Minor annoyances.

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The weather turned a bit cooler today, so I decided to wear socks. Did ya ever have a pair of socks where one sock stayed up and the other sock slipped down? Did ya ever put a rubber-band at the top of the "slippery" sock so your feet would look alike? I couldn't help but notice when I left the computer to walk to the kitchen that my right foot was 2 inches "longer" than my left foot, as the right sock slipped down, moved forward, and made a slight flopping sound as I walked.

Did ya ever wash your hands, dry them, and squirt some lotion on them just to find the lotion bottle had the clog and the clog burst onto your hands with the lotion? Did you try and rub the clog in with the rest of the lotion, or did you treat it as excrement from an unrelated child's nose and look for something you could use to remove it from your derma?

This thread is for those LITTLE things that annoy us. It's not for the MAJOR things that annoy us. THOSE things are best left to other threads, and perhaps even other fora. I'm curious to know how many LITTLE annoyances we share.

-- Anita (notgiving@anymore.thingee), March 17, 2000

Answers

Little Annoyances: Everything that ends up stuffed between the couch and it's cushions. Socks, money (mainly pennies), assorted dog chews, dry cereal pieces, the remote control that was missing for a week, pencils, crumbled up school papers, unpopped popcorn kernals (I have a theory about that one) and deep deep down I found a silver and green new years eve toot-tooter (mangled beyond belief!).

Socks, in my house, appearently move around on their own at will. They roll themselves into tight balls, and hide themselves under couchs or crouch in dark corners. Sometimes, if you enter a room as a sock is trying to make it's move...it will stop dead, right in the middle of the floor, pretending to be inanimate. I walk in on the socks often. Sometimes I pick them up, and return them to some laundry basket,...other times..I pretend I don't see them, and hope they'll continue on when I leave...so I don't have to bend over. :-)

-- kritter (kritter@adelphia.net), March 18, 2000.


Just a brief poem which I happen to remember from a birthday card I received, umm, maybe 20 or 30 years ago.

It's easy to smile when your ship comes in And your friends all love you a lot. But the man who is brave is the man who can smile When his shorts creep up in a knot.

-- gene (ekbaker@essex1.com), March 18, 2000.


Sigmund Wollman's Reality Test

By Robert Fulgham

It was the summer of 1959. At a resort inn in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California, I had a job that combined being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner-manager was Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I did not get along. I thought he was a fascist who wanted peasant employees who knew their place. I was 22, just out of college, and pretty free with my opinions.

One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of the meals was deducted from our paychecks. I was outraged.

On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job arund 11pm, and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen and saw a note to the chef to the effect that wieners and sauerkraut were on the employee menu for two more days.

That tore it. For lack of any better audience, I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman.

I declared that I had had it up to here, that I was going to get a plate of wieners and sauerkraut and wake up the owner and throw it at him. Nobody was going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and this was un-American and I didn't like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat them one day for God's sake and the whole hotel stunk and I was packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn't feed that stuff to pigs. Something like that.

I raved on in this way for 20 minutes. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly swatter, the kicking of chairs and much profanity.

As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman sat quietly on his stool, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He had good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job. It gave him intellectual space, peace and quiet, and even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to -- all the wieners and sauerkraut he wished. To him, a feast. More than that, there was nobody around to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he had dreamed of such a time. The only person he saw at work was me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlapped an hour. And here I was, a one-man war party at full cry.

"Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know wht's wrong with you? It's not wieners and kraut and it's not the boss and it's not the chef and it's not this job."

"So what's wrong with me?"

"Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don't know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire -- then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy."

"Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night."

In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed.

Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes so hard with truth. There in that late-night darkness of a Sierra Nevada inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind.

For 30 years now, in times of stress an strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I'm ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks, "Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?"

I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Good night, Sig.



-- Wilf (Wilferd@aol.com), March 18, 2000.


"And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. "

Wilf, that story reminded me of the time I needed to tell my mother and grandmother some news. I started to say, "I need to tell you something important..." They both jumped in saying, "Oh no! You're not pregnant AGAIN, are you? When are you guys going to quit having kids?" They raved.

In the middle of it I blurted out that I had a lump. Suddenly you could have heard a pin drop. They asked where the lump was. It was in my breast, I told them, and it was really big.

We spent a couple more weeks waiting to see if I had cancer. My birthday came and went. They gave me bras. They looked at me sorrowfully. I wanted to scream at them to just stop with the funeral arrangements already.

The lump was benign. Later when I told them I was pregnant AGAIN, they just congratulated me. :)

-- helen (handbasket_helena@hotmail.com), March 19, 2000.


Great thoughts here!

As today was my monthly trip to the Hypermart Super Store, I noticed another minor convenience. It was pouring rain when I ran from the car to the store. The carts are parked outside, and I had to go through a minor waterfall [something to do with buildings and how rain pours off the side.] I quickly chose a cart and entered the store. It was one of those carts from hell. You know the kind: It had one direction...STRAIGHT into the displays. It's never too bad in the beginning, but add a lot of weight and you need to get a running start to push the thing.

Once home, I remembered the time I took my mom to Hypermart. It was during the summer of 1998. Here's the story:

I refer to her as "Lucky" to all my friends, because of her bingo winnings. If y'all don't have a Hypermart in your town, it's that "all-encompassing" Walmart...the Walmart "SUPER STORE".

Since Em thought his folks were going to come over this evening, I decided to take Lucky out to eat at Boston Market (had to drop off some cough medicine to Ingrid anyway). We did the Boston Market thing, but Ing wasn't there immediately when we arrived, so we had to pay full price. Cough, cough.

So...since I wanted to check out Hypermart's prices on some things I wanted for year 2000, I decided they'd probably have those carts with the big wheels wherein I could push Lucky around, as well as the basket. Well, all they had were electric carts.

I pulled the car up to the door entrance to go in and inquire about the carts. I came out knowing how to make the cart go forward and backward, steer, etc., and put Lucky in it. Of course you know Lucky and technology, so I didn't even bother to explain...just leaned over and controlled her "flight".

We spent several hours touring Hypermart...perhaps only 1.5 hours, but I suspect they were pretty glad to see us leave. Lucky had a GREAT time people-watching, and I doubt she's been in the "baby" section, or "sporting goods" section of a store in QUITE some time.

Now the humor in it all was in the setup of the cart. To slow down and stop, you push the handlebars AWAY from you. To speed up, you pull it towards you. Maybe I've done too much horseback-riding in my time, but as soon as I felt we were about to crash into something, I pulled those reins BACK on Nellie, and we hit it full-force! MANY a shopper is now limping. I guess we should have worn a "WARNING" sign.

The FUNNIEST experience, though, was in Sporting Goods. We came around a bend, there was a rifle showcase that two guys were investigating. I sensed the impending doom and pulled the reins on Nellie, and we crashed right into that case. The two guys scattered before we could even locate reverse. You suppose they had some guilt? I suppose WalMart accounts for the spastics operating their electric carts, as the bottom half of the display showcase was wood. Wiggling glass is a pretty cool sight, but at least we didn't break it.

CORNERS (and maneuvering them) were another obstacle. Sometimes (um...OFTENTIMES?) we'd turn a corner just to have Lucky's elbow or the arm of the cart "catch" on the stacked items. Oops...backup...oops...getting hung worse...uh.. go forward...uh...uh...go BACK...

After about an hour of playing havoc with Walmart, we were doing pretty good. I said, "Hey, mom...we haven't hit anything in quite a while now." Lucky then said, "You mean you never used one of these before?" (THINKING...ONLY THINKING...Gee ma, do you really think I'd be such a major screw up on this had I USED ONE BEFORE?)

We experienced kids riding bicycles next to us, people jumping in front of us, etc. We also experienced shoppers that were QUITE willing to allow us to GO FIRST into an aisle they were about to exit. I said, "For your own safety, I'd suggest that YOU go first. We're pretty new to this."

Lucky had a good time, I had a good laugh, and Walmart will survive. The cart "died" once I got Lucky into the car. I don't know if it was recharge time, or its "survival program" had kicked in. I had to push it uphill back into the store. Twas NOT an easy task.

I think I'll take Lucky on MORE outings such as these...just for the humor provided.

I spend a lot of time with mom and her table-mates dining. Once I told them of our experience at Wal-Mart, mom said, "Never again...we hit EVERYTHING". Her pals said, "Take ME next time, then. There's never anything that interesting going on around here."

-- Anita (notgiving@anymore.thingee), March 21, 2000.



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