I
find bare things shocking - especially wires
by
Robert LaFrance
This morning I received a real shock
shortly after I got up. I must fix that bare wire on the toaster.
But I don’t want to talk about toasters, or
procrastination; I want to talk about my blasted alarm clock and how things are
all so automatic nowadays that no one can fix anything. I know, I rant about
this kind of stuff all the time, but this time it’s personal.
It was Sunday morning, October 13,
almost dawn when I woke up, but the clock radio alongside my bed was reading
5:45. “How could this be?” I asked myself, since there was no one else awake to
ask. I looked at the clock radio on the other side of the bed and it read 6:45.
I have mentioned before in this
column that I have a drug and liquor problem, but it couldn’t have been that,
because I don’t use either one. (My problem is that I probably should start.) A
quick scan of my face in the bathroom mirror didn’t show any more weirdness
than ever, so I was forced to sit down and think.
Finally, like the waters of the
Mackenzie River arriving at the Beaufort Sea, it came to me once I had spent a
considerable amount of time thinking of every possible reason that my clock, on
time when I went to bed Saturday evening, should flip back an hour.
Of course! It was doing the
automatic fall change from Daylight Saving to Standard Time, but the only
trouble was that the clock wasn’t listening when the powers that be moved that
time change forward a few weeks from mid- or late October to November 3rd.
So it was just a matter of changing
the clock ahead an hour, right? Very simple, right?
Wrong. Guys, I am sorry but I let
you down on this one, but after fifteen minutes I started reading the manual.
Although it seemed to be in Swahili, I got through it and tried it suggested to
set the clock. Of course nothing worked. It remained an hour slow. Finally I
decided on a foolproof solution: leave it alone and accept things as they were
until November 3rd.
When I did finally get up, just
before 8:00 am, I went downstairs to check if my VCR had recorded ‘Murdoch
Mysteries’ but of course it had not. It too had switched back to Standard Time.
Therefore, I had recorded a program about aardvark mutations in Ernfold, Saskatchewan.
Exciting, but I would never know if Det. William Murdoch had captured the
miscreants.
In the kitchen, the microwave’s
clock numbers were blinking. I decided to have breakfast uptown with some
relatives. As I started my borrowed Toyota, I heard a sharp ‘click’ and soon
realized the car had automatically locked all the doors. I would have said that
I was perfectly capable of locking my own car doors, but apparently Toyota
doesn’t agree.
Everywhere I went and whatever I
did, some electronic instrument was telling me what I could and couldn’t do,
and when to do it – or not. Security cameras followed me in every store, I
couldn’t take the car out of ‘park’ unless I put my foot on the brake, and I
found everything I touched had dead batteries.
Let’s accept it: we humans no longer have any say in
anything. While this is a common feeling for husbands, now even wives are
feeling the pinch, as it were.
*****************************
A friend from Ernfold, Saskatchewan
stopped by for the visit on Tuesday. He and his brother were on their way to
Charlottetown for a horse breeders’ conference. They co-own a ranch where they
raise quarter horses. (I never could understand the term ‘quarter-horse’. What
happens to the other 75%?)
Anyway, Boyd and his brother Bill
stopped by for a short visit and Boyd had one of his stories all ready for me.
When we had shared a house in Hamilton, Ontario back in the early 1970s, he had
always been ready with a good story.
This story dated from the late 1960s
when he was working on a Panamanian freighter, sailing between The Netherlands
and Brazil. New on the job and only 19 years old, he had studied his book on
nautical terms and the jargon sailors used. One night he was doing a shift on
the bridge, watching for other ships, etc. in the area. Four bells (2 hours)
into his shift, he saw some lights off to the right and informed the captain.
“Well, where is it?” growled the
captain, a Luxembourgian who was in a foul mood. You know what they’re like.
“Three points abaft the starboard
beam!” shouted Boyd.
“What?”
“Three points abaft---“
“I heard what you said, you moron.
What does it mean?”
“Over there to the right…see?” Thus
ended Boyd’s career as a master of nautical terms. He threw his book overboard
and talked Saskatchewan trash talk from then until he jumped ship at Halifax
three months later.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment