New bird: the
red-faced Marton
by Robert LaFrance
There was one particularly red face
down at the club last evening. Plebe Marton, the retired Corvair mechanic,
slunk in to Happy Hour about twenty minutes late because he had embarrassed
himself earlier in the evening by ‘taking a leak’ while two respectable women were sitting in a parked
car right behind him.
At the time I was inside the meeting
hall and about to come outside after a community get-together called to talk
about the dreadful state of garbage pickup, or perhaps it was unsightly
premises.
Whatever it was about, I left about
7:30 pm and just as I was stepping outside I heard a scream that might have
curdled anyone’s blood. It was Etherine Henderson who was fleeing the scene
where Plebe Marton had just embarrassed himself. She was followed closely by
her mother Marion, a church elder.
Here’s how it all ‘came down’: Plebe
had been in the meeting too, but left at the earliest possible moment because
he had drunk two bottles of water and was just about to be ‘caught short’ as my
late Aunt Ella Adams would have said. He went outside and quickly stepped over
by some lilac bushes to relieve himself.
However, he neglected to check the
cars nearby because he figured everyone was still in the meeting hall. That was
a mistake, an example of what might be termed ‘unintended consequences’. This
was to become obvious to him about thirty seconds too late, when Etherine let
out her first scream. She and Marion had been waiting outside in their car for
Marion’s niece Glenna, who was attending to complain about whatever the meeting
had been about.
All we guys gave Plebe our sympathy to
be sure. “It’s happened to me,” commented Will Barber, the assistant bartender.
We all agreed and we especially understood why Will would sympathize. He
doesn’t have a healthy rosebush around his place because of the number of times
he has decorated them with “Number one”. Indeed, one day a travelling wasp
stung him as he was completing one of those operations. Another red face
because that area swelled up (not in a good way) and by the time he got to the
ER it was causing him a lot of discomfort.
Life sure is complicated.
*****************
A short
note here on potholes. Although it’s almost July and we are well into summer,
many of the spring potholes are hanging in there, and I want to make clear I am
not blaming the people who actually do the work, but let’s call it a government
policy that began in the 1990s. That is Policy 1995(R)3:34 in the Official
Pothole Manual.
“Workers shall not be allowed to fix
potholes until D.O.T. received at least 155 complaints from the
public and the total of vehicle repairs equals or surpasses $250,000.” One
retired civil servant I happen to know from when we both worked in Paris
(Ontario) said that he had worked for Ontario D.O.T. for thirty-two years when
the Paris garage received a directive from Toronto. He couldn’t remember the
policy number, but the gist of it was that D.O.T. workers were no longer
allowed to stop and fix a pothole, to just dump a pail of tar in it, but must
now report it to the local office for action. Or, I should say, “action”.
What happened then was that Paris
D.O.T. office workers would fill out a form and mail it to Toronto, whose
functionaries would then make out a work order and send it to Paris. The Paris
office would then contact the actual workers who would fill the offending
pothole that was, by that time, a week or ten days older and bigger.
I want the reader to know that the
Plebe Marton story was a total lie, composed for entertainment’s sake, but I
swear the Ontario D.O.T. story is true, unless my cousin was lying. I don’t
think he was; it sounds too real.
******************
My friend Glenn was visiting last
evening and said he had to go in the next morning for a routine EKG, his yearly
checkup.
“Why do you call it an EKG and not an
ECG?” I asked.
He answered with unassailable logic:
“Because that’s what it is.” I asked him to explain why the word
electrocardiogram would be abbreviated to EKG when there’s no letter K in the
word, except in German. He blustered for a while and then settled for the old
standby: “Dr. Phil (or Judge Jean or somebody with a title) said it on TV just
yesterday.” Then he went to say that anybody who would say ECG also thinks that
the last letter of the alphabet is pronounced zed.
“Those are American affectations,” I
said, just as if I knew what I was talking about. Then I looked up
electrocardiogram on Google, the fountain of all knowledge, and showed Glenn.
“People say EKG because they hear it on TV,” said Mister Google, “and the last
letter of the alphabet is pronounced zee in the U.S. only.”
-end-
Really.
It said that.
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