This is Only a Test

We had an earthquake drill at work. It wasn’t the first one. Our office building is required by law to do them every so often, because we live in an area where an earthquake is a possibility, and they want to be sure that we rehearse crawling under our desks regularly, so we don’t forget this critical and highly specialized skill.

In the event you’ve never taken part in one (I hadn’t until a couple of years ago), the process is fairly simple. They come over the PA system, and read a script that describes what would be happening in an earthquake. You’re instructed to climb under your desk, protecting your head and neck, and stay away from windows.

Because the script was written by a government agency, it has all the charm and linguistic finesse of an airline boarding pass. It never varies from one drill to the next, and every time we hear it, it is a source of mirth and amusement. It begins by notifying you that the earthquake is starting. It describes the shaking causing items to fall, the lights flickering and the air filling with dust. You are instructed to stay away from the windows, crawl beneath your desk and wait. Once the fictitious quake ends, you’re told that you should move toward the “core” of the building, near the elevators, as this is the most stable location. (I find it interesting that six 30 story empty shafts through which the elevators travel is the most solid part of the building. I get why, but you have to admit, it’s still a little odd.) You’re told that once the quake was over, you’d be notified of further emergency procedures to follow. Then they thank you for participating, and you ostensibly climb out from under your desk and get back to work.

I think that speech was written in about 1985 and hasn’t been updated since. When they talk about the falling items, they talk about “binders.” Who uses binders anymore? I mean my kids do at school, but in my office the only binders you can find are in the supply room. It appears that at one point they held training materials (they all have various company names on them), but the training documentation has all been removed and the binders abandoned, unloved and unneeded. Seriously, binders?

The announcement about further emergency procedures seems a bit strange. I hope they have a readily accessible supply of poster board and huge markers, because that PA system is going to be completely out of commission after an earthquake. If the power’s out, the PA’s going to be out too. The only way they’re going to get information to us is by handing out post it notes, or by mental telepathy.

This was the first drill we’ve had since we hired a few new contractors. Quite frankly if we really do have an earthquake, we’re going to lose a huge percentage of our contractors, because they sit right in front of the windows. They’re pretty much doomed.

Once the drill was over, I heard one of our contractors talking to another one.

“I took notes,” she said.

Wait, sorry, what? You did what? You took…notes? On what, exactly? I can only assume she was so moved by the dramatic narrative during the drill that she wanted to record her feelings in the moment. Because seriously, what is there to take notes on about “crawl under your desk”? I’m also wondering what’s going to happen if we really do have an earthquake. How long is it going to take her to locate those notes to figure out what it is she’s supposed to do? It’s worth pointing out that this woman is the same one who spent four straight days humming, “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” under her breath.

A friend of mine was telling me about his experience in a quake that happened before I moved here. He was at work, and they heard the noise. Because they worked near a train yard, he said their first thought was the train cars were slamming together, as they apparently sometimes did. When the noise continued, everyone in the office looked around at each other, and they all promptly dived under their desks, just as the (non safety) glass in the windows above their heads began buckling. They recognized the circumstances, they remembered the correct procedure, and executed flawlessly. I’m confident in a similar position I too will be able to do as well, even if I don’t practice constantly. Call me arrogant, but I think I’m a natural.

The Trouble with Windows

We’ve been having some problems with car windows lately. Our cars aren’t brand new so it’s not really surprising that they’re starting to have problems, but it’s still annoying. I guess I should be grateful it’s windows and not things like transmissions or timing belts or something else that would cost a mortgage payment to get fixed. The weird thing is our problems really do seem to be isolated to windows.

The first window problem started about two years ago, when the driver’s side window on my husband’s car got sluggish in its transit up and down. It would judder and stall when it was half way open. You could make it go up an inch or so, and that would sort of give it a little burst of energy when you tried to send it back down that would allow it to make it all the way. It was a pain in the ass, but at least we could still go through the drive through in it. Which of course is very important to us, with our healthy lifestyles, and strict adherence to government dietary guidelines and so forth.

Then things went from bad to worse. The motor died completely. I think. Or maybe something broke? I don’t know, what the fuck do I look like, Mr. Goodwrench? The bottom line was the goddamned thing wouldn’t go up or down. So my husband replaced the motor or something. Whatever he did, it kinda worked, and then it completely stopped working. If you even tried to roll the window down, the glass would list forward, and it looked kind of like what happened in “Titanic” when the ship upended and went under for the last time. Only without the icebergs and lifeboats in the foreground, and sobbing, despondent teenage girls all around you.

My husband was able to get the window back the way it was supposed to be, but he gave me a stern instruction not to open the window. It was to remain closed. Period. That was maybe six months ago.

Fast forward to last weekend, when he took the minivan/ghetto wagon (getting to that), and I took his car to a couple of appointments I had on Saturday morning. The last one wound up right around noon, and I was feeling right peckish, so I stopped for a light snack (small fries and a small Diet Coke) at the drive through. Of course I rolled down the window to place my order. I know he’d told me not to do it, but that was six months ago. I can barely remember if I actually washed my hair this morning, and he expects me to remember not to roll down a window I was told not to roll down six months ago in a car I rarely drive? Seriously? WhatEVER.

So I ended up conducting this transaction around a triangle of window that looked like the dorsal fin of a Dale Chihuly-inspired shark sticking up in the middle of the window space. The guys at the drive through didn’t even give me a second glance. I guess when it comes to automotive weirdness, they’ve seen just about everything. When I got home I got a lecture, of course, which I responded to with a mature, understanding, and carefully considered, “Fuck off.”

To end your suspense, he was able to fix it, and he yanked the fuse that allows that window to operate, so I couldn’t make the same mistake again. That’s fine, but let me just tell you that while this was sort of my fault, the other window issue is 100% his fault. Here’s what happened.

Once again it’s been maybe as much as a year or so since it happened, but the hydraulic lift on the tailgate of our minivan gave out. Instead of, you know, replacing the fucking hydraulics, he decides the way to deal with this problem was to use a telescoping metal pole to hold the tailgate up when we were getting stuff in or out. I spent a lot of time worrying about what would happen when the pole slipped and the tailgate came crashing down on someone’s head, probably mine. As with almost everything in life, the things we worry about are not the things that actually end up going wrong.

He’d taken the kids on a Scout trip-overnight camping trip-white water rafting trip up in the mountains. He was in a parking lot somewhere, getting something out of the back of the van, and was in a hurry. As usual, the tailgate was propped up with the pole. Moving quickly, he didn’t think about the pole, and went to slam the back. Under his force, the pole shifted sideways, and shot up through the glass in the back window, completely destroying it.

When they returned the next day, there was an enormous sheet of plastic taped over the back window of the van. Combined with a scraped bumper (also courtesy of him) and a dinged tailgate (admittedly, courtesy of me), my minivan had been transformed into the ultimate ghetto wagon. It looked like complete shit. It continued to look that way until fairly recently, when he finally had the glass replaced.

We won’t have this problem again with the pole because about two weeks ago he ordered a new hydraulic kit from Amazon. It came, and he took it outside to install it. Fifteen minutes later he came back inside and said, “Well that wasn’t hard at all. If I’d realized it was that easy, I’d have done it a long time ago.”

Say what now? You mean to tell me I’m driving around in a car that looks like what Fred Sanford would have driven if he’d been a soccer mom instead of a junk dealer, and you could have saved us all kinds of trouble and money with fifteen fucking minutes and a screwdriver? Fuck you, motherfucker.

The funny thing is there was something about having that translucent plastic instead of clear glass as a back window that was sort of liberating. To get out of our neighborhood, you turn onto an actual highway (not a 60 mph interstate, but a state highway nonetheless). The speed limit is 50, and people are often going faster. Turning out into a gap in the traffic, sometimes I know people are going too fast and will have to slow down to accommodate my acceleration up to 50, and are probably thinking, “Thanks a lot, bitch,” or something similar. But even when I thought they might be glaring at me and judging me, I couldn’t see them glaring at me because of the plastic. I would think, “If I can’t see you, you can’t judge me.”

However, that doesn’t mean I liked having my car look like some kind of bad stereotype joke. Fortunately he got the glass replaced, and now it looks generally respectable again (well, except for all that duct tape residue around the back window, but nothing’s perfect, I guess). The side window in his car still doesn’t work, but I just have to remember to take the right car when I’m planning to hit the drive through.

 

Now I'd just call it "ghetto adjacent."

A Study in Compulsions

I’ve recently had occasion to think a lot about my father in law. Some people have problems with their mothers in law. I’ve never had have too many problems with her because she’s been dead for most of my marriage. My problems were largely with my father in law, and mostly they had to do with his being alive. The reason I’ve been thinking about him a lot is because now he’s dead. If you’re one of those people who thinks that everything is funny but death, and death absolves people of all sin and we should just remember dead people as perfect and saintly, maybe navigate away now, because I’m about to get snarky about a dead guy.

My father in law was generally a good person, I’ll put that out there now. He didn’t cheat or steal or set fire to orphanages. But hoo boy did he lie. Maybe “lie” is harsh. He exaggerated. Except when you exaggerate, you expand on a story that’s true, and kind of tart it up, make it more interesting. And in retrospect, that’s not really what he did. He just made shit up. So I guess he was actually lying. But they were such patently obvious lies that they were funny.

Oh, how bad could it be? Well, let’s see—did you know he was responsible for the development of the integrated circuit? He was. He told us a lot of his stories before the advent of the Smart Phone, and he’d tell us shit like this over dinner, so we’d just have to smile and nod and think, “What utter bullshit” instead of whipping out an iPhone and saying, “Let me Google that” and finding out the truth. Which in this case was that the integrated circuit was developed at Texas Instruments during a time when he was in Germany in the Army. So, you know, what utter bullshit.

And then there was Babe Ruth’s Bat. This story was told to his girlfriend (partner, whatever) while my husband and I were in the room. My husband and I keep looking at each other, rolling our eyes in disbelief and incredulity. Because she was hanging on every word, convinced that this was the absolute verbatim truth.

It seems that at some point in the…1940s? I don’t know, the timing wasn’t clear, because my father in law was born in 1939 and Babe Ruth played baseball in the 20s, but clearly this sort of detail was glossed over in the telling of this story because, you know, details. Anyway, sometime in the 1940s, when he was a kid, his dad somehow got hold of a bat that had belonged to Babe Ruth. Where his father found a 20 year old bat belonging to one of the greatest baseball players of all time near their home in Western Massachusetts, and how he was so sure of its provenance, was never clearly explained. Because, you know, details. Anyhoo, his dad brought this bat home, but it was broken. His father fixed it and gave it to my father in law to play with. My father in law, being a kid—8 or 10 or whatever—and not really understanding the significance, played with this bat, but just didn’t get what he’d been given. I think maybe the moral of the story was supposed to be that Kids Just Don’t Appreciate These Things.

But our eyerolling was based on the obvious: Babe Ruth’s bat? Come on. It was broken? And his dad repaired it? And in the 1940s there was a fixative strong enough to repair it so it could be used again? I’m no structural engineer, but even I know that a broken wooden bat can’t be repaired in a way to make it usable again. My brother in law is a structural engineer, and he confirmed that the integrity of the wood would be compromised sufficiently to render it as useful for either kindling or to fix tippy tables at a restaurant, your choice. And in the 1940s there was no such thing as Liquid Nails or Gorilla Glue or whatever, not that those would even work. And yet, his girlfriend believed every word of this preposterous horseshit.

Let me also add that always his lies were harmless. He never lied about anyone’s character, or actions, or motives (well, other than his own). He was never attacking an individual. It was just infuriating because they were so obviously lies, and while you could call him on them, they were always petty and stupid enough that to do so would make you appear…petty and stupid. And yet it was tiresome and sort of insulting to sit there knowing you were being lied to.

Like the Fourth of July Parade lie.

We live in a really small town that every year has a big old fashioned Fourth of July parade. Any group is welcome to march—the Rotary, the Boy Scouts, the roller hockey team, the local animal shelter, the LGBT support group, local businesses—the organic butcher, the organic baker, the organic candle stick maker. Anyone who wants to can march if they get permission from the parade committee. The joke around here is that half the town watches the parade, and the other half is in it. Ha ha.

Last year he and I attended the parade, while my husband and kids marched in it with my husband’s company. As we sat there, waiting for the parade to start, I told him this pathetic little tidbit of humor. He nodded for a minute, and then said, “You know, there’s this town where they have a Fourth of July parade, and one half of it watches it, and the other half is the parade. And then when it’s over, the ones who were watching get up and march, and the other half watch.”  So, seriously? You took the stupid one-liner I just delivered, and basically repeated it back to me as a “true story”? Seriously?

What most of his lies had in common was that they were delusions. Either they were things that he’d claim to have done, or facts that he “invented” that he then presented to his companions as unarguable truths. In a way it was sort of pathetic, because most of his stories were intended to make him appear brilliant and successful, or at least wickedly clever, in ways that he never really was. The saddest part is, I think he really believed every story he told. In fact I’m not sure he wasn’t completely out of his fucking mind. This suspicion deepened when we went and saw his house.

We took the kids to see “grandpa’s house.” He had moved from where my husband and his brother grew up to a different state in New England, to a house none of us had ever seen (he had always come to visit us, instead of us going to him). I wasn’t sure it was going to be terribly meaningful to the children, but we needed to get a feel for what was in the house, because of course it would have to be cleaned out and sold.

On the surface, it was very, very tidy. The living room looked fairly normal. His girlfriend had moved some of her things out and taken them to the townhouse in Maine she was moving to, so there were some bare spots, but it was neat and uncluttered. The kitchen was also neat and organized. The basement had lots of metal shelving with big plastic bins on it. Actually, I should say that everything was very neat and organized. What was notable was what you found when you started opening drawers.

Although we’re not anywhere near done, I can offer some preliminary observations.

We are now the owners of five digital cameras (one brand new in the box, most of them simply removed from the box, but never used), plus two MP3 players (again, one brand new in the box). We have three laptops, none of which are new, but none of which is more than maybe 5 years old. We left two there. And that was just the beginning of the Festival of Electronics that was in store for us. Wireless mice. Old keyboards. A couple of old printers. Three cordless phone sets. Miles of various kinds of cable. Four or five webcams. Twenty two power strips, all at least fifteen years old. I have no idea what one retired person planned to do with all of this, but he’d always fancied himself “technical,” and at one point in the 90s he had bought ten or twelve Macs, proclaiming that he would cobble them together in such a way that he claimed they would anticipate Apple’s future offerings by ten years (see: “delusions, comma, lies,” above) so I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been to find that stuff.

I was looking around on a desk in the basement, and it struck me there were six pairs of scissors in my field of vision. I started opening drawers, and started finding staplers. Seven total. Then those little bitey staple puller things. Nine of those. Another drawer held three boxes of 24 pencils, all unsharpened, and four sets of colored pencils. There were thirty six highlighters. There were five (five) Cross pen and pencil sets, all with the logo of a company at which he last worked twenty five years ago, plus a bunch of other pens in presentation boxes. A little more digging unearthed eighteen pocket knives (we later found one more in his car). And that was just one of his two desks.

As I was investigating all of this, my husband came downstairs and said, “Holy shit.” I wheeled around in the desk chair into which I had collapsed as I was counting highlighters and said, “What?” He pointed wordlessly at a set of heavy duty aluminum shelving that was behind me that I hadn’t noticed. On a set of shelves approximately five feet wide, seven feet high, and two feet deep, stacked on four shelves, from top to bottom, were boxes and boxes of train sets. Hundreds of cars, miles of HO gauge track. All purchased from eBay, I presume with the intention that he would build a huge train set in his basement, and his grandchildren would beg to be allowed to visit him to play with the amazing Train Set of Wonder and Delight. Holy shit, indeed.

I couldn’t imagine anything could top the trains. I was wrong. So very wrong.

In his office, I found a fairly good sized travel bag of prescription medication. Because he was in poor health and took a shit ton of various medications and vitamins every day (to no avail, clearly), I wasn’t surprised to find it (and, spoiler, it wasn’t Class 1 narcotics or anything). My brother in law advocated for tossing it, but we decided that since we weren’t sure what all it was, it should go to a pharmacy to be properly disposed of. I volunteered to take it, and grabbed a couple of those S-M-T-W-Th-F-S pill boxes with stuff in them off the table to add them to the pile. Someone suggested I’d better make sure they didn’t belong to his girlfriend. She said, no, they weren’t hers, but told me that there was another bag in the garage that I should take too. I went out to find it.

What I found was a bag, like the kind of bag they’d give you at Bed, Bath and Beyond, or Sheets ‘n’ Shit if you bought a king sized comforter, or one of those “bed in a bag” things. A big fucking bag, is where I’m going with this. This big fucking bag was, I shit you not, half full of medicine bottles. Let me repeat that, half fucking full of medicine bottles. Which all had pills in them. We’re not talking about a bunch of empty bottles, these all had shit in them. A lot of them were vitamins, but that only makes it worse. That means that he’d gone out and bought a bottle of vitamin E, and then two weeks later, had—I don’t know, forgotten he bought it, or was afraid he’d run out, or whatever the fuck he was thinking—and went out and bought another bottle of vitamin E, then did it again. And again. And again. Since I have little need for 34 pounds of vitamin E, it all got turned in to be disposed of.

It’s bad enough that he still has cassette tapes of Laura Branigan albums, and notebooks from classes he took in which the handouts were run off on a mimeograph machine, but he also has dozens of CDs for software that was probably five years out of date when he bought it or got it (AOL install disks with 100 free hours, anyone?), enough pairs of prescription glasses that he could have worn a new pair every week for a year with no repeats, and forty SD cards that may or may not have anything on them.

My brother in law and I started talking about what someone would think if they started cleaning out our stuff. Anyone doing it for me would shake their heads over the number of blank notebooks I had, or the fifteen three ring binders full of recipes. They would look at the big basket of nail polish and say, “How many nails did she think she had?” I think we all have a slight hoarding instinct, whether that manifests itself in the form of family pictures, coffee mugs, or washers and screws. But somehow I think having thirty colors of nail polish doesn’t quite put one into the category of “hoarder” the way having a box of 85 keys to nothing, 6 sets of brand new gardening gloves, 5 disposable charcoal grills, and 36 light switch plates of various configuration does. Holy shit.