Tag Cars

Color my world

Michael 12 Comments

Because the dealership where I bought my car was dumb enough to give me state safety inspection and basic services free for life as long as I own the car, I visit them every 6 months for my oil change. Last week was one of those times. In fact, it was the 43rd time.

While I was waiting for someone to recycle my old oil I wandered about the showroom. It only took a few minutes to nickel something disturbing (to me). Between the showroom and the front line outside there was no color. All the cars were black, gray, silver, and white. In the second line there was one dark blue SUV.

I started paying attention at red lights, in parking lots, up and down the neighborhood streets. Cars have no color. It was not that long ago you could buy red, blue, and green in varieties of shades. Orange, purple, and chartreuse were almost common. It was longer ago but still in our lifetimes that two-toned, multicolored patterns decorated our motorized chariots.

I’m doing my part. I have a red car. It’s actually my third red car. I’ve also had blue, green, gold, tan, brown, and even black, white, and gray. And one the dealer called pewter. I called it another gray. I liked those cars. I can remember those cars because I can associate the color with a particular event or an era. If they had all been back, white, or gray, I’d likely not even remember them.

Car colors and the occasional chrome to excess identified our rides, were extensions of our personalities. They have been replaced by ever higher lift kits and exponentially increasing tire sizes. Oh, and tattoos. Can’t forget the tattoos. Where did we go wrong?

Adding a little adventurous audacity might be what your life needs to jumpstart your enthusiasm engine. What’s the worse that can happen? You’ll figure it out when you read the latest Uplift.

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Brain Dump – Again!

Michael Leave a comment

Welcome to a new edition of “Let’s clear those brain cells!” or “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”

IMG_2117Stay in your lane

Well, this fellow actually found his own lane to hang out in. I’m not sure what the laws in your state are but here, that much yellow paint in unmistakable diagonal lines means “no parking.”  This isn’t so bad. At least he isn’t parked in the diagonal blue lines next to a handicap space.  [sigh]

Shopping math, cyber edition

If you haven’t read any of my posts on toilet paper math, go there first. My daughter brought this one to my attention. So many discount, rebate, and coupon sites now are online, and all of them offer to find you the absolute best deal available – compared to regular posted prices. When you load multiple versions you are apt to find one offering you 5% of the regular price but only if you shop at the store with a coupon, another with 2% off the sale price but only if you shop online, or another offering free shipping but only if you buy it in magenta and are willing to answer a 45 question survey first. On a Tuesday. This all started when I mentioned I bought a new iPad last week from Amazon but I could have gotten the same deal at Target and saved 5% with their Red Card. I was all set to do that when it dawned on me that I was using a couple hundred dollars in gift cards that I had gotten by answering a variety of 45 question surveys and that beat 5% any day! [duh]

IMG_2029Old enough to drink

Last month my little car hit a milestone. It turned 21. Actually, It’s nearly 23 now but I don’t count the years before I adopted it. In honor of it’s birthday I had it retitled as a classic vehicle. As a classic I was able to negotiate a replacement price with my insurance company which is a good thing because given its condition, it’s worth more than 2-1/2 times the actual “blue book value.” Oddly enough, now that it is insured for 3 times what it was two months ago, the annual rate dropped by exactly half. I know the insurance company isn’t going to lose money on this deal. Hmm. I wonder if those guys ever took toilet paper math.

samsung-and-apple-logoBrand Disloyalty

I mentioned a few brain cells ago that I recently purchased a new iPad. It replaced a Samsung Galaxy tablet which itself replaced a Nook e-reader, which replaced a Bookman. (If you don’t recognize Bookman, you aren’t missing much. I don’t think it has been around since sometime in the 90s.) For some people, the thought of switching operating systems is absolutely unheard of. Families have been torn apart because someone dared stray from whatever everyone else had. Not me. I can flex. Right now I have an Apple phone and tablet, a Dell laptop and an HP desktop running Windows. The old tablet could mirror with the laptop but the desktop is so old it’s more of a paperweight right now and it only mirrors my reflection in its almost always darkened screen. It’s only the third desktop I’ve owned, the previous was a Gateway (wow, remember them!?) and before that, an Apple. Yes, in 1984 I bought my first Apple which was probably before some of the people who are running that company now were born. I doubt I’ll ever replace the desktop with another Apple. I doubt I’ll ever replace the desktop. When the laptop goes (and boy do they go – I can’t keep track of how many laptops I’ve had), I’ll figure out who has the best deal for what I want to use it for, of there are any deals available, and who has the best coupon code to use. But only after I review my post on toilet paper math.

That’s it for now. See you later!

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Blog Art (14)Did you stop by ROAMcare last week to read our take on “Special are those who plant trees knowing that they shall never sit in their shade,” the counterpoint to my post here last week? If you missed it, you can check it out now at www.roamcare.org. (Later this week we explain the meaning of life in five words! That posts Wednesday, July 20. You’ll want to read that one for sure!)

Revisiting the Middle Seat

Michael 4 Comments

Back in July of 2020, July 9 to be exact, I published “The Middle Seat Hump Syndrome,” a clever little ditty if I say so myself wherein I compared the then fairly new encounter with the coronavirus, which we don’t even call it that any more. Toward the end of an honest to gosh true tale of summer family vacationing, I said with much assurance that we will all be fine in the long run. Guess what? I was right! Politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, centrists all aside, I was right! We are pretty much okay as long as you don’t ask the 6.35 million people who lost their lives. Yes that number could have been smaller had we paid less attention to the politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, but we’re stupid so we didn’t. Maybe next time we will.

Because today is the Fourth of July, which of course everybody knows is officially American Independence Day, and because the entire country is out there burning gas we don’t have to pursue their right to a family vacation, I thought I’d regale you again, with “The Middle Seat Hump Sydrome,” with that pesky typo corrected even!

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You need to be of a certain age to remember summer vacations in the family car with enough family that it filled all the seats, three across, and the middle seat made the leg room in coach on Delta look generous for there, right where your feet wanted to be, was “the hump,” the growth in the floorboard that rose nearly to seat level, to allow whatever it was that transferred the up and downs of the engine to the round and round of the rear wheels to make it’s way from the motor to the where the rubber met the road. I am of that age and had been on those vacations and I got that middle seat.

It wasn’t always like that. For a while there were just two of us in the back and we would each get out own window seats with plenty of room between for the picnic basket and cooler that were only opened at planned stops along the way. Then the third one came along. At first it wasn’t such a big deal. She started out in the baby seat in the middle of the front seat (yes, that’s where we put them when we used them back then). After she outgrew that space, she shifted to the back but because those short, stubby legs didn’t even make it off the seat, the hump was not impediment to her comfort. Eventually though, she grew and with that, so did the complaining. “I don’t want to sit on the hump!” And the word came from the front, “take turns.” From then on, whenever the car stopped, the back seat crowd reshuffled, and everyone got a turn being uncomfortable where we decidedly didn’t want to be.

That’s a little like what’s going on in the world now. Each time it appears to be stopping, or at least slowing enough to risk opening the door and get off this crazy ride, the virus comes back, and we have to reshuffle. Do we limit contact, should we close down again, does this mask make my nose look big? Regardless of the answer, some bodies are going to end up decidedly where they don’t want to be doing what they’d rather not be doing or not doing what they’d rather do. Think of the world as an early ’64 Chevrolet and were all taking turns sitting on the hump.

I’m going to spoil the ending for you. It all works out. Nobody was permanently damaged from sitting with a leg there and the other one there. We climbed out of the backseat a little stiff and a little sore but we made. We’ll make it through this also. Maybe a little worse for the wear after this ride that you are certain we got lost on because no way it should be taking this long, but eventually we are going to climb back out into the world.

Middle seat hump syndrome was never that horrible and may have been the inspiration for some future engineer to design SUVs with higher cabins that clear all those mechanical doodads or to shift the driving wheels to the front and obviate the need for a hump running down the middle if the cars interior. Along those same lines it could be someday we might even get to go out and not have to check that we have our masks with us. We just have to wait for the right expert to come up with the right solution. They are out there. There will find it.

In the meanwhile, Happy Motoring!

roamcare_logo-3If you haven’t had a chance to visit ROAMcare yet, stop by, refresh your enthusiasm and read our blogs, check out the Moments of Motivation, or just wander around the site. Everybody is always welcome.

Uncommon Sense

Michael 3 Comments

The past few weeks have sorely tested my patience I wish everybody would go out and invest in some self-help books that include how to recapture some common freaking sense. Let’s start.

It’s summertime in the good old U. S. of A. which means, even in the absence of global warming, it gets hot. Glass amplifies heat. An enclosed space holds heat. Things inside hot enclosed spaces cook. And that’s how Jordan Mott came up with the oven in 1490 (minus the glass – that’s a bonus). Because we know it doesn’t count unless it happened in America, we can fast forward to 1882 when Thomas Ahern worked out the details for an electric oven. Granted, he was Canadian but that’s as close as we’re going to get unless you want to count the first person who fried an egg on the hood of a car. That had to be a “real” American, and that gets us to cars, hot cars, hot car interiors on hot summer days. There have been such a spate of kids being cooked in the back seats of cars – again. The government is mandating that by 2025 all auto manufacturers to put in systems that display and sound warning messages to check the back seat for Junior and Fido when you shut off your car. If you aren’t lucky enough to have one of the cars that already have such a warning and/or until you do, they suggest you put “something of value” in the back seat so you don’t forget your kid. Duh! Is it just me or is there nothing anybody owns more valuable than their own child? That was an honest to gosh, news piece just within the last week on most major news outlets. Don’t forget your kid, put something of value in the back with them.”

While we’re on the subject of kids, in June in a small Pennsylvania airport, the TSA confiscated a loaded handgun – in a baby stroller! According to a report on TSA.gov, “The man said that when he and his girlfriend take their dogs and child for a walk that he keeps his loaded gun in the rear stroller pocket and forgot to remove it when they came to catch their flight.” I call bull-doodoo! If you’re taking a baby on a plane with a stroller you are using every cubic inch of that to add carryon volume. And where in H-E-Double Toothpicks is this guy walking that he needs to carry a loaded gun with him when he’s out with his pseudo-family? Let’s stay with guns in airports for a while, even though I ranted about this before. Also, from TSA.gov, “Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers detected twice as many firearms per million passengers screened at airport security checkpoints nationwide in 2020 compared to 2019, and at a significantly higher rate than any other year since the agency’s inception.” A total of 3,257 guns were confiscated from passengers carry them on their persons or in their carry-on bags, and about 83 percent of them were loaded. Those figures didn’t include the number of guns confiscated because they were improperly packed in checked baggage, or toy and BB guns. All while people on planes are beating each other up for taking too much of the shared armrest or [shudder] being compelled to wear a mask.

And now that the delta variant has bloomed in the US to where masking might become more routine again, I figure something in August I get to write this post all over again with a new set of “can you believe this” tales.

Patience. Please give me patience.

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Buddy, can you spare a spare?

Michael 8 Comments

Hey everybody!  I have a spare tire. No, not that kind. Sheesh. Out in the car. There’s a tire spare there! What, you don’t think that warrants an exclamation point, let along a blog post? Well, pull up a chair, get a cup of coffee, or tea, or whatever welcomes you to the day, and hear my tale.

Before we begin, you must either recall or take as new information now that I bought a new (to me) vehicle just a few posts ago, or a couple of weeks ago depending on your time reference preference. Another prefatory comment, the previous vehicle was the first “car” vehicle, as in sedan, I bought in this century, Other recent and many older vehicles (with the exception of the “little car” which is the little red roadster than lives 8 months of the year in the garage and doesn’t count for this discussion) have been trucks or SUVs and have always been called “car” though they weren’t, not even the SUVs which were the old truck based SUVs, not station wagons with big wheels we call SUVs (which probably are actually CUVs if you asked a car person) (that’s “car person” as in aficionado, not one who drives a “car” versus a truck, SUV, CUV, or any other V currently roaming the streets). So then, are we ready? Good! I’ll get my coffee and we’ll begin.

Previously I had no need to go looking for a spare tire. While I was driving the now former car of mine, I never had neither a flat nor the desire to lift the car off the ground. Even the existence of a spare tire was merely a curiosity, a conversation starter in very, very, very, very, very slow cocktail parties, or perhaps a discussion topic with my therapist if I had been going to a therapist and he/she/it was one always questioning one’s existence and thus the spare tire could be a tangible example. Or non-tangible as it turned out.

2 + 2 5When I was emptying the trunk of all it’s trunk items I wanted to make certain I had everything and thought I should check under the trunk cover and check to make certain nothing had fallen into the spare tire area. I lifted the carpet, lifted the compartment cover, and found nothing there. Not even a spare tire. Nothing is not true. You see, the spare tire was not missing because somebody had absconded with it. There was in its place a small air pump to be used in the event of a flat tire. (It might also have come in handy when I was blowing up pool toys over the years but not knowing of its existence any more than the non-existence of the tire, that consideration never came up.) After a little head scratching and a silent thank you for not having had to discover that on some dark and stormy night with only three fully inflated tires under the car, I gathered up my boxes of trunk things and brought them indoors awaiting their new residency in the back of the new car which is actually not a car but as previously mentioned they are all called cars.

If I may digress for a moment. If you are wondering if that was a typo, no. I typed and intended to type boxes, the plural. I have since streamlined the car trunk stuff to a amore manageable number of items, not including such things as: two wooden yardsticks, a frying pam, three umbrellas, a license plate frame, a can of wood stain, the pole from a pole lamp, and a dust pan.

(Yeah? Why not?)

So, back to our story. Most people are likely familiar with the space saver, limited use, temporary. “donut” spare tire. That thing has more names than British royalty. They seem to be everywhere but only because about 50% of all the vehicles on the roads have them.  If you consider that none of the buses,  tractor trailers, trailer trailers, full size pick-up trucks, truck based SUVs, motorhomes, and motorcycles and scooters don’t have them, that means a lot of cars and SUVs, CUVs, and other Vs do.

Since the 1980s most cars started carrying space saver spares (the first American vehicle to use a space saver as standard equipment was the 1967 Pontiac Firebird). Probably a big chunk of you reading this weren’t even driving before the 1980s so you might not have even ever seen a full size spare even if you ever even looked for one. I was driving before then, quire a while before then, and even though I rarely ever even looked for them I just made some wild assumption that every car on the road not driven by an “I needed to use my spare but I’m not going to replace it because those things are EX-PEN-SIVE” spare tire user had a spare tire. Even. And that’s how I came to be muttering thanks for not having a need for any kind of spare tire on my previous car when I discovered my previous care did not have any kind of spare tire. (Who gives you just a pump?)

2 + 2 5 (1)

But I am happy to report the new to me new car is fully equipped with not so fully sized space saver, temporary, limited use, “donut,” royal spare tire. I checked.

You may now go about your day. That’s it. We’re done here. That’s the end of the story. There’s nothing else. Good day folks.

(I wonder if I should put the frying pan in the new to me new car. It could come in handy. You never know.)

Now scoot. I have things to do. Bye.

Middle Seat Hump Syndrome

Michael 9 Comments
You need to be of a certain age to remember summer vacations in the family car with enough family that it filled all the seats, three across, and the middle seat made the leg room in coach on Delta look generous for there, right where your feet wanted to be, was “the hump,” the growth in the floorboard that rose nearly to seat level, to allow whatever it was that transferred the up and downs of the engine to the round and round of the rear wheels to make it’s way from the motor to the where the rubber met the road. I am of that age and had been on those vacations and I got that middle seat.
 
It wasn’t always like that. For a while there were just two of us in the back and we would each get out own window seats with plenty of room between for the picnic basket and cooler that were only opened at planned stops along the way. Then the third one came along. At first it wasn’t such a big deal. She started out in the baby seat in the middle of the front seat (yes, that’s where we put them when we used them back then). After she outgrew that space she shifted to the back but because those short, stubby legs didn’t even make it off the seat, the hump was not impediment to her comfort. Eventually though, she grew and with that, so did the complaining. “I don’t want to sit on the hump!” And the word came from the front, “take turns.” From then on, whenever the car stopped, the back seat crowd reshuffled and everyone got a turn being uncomfortable where we decidedly didn’t to be.
 
That’s a little like what’s going on in the world now. Each time it appears to be stopping, or at least slowing enough to risk opening the door and get off this crazy ride, the virus comes back and we have to reshuffle. Do we limit contact, should we close down again, does this mask make my nose look big? Regardless of the answer, some bodies are going to end up decidedly where they don’t want to be doing what they’d rather not be doing or not doing what they’d rather do. Think of the world as an early ’64 Chevrolet and were all taking turns sitting on the hump.
 
I’m going to spoil the ending for you. It all works out. Nobody was permanently damaged from sitting with a leg there and the other one there. We climbed out of the backseat a little stiff and a little sore but we made. We’ll make it through this also. Maybe a little worse for the wear after this ride that you are certain we got lost on because no way it should be taking this long, but eventually we are going to climb back out into the world.
 
Middle seat hump syndrome was never that horrible and may have been the inspiration for some future engineer to design SUVs with higher cabins that clear all those mechanical doodads or to shift the driving wheels to the front and obviate the need for a hump running down the middle if the cars interior. Along those same lines it could be someday we might even get to go out and not have to check that we have our masks with us. We just have to wait for the right expert to come up with the right solution. They are out there. There will find it.
 
In the meanwhile,  Happy Motoring!
 
 
20200708_235806

I’ll Have What He’s Having

Michael 3 Comments
The Academy Awards are behind us and the Oscar hoopla has pretty much faded away. I have a few more old Oscar nominees to watch. I’m still used to the awards being presented in March and February being the time to relish in the performances. Is it just me or do actors tend to speak better when reading somebody else’s lines as scripted than when they try to go their own way on the award stage? Anyway, I prefer the movie actor to the award show actor and often the movie world to real realty. Ironic, no?
 
Something that hit me this year watching my usual overdose level of film history is how much out there in movie land we can really use in real people land. Television land also has some pretty nifty gadgetry that we mere mortals could benefit from. Take for instance in 1966 just asking “Yo computer, how much longer till we get to the Romulan border?” and sure enough some snarky female voice speaks back “the. border. is. one. hundred. forty. light. years. away. and. will. be. reached. in. twenty. eight. and. one. half. minutes. if. you. don’t. stop. for. take. out. on. the. way.” Did Gene Roddenberry know Siri and Alexa were coming? If we’ve been able to harness computer power to become our personal assistants, why not some other seemingly outlandish inventions.
 
For example:
Movie people must have dishes that dry and put themselves away. I’ve seen dozens of movies this month with people eating and drinking and even in some instances washing dishes. But nobody ever dries them or puts them away. The only Oscar nominated movie I recall seeing somebody with towel in hand, drying dishes was Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey. She didn’t do a really great job of drying and didn’t put them away but she was a millionaire socialite so I guess just the attempt at drying part was something special. They all have self-cleaning carpets also.
 
TelephoneThis one we sort of had but then technology took it away and we need it back – a phone you can pick up the reciever and just say who you want and somebody gets them for you. You need to go back to the 1930s for this invention. Everybody from cops to robbers to femme fatales to innocent bystanders could go to any phone and say “Get me John Smith” and sure enough, an operator would find John Smith, and the right John Smith. Progress took this away quickly (The Front Page). By the 1940s people were dailing their own numbers (Going My Way), by the 50s were getting wrong numbers (Anatomy of a Murder), by the 60s they were tearing pages out of phone books (In the Heat of the Night), and eventually we’ve worked our way to a time when there are no phone books and if you ask your computer assistant for John Snith’s number, unless John Smith is among you personal contacts, the answer will be, “I’m sorry I don’t have enough information.”
 
Cars run on no gas. Imagine not just driving for days, week, even months without filling up, but driving hard, fast, and often in multiple countries and never visiting a fuel station. Racing movies aside, nobody ever stops to fill up. The French Connection wouldn’t have stood a chance for Best movie if Popeye Doyle ran out of gas on 86th Street. The only movies I recall seeing somebody at a gas pump are High Sierra and National Lampoon’s Vacation and neither were Oscar nominees in any category. (I should note that in Vacation, Chevy Chase is seen wiping and putting away dishes but I believe they hadn’t been washed yet, so…)
 
Since I brought up non-nominees there are some things in almost every movie I’d like to see happen. 
 
Airplanes with aisles wide enough to walk down two abreast (with a refreshment cart even) and seats with more legroom than in my living room. Sticking with the travel theme, cruise ships with cabins bigger than my living room. Entire blocks unoccupied in front of the building I want to enter so I can just pull up and park – and never having to parallel park (nobody parallel parks in the movies), and airport parking lots that never charge for parking. Formal wear for casinos. Subways never overcrowded and always on time unless being hijacked. And those telephones that when they are set to vibrate you still know a call is incoming even if you are 3 rooms away. 
 
And – a hot tub time machine. Hey Alexa, let’s kick some past!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Clear Failure

Michael Leave a comment

I have to buy a new car. I don’t want to. Well, that’s not really true. I always want to buy a new car. Actually I always want to buy something. I get great comfort from buying things. Fortunately I have a dollar store within walking distance so I can satisfy the buying urge fairly economically but this particular buying urge isn’t just a plain, old fashioned, garden variety shopping binge. This urge, the “I want to buy a new car urge,” is strictly due to windshield streaks. I tried to clean the inside of my windshield yesterday. That was when I decided it would be easier to just buy a new car than to de-streak (un-streak?) the inside of the car windshield.

I don’t understand it. I have the patience, skill, or both to clean almost anything else from the car side windows to the refrigerator door shelves. If it’s dirty I’ll clean it. I know it’s not the most fun activity, it’s not the first thing I think of when I’m deciding what to do for a day, but cleaning is a necessary evil and is a chore I generally manage to accomplish successfully and with a minimum of drama. Except for that miserable, no good, filthy, — um, except for the inside of the car windshield. As a result, it becomes a chore I usually put off for months. Not days. Not weeks. Months.

TheSneezeI don’t understand how it gets so dirty anyway. It’s not like I walk across it. I don’t sneeze my latte foam on it like in that commercial for allergy medicine. Where does windshield grime come from? No, that’s not the question. Dirt just happens. Ask Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen. The real question is what do they put on windshields that prevent the grime from being wiped off.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve used ammonia based window cleaner, vinegar based window cleaner, plain vinegar, diluted vinegar, plain water, soapy water, foamy window cleaner, even pre-soaked cleaning towelettes. I’ve wiped with cotton rags, paper towels, rubber squeegees, microfiber towels, old newspaper, blank newsprint paper, even tissue paper. Nothing works. Everything works on ever other window in the car, just not on the windshield. But why would you want that window clean anyway. It’s much more challenging to drive through bright sun or oncoming lights while looking through streaks and blotches of yuck.

Sigh. I need a new car.

When A Door Closes

Michael 3 Comments

This past weekend I was getting out of the car when I realized car doors don’t close right, the kind of light bulbs that last ten years don’t last ten years, and computers ask questions they have no intention of doing anything with about. I also realized these are all first world problems but, well frankly, those are the kinds of problem I most encounter.

Let’s look at those cars doors. Every other door in the (first) world either opens or closes. Most exterior and interior house doors have latches or knobs and you push them open and they stay open or fasten them closed and then stay closed. Some even have pneumatic or motorized closers that close them for you, and thus a name that has nothing to do with baseball. Refrigerator doors have those magnetic strips that run the complete inner rim of the door with the expressed purpose of making certain the door, when not opened, is indeed closed. An entire industry has been created around the process of opening and closing garage doors. The point is that most all doors in most all buildings are mostly always open or always closed unless you take steps to leave them partially opened (or, for the half empty types, partially closed).

Car doors are a different breed. Yes car doors have a latching mechanism that ensures the door remains in the closed position until you take steps to open it (a perfectly reasonable expectation of a car door when travelling down the highway at 15 miles over the posted speed limit), but only the car door has taken pains to provide the user with a position not open yet not quite closed (and a quite unreasonable position on that same highway). So often are these doors in this position that car manufacturers have taken steps to alert the driver that a door is not completely closed by means of a warning light on the dash panel. Would it not be a more reasonable resolution to take steps to make a door that closes completely? Perhaps the car makers should get together with the refrigerator makers.

Now, speaking of lights, I have this pole lamp in the corner of my living that has graced the corner of this living room, the previous living room, a family room, and a room that once had aspirations of being a den but became a nursery instead. As you can see, it’s a versatile and, at least in my opinion, an attractive light. I bought it about 15 years ago. I almost didn’t buy it. It was pricey for the time and for its type and that, I was told, was due to the light’s lamp. Lamp’s light? It has (had) a most usual bulb that looks like a miniature fluorescent tube that had the added bonus of a built in dimming mechanism. I questioned this arrangement, not to mention the price, before making the purchase. I was assured that the dimmer worked as well in the home as in the showroom, that indeed it was expensive and when it comes time to replace the bulb it too will be expensive, but that its bulb would last at least 10 years if not longer.

Well indeed it was expensive but it worked as advertised and its bulb lasted more than the claimed 10 years. I use the past tense here because after those ten and half again more years the bulb has given its all. I never found out if the replacement bulb is expensive because when I went to buy said replacement bulb I was told that “they haven’t made those for at least ten years now, but, who knows, maybe you can find something on the Internet.”

So to home I went, in my car with the now fully closed doors, fired up the old desktop computer and thought I’d check my email before beginning my what would probably be fruitless search for a miniature, dimmable, fluorescent light bulb. A message from my doctor’s hospital organization was there telling me I had a message on their server. (If they can send me a message that says I have a message why can’t they just send me the message? That may be Thursday’s post.) So I signed on to their server with my user name and super secret password and was immediately presented with a pop up window asking me if I want my browser to remember my super secret password. I suppose so I was not confused by this question I was presented with multiple choice answers. — Yes — Not Now — Never —  And as I do every time I am asked that same question entering that same site I select “Never.”

And then I wonder…we can’t even make doors that close all the way and I expect a computer to understand the concept of never.

 

Take my keys, please

Michael 2 Comments

Recently I was watching an old episode of Mike and Molly where they test drive a Rolls Royce. Because they could. It got me thinking, had I ever test drove something I had no intention of buying just because I wanted to drive it? And because I could? And I think TestDrivethe answer is yes. Yeah, I said I think. I’m old. I’ve driven a lot of cars over the years. Some I didn’t buy but I’m not sure if some I never intended to. Let me think on that for a while.

While I am thinking on that, how about you? Did you ever go into a dealership and say “I’d like to try out that Ferrari. Pay no attention to the holes in my jeans. They’re fashionable and I’m eccentric.” Or maybe not a car. Did you ever try to get your way onto a boat where you knew you didn’t belong? Sneak into first class with a standby coach ticket? Have you ever bought a really large screen TV for a game or movie or can’t miss TV wedding and returned it the day after? Or what about trying on something just to see what it felt like – a Patek Phillipe watch, a Burberry coat, Christian Louboutin shoes (um, women only please on that last one)?

Have we gotten to that point of entitlement or was the Mike and Molly episode just a comedic premise? Perhaps I’m overthinking this. Maybe it’s no worse to take the chance to drive a $300,000 car or wear a $100,000 watch than to move to the lower seats after the 8th inning as people leave the game to beat the traffic.

While you were thinking about all that I went back through the memory banks in search of disingenuous test drive recollections. And I do recall once being behind the wheel of a 25th Anniversary Corvette that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t buy but I don’t think I went in with the intention of not intending to. But even if I did I can balance that out with the time I drove a 1963 Corvette with the intention of buying but didn’t.

In that same vein, I’ve never rented a TV for the Super Bowl (that’s a cliché, if anything I would have rented it for the Stanley Cup Playoffs but that’s stretched over weeks), I don’t wear watches, I’ve never even seen first class, and I can’t wear heels.