THE OLD MANOF THE MOUNTAIN
THE OLD MANHere are a few little things that piss me off. I think it is the little things that absorb an inordinate amount of our energy. The major problem here is that people do not pay attention. If people would just be a little aware and study the few simple rules I lay down here, we could make the world a better place.
As you can see, there is no shortage of things to irritate The Old Man. But probably the very first thing that I discovered wrong with the world was the lima bean.
One of the things I never understood about my father was that he liked lima beans. No, it was worse than that. He loved lima beans. In his enthusiasm to share this with his son, he taught me to hate all vegetables, something I have only recently overcome. Many an evening I was made to stay at the table, staring at a miserable little pile of lima beans, which incidentally became no more appealing for having cooled, until I “finished my supper.”
I don’t even believe in my heart that a lima bean is a vegetable. I think it is a mineral. I know they grow from plants, but they strike me as the closest thing I am ever likely to experience to eating chalk.
Then there is succotash. Why do we take two perfectly palatable, everyday vegetables and associate them with lima beans? Very unfair to the carrots and corn, if you ask me. Evidence of some type of pro-lima conspiracy. Actually, this is a very familiar tactic: the only way I was ever able to ingest lima beans was to mix them in with my mashed potatoes. My mother may have sneaked a few into a chicken pot pie along the way too. I think if you check, you will find that lima beans are rarely eaten by anyone in the absence of one subterfuge or another.
The good news is that there is a natural predator of the lima bean: the lima bean pod borer. More good news is that it is quite small, a little worm or something just 1/8" in length, much smaller even than the words we use to describe it. So we don’t have to get too grossed out by noticing this bug very much. You may even have eaten a few of them yourself, if you happen to eat their host, the lima bean. I am thinking of launching a movement to see if we can’t get the lima bean pod borer declared an endangered species or something.
This lima bean plot needs to be nipped in the bud.
Why can’t people tune the radio in correctly? The digital revolution has helped here. Instead of the old slide rule style dial, now on newer tuners every station is a precisely tuned digital channel. Even so, some radios tune the FM dial in increments of one-tenth megahertz; i.e., 106.3, 106.4, 106.5 and so forth. Hello?! In North America and most other places all the FM stations end in an odd number of tenths. There IS NO 106.4! Incredibly some people tune in 106.4 anyway.
But then you have the old style radios where people manage to tune in like half the radio station. Distortion. Terrible distortion. Ear-grating, dental filling-shaking distortion. It sounds like all of the speakers are smashed. And some of these people don’t even notice! Do these people know what music is supposed to sound like? I would rather listen to a bunch of people dragging their fingernails down glass! Ouch!
Do not put the top down on your convertible and then ride around with the windows up! Doing this should be one of the primary examples of a dork. Please understand that there is more to looking cool than simply being able to pay for (or manage the monthly lease payment on) a convertible. And don’t give me that crap that you don’t care if you look cool; we all know better.
Take it from me, if the top is down you need to have the windows down. Condition yourself to put the windows down before you put the top down. If you are going to ride around with the top down and the windows up, you might as well dig out your father’s argyle knee socks and start strutting around in some Bermuda shorts. And don’t forget to button the top button on your shirt.
Another thing that pisses me off is those post cards they insert in magazines. You buy a magazine and then have to deal with half a dozen postcards fluttering out of it. Some of the postcards are stapled into the fold of the magazine so you have to rip them out, occasionally damaging the pages of your magazine. You could leave those in, but then the pages don’t lie down flat and you’re trying to read and the pages keep turning by themselves. To make it worse, most of these postcards are so that you can subscribe to the magazine! How many times is one person likely to subscribe to one magazine anyway? And they include these cards in the magazine even if you subscribe to it! A call to action: All of you... ALL OF YOU! send every one of those postcards back to the publisher. Every single week. Don’t bother filling them in. We are not subscribing to anything. Just mail them back blank. Just think if this catches on: millions of blank postcards flooding each publisher. Oh! they will get the message... at their expense! This will be almost as good as being able to call back a telemarketer at home collect! This is faux civil disobedience for the ‘90’s, an echo of the ‘60’s as we dimly recall past rebellions. But, hey! Whadya expect? Everybody is working, inflation is down, the market is hot... what else is there to get excited about?
While I am at it, what is this thing about caller ID? You can have the telephone company put a block on your line, so that - if I have paid the telephone company for caller ID - I can, nevertheless, not tell who you are. This is to preserve the privacy of you, the caller. This has always puzzled me. When you call me, you are - by definition, the way I see it - invading my privacy. If you wanted to preserve your privacy, then you simply could refrain from calling me.
I do not recall a whole bunch of instances in which the person being called invaded the privacy of the person who called him. Am I missing something here?
Next, let me comment on debit cards. One day I was greeted at my bank by a smiling teller...excuse me, customer representative...who invited me to get a debit card from my bank. I asked her what the advantage to that might be. She explained that it was great for people who didn’t like getting those annoying monthly credit card bills, and that it saved the trouble of writing a check to the credit card company as well as the cost of the postage for mailing it. I could use my debit card, she went on, and the merchant could instantaneously withdraw the amount of my purchase directly from my account! She was disappointed that I was not thrilled at the prospect.
First of all, I don’t even have an ATM card for fear that I will forget to enter withdrawals made other than by check and that I will thereby overdraw my account. A debit card would seem to pose the same risk. Secondly, I don’t like the idea of anyone withdrawing money from my account except for me.
But as for those pesky credit card bills, they are one of the few joys I derive from modern commerce. I have several credit cards, all with no annual fee, and I pay off my balance every month. Consequently, not only are the cards free but so is the use of the money between the time I charge an item and the time I ultimately pay my credit card bill. I get such a thrill from this that I maintain a schedule of my credit cards with the closing date of the billing cycles, so that I am always certain to use the one that will give me the longest float.
OK, OK...we are not talking big figures here. The float on my monthly credit card purchases does not amount to very much. But it is the principle of the thing. After all, you are reading The Old Man, the guy who shows up at the tax collector’s office, his check in hand, around three o’clock on the last day taxes are due and proudly proclaims that he is paying his taxes early this year. An hour early. They close at four.
It’s just the kind of guy I am.
Then there is the Paperwork Reduction Act notice! Has there ever been a more ironic monument to the wastefulness of our government? This is the law responsible for that extra piece of paper that comes tumbling out of virtually every communication you might receive from the federal government, to explain of course that they are obliged to reduce the paperwork associated with your complying with whatever bad news they have just sent to you.
How many billions of Paperwork Reduction Act notices do you suppose they mail out every year? Please tell me that somewhere in the bowels of the bureaucracy there is at least one, just one panjandrum with enough of a sense of humor to chuckle over this delicious irony. Because it makes me vaguely ill, and someone should get a laugh out of it.
Finally, may I beseech the manufacturers of mattresses to deal with what I think has been the most obvious problem with their line of goods since I have been alive? No, I am not going to make a joke about the labels that you are not to remove under penalty of law.
Instead of spending so much time worrying about orthopedic support systems and the like, how about some sort of handles that actually work? Pound for pound, mattresses have to be just about the most impossible thing to lug around. Floppy dead weight, often with no handles at all, otherwise equipped with those little bitty handles - either the ones made from some sort of flimsy cord or else a plastic mold too small to accommodate any hand likely to be attached to an arm strong enough to lift the damn thing. Certainly this industry could dedicate just a bit of its R&D budget to figuring out a more efficient mode of transport assist... it shouldn't take much.
You will notice that the Old Man has definite ideas on topics such as the above. If I could be in charge of things around here, the world would be a better place. But I am not so arrogant as to think that I know all the things that need to be corrected. It is possible that something has escaped my notice. If you think so, please let me know by e-mail and perhaps we will address it here.
A public service of the Old Man. It’s the least I can do.
