Park in a couple of weeks. It will be nice to get away for a few days, to relax. To recharge. And to hike around an oversized ice cube for fourteen hours a day in the middle of rabid cold angry bear country.
I digress.
The real danger in leaving is the possibility of mischief being perpetrated on my office desk. There are a number of gag-happy pranksters in the company, and their preferred modus operandi seems to be pranking while someone’s back is turned. Or more accurately, when someone else’s back is stuck to a clammy airplane seat, flying off to faraway vacationland.
“Fuzzy bunnies may or may not have been harmed during the making of this mischief. I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know.”
They’ve had a lot of practice at this, and they’re ruthlessly efficient. One guy left for a long Easter weekend; by the time he got back, there was Easter basket fluff filling his cubicle chest-high, and a prominent cotton tail on his desk chair.
(Fuzzy bunnies may or may not have been harmed during the making of this mischief. I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know.)
Should the prankers-that-be turn their attention my way this trip, I’m an easy mark. Glacier Park is kind of a gimme, frankly. It practically pranks itself. I might come back to a desk festooned with icicle-shaped Christmas lights, for instance. Or an office filled with water and flash-cooled into a solid block of ice. Or maybe everything will be frozen solid in place with liquid nitrogen, so when I sit in the desk chair it explodes into thousands of jagged plastic shards. Maybe they’ll move in an Eskimo family. Or maybe they’ll get creative; these are just the easy ones.
Some trips are not quite so conducive to in absentia tomfoolery, of course. Take my boss, for instance. She’s returning soon from a several-week working vacation / sabbatical spent in Eastern Europe, and the prank patrol recently came by to brainstorm their ‘revenge’. Problem is, none of them (or I) are so good with the geographies. Or Eastern European culture, apparently.
The gang stopped at my desk for details: When’s she coming back? Today or tomorrow. You mind if we screw around with her desk (an appreciated courtesy, as it’s next to mine)? Not in the least. Prank away.
Great, they said. Now, there’s just the matter of what to do. Where did she go, anyway?
Croatia. And a couple of other countries, maybe in the former Yugoslavian region. Slovakia? Slovenia? Lichtenslavensteinenstan, maybe?
We blinked at each other for a while. We got nothing.
Somebody asked whether they make borscht in that area. None of us know; nor do we have a way to get our hands on several hundred pounds of beets. One person says he knows “a turnip guy”, but nobody’s really sure what the hell’s in borscht in the first place. This goes on the “maybe” list.
What about a Borat theme? Wasn’t that where Borat went? Only three people in the group have seen the movie, but they’re pretty sure it was set in some fictional country. On the other hand, at least one of those three has never heard of ‘Croatia’ before, so he’s thinking it might be the right place. Another maybe. And a mental note to never ask that guy to join any kind of bar trivia team we put together.
Ooh, says another. I think Hostel was set in Eastern Europe. How about that?
We agree that he’s probably geographically correct, or as close as any of us would know, anyway. We also agree that unless he’s suggesting we dump blood and dirt and implements of torture all over her desk to “welcome” her home — Hostel-style — then his idea’s not so very good, is it?
And if that is what he’s suggesting, then his brain isn’t very good, either. The guy may have huffed too much of that Easter fluff.
Finally, we turned to Wikipedia. Because that’s what one does in the modern age, when one takes a mild and temporary interest in something and wants vaguely relevant and slightly dubious facts listed as quickly as possible. Some people are good at gleaning information from these pages.
Those people are not the ones we sent.
Hey, said our Wikipedia man. Croatia’s two biggest exports are cruise ships and refined petroleum. Can we use that?
Well, sure, sport. Dump a can of WD-40 on her desk, plop a toy boat in the middle, call it the Exxon Valdez and call it a day. Way to go, Captain Internet Thing Finder!
Digging further, we found that there are, in fact, quite a lot of tourist attractions in Croatia. But we had no idea which ones she might have seen, so that was a wash. There’s a region in the area called Dalmatia; someone offered that we could paint everything in dalmatian spots, or adopt a bunch of dogs from local shelters and park them on the desk.
That seemed like a stretch. Also, no one had any poop bags, and that could become a problem in a hurry. And anyway, if we couldn’t come up with one hundred and one of the things, then what was the point, really? None of us have that kind of time. Or the trunk space.
So we’re back to square one. At this point, it looks as if my boss is actually off the hook. Maybe someone will come up with a last-minute grand idea — something with gypsies or vampires or Cold War-era brutalist architecture, maybe — but for now, the prank gang are stumped. The secret to not having your shit tampered with, apparently, is to vacation somewhere that people aren’t familiar with.
To that end, I’ve changed my summer travel plans. Or so I’m telling people at the office. In two weeks, I’m not going to Glacier Park. Oh, no. Instead, I’m vacationing in central Turkmenistan. In Serdar, formerly Gyzylarbat. In the foothills of the Alborz mountains.
Yeah. Let’s see those oil-slicked Borat boinkers do something with that.
Permalink | No CommentsThere’s no winning when an expert gets involved. This is absolutely true, if you yourself are not the expert in question.
(It may also be true when you are the expert; I don’t know. If I’m ever good enough at something to tell other people how to think about it, I’ll let you know. But I’m not holding my breath.)
I was reminded of this rule of life today. In two weeks, the missus and I are going to Montana to hike around some glaciers. Because this is a thing that people do, apparently, for some reason. Good for Montana, I suppose, but we live in Boston. If we want to trudge over an enormous block of ice, we just wait for January and walk outside. I know. I’ve done it.
My wife tells me that this “glacier” thing is different, somehow. It’s bigger or colder or flavored like a Sno-Cone or something; I didn’t really catch the details. But she also said it’s melting, which means it won’t be around to climb on for very much longer. And that makes it imperative to get out there, like yesterday, and scamper around it while it’s still there.
(Let this be a lesson to everyone — get out there and enjoy these sorts of things before they’re gone. Ride a mastodon. Fry some dodo wings. Follow Amanda Bynes’ career.
Oh. Sorry. Too soon?
Yeah. I still get pretty torn up about the mastodons, too.)
Anyway, glaciers.
Evidently, one does not simply hike onto a glacier. At least, not in “those ratty old boat shoes with a stupid hole in the bottom”. Or so I’ve been told. Repeatedly.
So we went shopping for shoes. Hiking shoes, specifically. And Montanan glacier hiking shoes, if such an uber-specific thing were to exist.
(Apparently, it doesn’t. Which is a shame, because that would have made things much easier.)
“And also, hiking isn’t a sport; it’s a chore that people who don’t own cars have to put up with until they can afford a bike.”
My wife had already bought her hiking paraphernalia — shoes, socks, hat, fashionably purple canteen, bear repellent, mosquito confuser, liquid Moose-B-Gon, the usual — so she hooked me up with her supplier. That turned out to be a store in our neighborhood named EMS, short for “Eastern Mountain Sports”.
I pointed out that technically, a glacier isn’t a mountain. And Montana isn’t “east” of anything but Seattle. And also, hiking isn’t a sport; it’s a chore that people who don’t own cars have to put up with until they can afford a bike.
She insulted my shoes again, and we went to EMS. Some people just don’t want to hear the truth.
It was at EMS that we ran into the Expert™. She was a lovely girl, friendly, helpful — and she knew a lot about things you put onto your feet outdoors. Like, a lot. She probably had a Ph.D. in insoles or something. I bet her thesis involved arch support of sandals depicted in 15th century Flemish paintings.
I was in trouble from the very beginning. I explained what I was looking for, and she nodded and hrm’ed, and told me to take off my shoes. Now, I’d tried to do the right thing, and wore a pair of sneakers, so I could also wear a pair of tube socks. Socks with the boat shoes (and shorts) is strictly verboten in males under the age of eighty-seven — and anyway, I didn’t want them hearing any more bad-mouthing. They’re sensitive enough as it is.
So I took off my sneaks, expecting the Expert™ to measure my feet or put me on one of those Dr. Scholl’s pressure gizmos or to lop off a toe for DNA analysis, in the interest of providing the perfect shoe.
None of these things happened. Instead, she told me to stand up I stood up. She looked at my besocked feet, nodded, and asked me my shoe size. I told her, and she went off to fetch fourteen boxes of footwear from the back to try on.
For some people — traditionally of the female variety, but I’d rather not generalize — this would be heaven. Two hours of trying on shoes, fitting and lacing and twirling all twee in the mirror. I am not one of those people. I would have been far happier ordering one pair of possibly ill-fitting shoes online, suffering through the hike, and being done with it.
But no. I was now starring in my own shoe shopping montage in the middle of some outdoorsy chick flick. Sex and the Glacier. The horror.
Also, the adventure didn’t even start with the shoes. As I prepared to hoist on the first pair, I asked lady Expert™ whether trying on one shoe of a pair would suffice. As it has, say, in every single shoe store I’ve ever had the misfortune to enter.
She gave me a sad, pitying look. An “of course not” look. A “when will people learn?” look. A look that tore right through my soul and into the inner holey boat shoes within. And then she gently but firmly insisted that I should try on both shoes in each pair, because each foot is a different size, dummy.
(The dummy was implied. But it was there. Oh, yes.)
My fate sealed, I hefted the first woodsy hiker toward my foot. And she dropped the other hammer.
“Oh, you shouldn’t try them on with those socks. Cotton socks are very bad to hike in; they’ll give you blisters.”
I had done one thing to help — one thing. And it hadn’t helped. It only raised the specter of ouchy blisters, and got me a trip to the “sample sock” bin, where I picked out a lovely mismatched pair of (apparently) non-cotton socks which had no doubt been sported by fourteen other pairs of sweaty urban feet that day already. Plus the day before, and really — do they ever wash those things? They’re for the clueless non-expert doofuses who don’t know about glacier hiking blisters. Let them wear sock!
Eventually, we made it out. I’m not sure how long it took, exactly. I half-expected to walk out of the store into three feet of snow, which would have given me a good chance to try out my new shoes, assuming I still had the energy to walk. Which I didn’t.
On the good side, I’m told I now own the appropriate footwear with which to hike a glacier in Montana in two weeks. We may spend less time actually hiking than it took to buy the damned things, but I have them. They’re mine. Right here.
Of course, I don’t know what’s going to happen when it’s time to go, and I inevitably forget to pack them. I just hope my holey loafers have earplugs. Because I think we’re all going to hear about it.
Permalink | No CommentsMy wife and I have umbrella problems. Which is to say, we each have our own umbrella problem — except for those times when her umbrella problem becomes my umbrella problem, and then I have all sorts of umbrella problems.
I’ll explain.
The two of us have very different philosophies when it comes to umbrellas. Frankly, if our relationship was built on umbrella management alone, we probably wouldn’t be together any more. Likely, we’d have never gotten married. We’d have gone on a couple of dates, had “Umbrellagate” blow up in our faces, and we’d have bad-mouthed the other’s umbrella decisions to our friends for a few weeks. That would have been that.
(Happily, we’re much more compatible in a number of other, more important areas. Like overy-undery toilet paper rolls and pizza topping preferences.
But not ice cube tray management. Good lord, never ice cube tray management.
If we ever go our separate ways, it’ll be “irreconcilable ice cubes” on the divorce papers.)
Anyway, her umbrella strategy goes something like this: In the morning, before heading out, she checks the weather. If there’s a chance of rain, she’ll look inside our coat closet, pull out an umbrella, and take it with her, just in case.
This seems very reasonable, on the face of it. There are, of course, a few extenuating circumstances.
The first is that she’s somewhat prone — in the same way that a dog is “somewhat prone” to enjoy bacon — to losing her umbrella. She’ll get it to the car, and maybe use it during the day, but somewhere along the way, by the time she gets home she’s often umbrellaless. By that point the rain has usually stopped, so it may actually be days later before she realizes that she’s an umbrella short.
“The upshot of this is that at any given time, there are between zero and fourteen umbrellas in our hall closet.”
And then one of two things happens. Either she’ll go buy another umbrella and put it in the closet, starting the cycle anew — or she’ll find my umbrella, take it, and, basically, start the cycle anew. But with my umbrella. I’ll get back to that.
Meanwhile, one of her “lost” umbrellas might turn up somewhere. Stuffed in the trunk of the car or jammed into her purse, maybe. So that goes back in the closet, too. The upshot of this is that at any given time, there are between zero and fourteen umbrellas in our hall closet. The time remaining until any one of those will be lost — temporarily or permanently — is approximated by the equation (time until next thunderstorm) + (3.4 hours).
It’s a system, I guess. Not my system. But it’s a system.
(Until it involves my umbrella. Then it’s a problem.)
My strategy is completely different — and, on the whole, wildly less effective. I don’t lose umbrellas (except to my wife’s “system”). But I also don’t check the weather. If it’s raining when I leave the house, I take an umbrella.
(Usually from the hall closet, if there are more than two in attendance. Which is most of the time.)
If it’s not raining the moment I leave the house, I tend to assume that it’s not going to rain for the rest of the day. Because ‘an object bathed in sunshine will remain bathed in sunshine for the foreseeable future.’ Isaac Newton taught us that.
(Or maybe it was his meteorologist brother, “Stormchaser” Newton. Less famous. Probably for good reason.)
Suffice it to say, my umbrella plan leaves me, more often than not, without an umbrella when I need one. At least, if I’m depending on the stash in the closet. So I don’t. Instead, I bought two umbrellas, and placed them at strategic and high-value locations. Namely, one’s in my office. And one stays in my car.
(Which is to say, it stays in my car now, because the missus has her own car. When we shared the Nissan, my vehicular umbrella stash was under the same constant risk of falling into her system’s maelstrom as all the other umbrellas we owned.
Of course, that was fair. I used to chew all the gum she left in the glove box.)
Recognizing my chief deficiency — that is, that I’m too lazy to check the weather before I leave the house — I’ve covered as many bases as possible. If it’s raining on the way to the car, I’ll get wet, yes. But from the car to the office, the office back to the car, or even from the car back into the house, I’m covered. Literally.
Or so you’d think.
Sadly, my deficiency works overtime — and conspires with the fact that I park underground to get to the office, and work in a spot that has no window. And I’m still too lazy to check the weather.
So from the car to the office, I get wet… with a perfectly good dry umbrella resting in the backseat. From the office to the car, again, wet… and with a backup ‘brella sitting on my desk. By the time I get home and park in the lot — above ground, exposed to the elements where I might actually realize it’s raining — I’m usually too wet and clammy to bother dragging the car umbrella out for the short walk to my place. And when I do, that umbrella becomes fair game for “the system”, because the odds of me remembering to take the stupid thing back to the car before the next typhoon rolls in are approximately never-going-to-happen-to-one.
In summary, I guess I should revise my original statement. My wife doesn’t have an umbrella problem. She takes them. She loses them. She buys more, and occasionally finds them. Probably she stays dry a good ninety percent of the time. And she doesn’t really think about umbrellas very hard.
Me, I obsess over umbrellas. Where to best stash them, how not to lose them, whether they’ll be whisked away from under my nose at any given time. And I’ve reliably got two — not one, but two — of the things at my disposal, under my full control, and available at my merest whim.
I’m also soaked by rain on a regular and maddening basis. Including right now, sitting at my desk, staring at an unused umbrella that I didn’t think to take to lunch — and will, no doubt, forget to bring with me at the end of the day.
So, my wife doesn’t have an umbrella problem. And I have a problem, for sure. But I can’t blame her. Or the umbrellas. Or even the rain.
Clearly, it’s the Weather Channel’s fault. That must be it. I’m going with that. Just as soon as I wring out my socks. Stupid Weather Channel.
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