by Bill Bryson
“Where’s women’s lingerie?” you ask.
“Aisle seven.”
“Where’s pet food?”
“Aisle seven.”
“Where’s aisle six?”
“Aisle seven.”
My least favorite of all store types is the one where you can’t get rid of the salesperson. Usually these are department stores at big malls. The salesperson is always a white-haired lady working in the men’s wear department.
“Can I help you find anything?” she says.
“No thank you, I’m just browsing,” you tell her.
“OK,” she replies, and gives you a smarmy smile that says: “I don’t really like you; I’m just required to smile at everyone.”
So you wander round the department and at some point you idly finger a sweater. You don’t know why because you don’t like it, but you touch it anyway.
In an instant, the sales assistant is with you. “That’s one of our most popular lines,” she says. “Would you like to try it on?”
“No thank you.”
“Go ahead, try it on. It’s you.”
“No, I really don’t think so.”
“The changing rooms are just there.”
“I really don’t want to try it on.”
“What’s your size?”
“Please understand, I don’t want to try it on. I’m just browsing.”
She gives you another smile—her withdrawing smile—but thirty seconds later she is back, bearing another sweater. “We have it in peach,” she announces.
“I don’t want that sweater. In any color.”
“How about a nice necktie then?”
“I don’t want a tie. I don’t want a sweater. I don’t want anything. My wife is having her legs waxed and told me to wait for her here. I wish she hadn’t, but she did. She could be hours and I still won’t want anything, so please don’t ask me any more questions. Please.”
“Then how are you set for pants?”
Do you see what I mean? It becomes a choice between tears and manslaughter. The irony is that when you actually require assistance there is never anyone around.
At Toys “” Us my son wanted a Star Troopers Intergalactic Cosmic Death Blaster, or some such piece of plastic mayhem. We couldn’t find one anywhere, nor could we find anyone to guide us. The store appeared to be in the sole charge of a sixteen-year-old boy at the single active cash register. He had a queue of about two dozen people, which he was processing very slowly and methodically.
Standing in line is not one of my advanced social skills, particularly when I am standing there simply to acquire information. The line moved with painful slowness. At one point, the young man took ten minutes to change the receipt roll, and I nearly killed him then.
At last my turn came. “Where’s the Star Troopers Intergalactic Cosmic Death Blasters?” I said.
“Aisle seven,” he replied without looking up.
I stared at the top of his head. “Don’t trifle with me,” I said.
He looked up. “Excuse me?”
“You people always say ‘Aisle seven.’ ”
There must have been something in my look because his answer came out as a kind of whimper. “But, mister, it is aisle seven—Toys of Violence and Aggression.”
“It’d better be,” I said darkly and departed.
Ninety minutes later we found the Death Blasters in aisle two, but by the time I got back to the register the young man had gone off duty.
The Death Blaster is wonderful, by the way. It fires those rubber-cupped darts that stick to the victim’s forehead—not painful, but certainly startling. My son was disappointed, of course, that I wouldn’t let him have it, but you see, I need it for when I go shopping.
I have been thinking a lot about food lately. This is because I am not getting any. My wife, you see, recently put me on a diet. It is an interesting diet of her own devising that essentially allows me to eat anything I want so long as it contains no fat, cholesterol, sodium, or calories and isn’t tasty. In order to keep me from starving altogether, she went to the grocery store and bought everything that had “bran” in its title. I am not sure, but I believe I had bran cutlets for dinner last night. I am very depressed.
Obesity is a serious problem in America (well, serious for fat people anyway). Half of all adult Americans are overweight and more than a third are defined as obese (i.e., big enough to make you think twice before getting in an elevator with them).
Now that hardly anyone smokes, it has taken over as the number one health fret in the country. About three hundred thousand Americans die every year from diseases related to obesity, and the nation spends $100 billion treating illnesses arising from overeating—diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, and so on. (I hadn’t realized it, but being overweight can increase your chance of getting colon cancer— and this is a disease you really, really don’t want to get—by as much as 50 percent. Ever since I read that, I keep imagining a proctologist examining me and saying: “Wow! Just how many cheeseburgers have you had in your life, Mr. Bryson?”) Being overweight also substantially reduces your chances of surviving surgery, not to mention getting a decent date.
Above all, it means that people who are theoretically dear to you will call you “Mr. Blimpy” and ask you what you think you are doing every time you open a cupboard door and, entirely by accident, remove a large bag of Cheez Doodles.
The wonder to me is how anyone can be thin in this country. We went to an Applebee’s Restaurant the other night where they were promoting something called “Skillet Sensations.” Here, verbatim, is the menu’s description of the Chili Cheese Tater Skillet:
We start this incredible combination with crispy, crunchy waffle fries. On top of those we generously ladle spicy chili, melted Monterey jack and cheddar cheeses, and pile high with tomatoes, green onions, and sour cream.
You see what I am up against? And this was one of the more modest offerings. The most depressing thing is that my wife and children can eat this stuff and not put on an ounce. When the waitress came, my wife said: “The children and I will have the De Luxe Supreme Goo Skillet Feast, with extra cheese and sour cream, and a side order of nachos with hot fudge sauce and biscuit gravy.”
“And for Mr. Blimpy here?”
“Just bring him some dried bran and a glass of water.”
When, the following morning over a breakfast of oat flakes and chaff, I expressed to my wife the opinion that this was, with all respect, the most stupid diet I had ever come across, she told me to find a better one, so I went to the library. There were at least 150 books on diet and nutrition—Dr. Berger’s Immune Power Diet, Straight Talk About Weight Control, The Rotation Diet—but they were all a little earnest and bran-obsessed for my tastes. Then I saw one that was precisely of the type I was looking for. By Dale M. Atrens, Ph.D., it was called Don’t Diet. Now here was a title I could work with.
Relaxing my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely preposterous as to put “Ph.D.” after his name (I don’t put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all—and not just because I don’t have one), I took the book to that reading area that libraries put aside for people who are strange and have nowhere to go in the afternoons but nonetheless are not quite ready to be institutionalized, and devoted myself to an hour’s reflective study.
The premise of the book, if I understood it correctly (and forgive me if I am a little sketchy on some details, but I was distracted by the man opposite me, who was having a quiet chat with a person from the next dimension), is that the human body has been programmed by eons of evolution to pack on adipose tissue for insulating warmth in periods of cold, padding for comfort, and energy reserves in times of crop failures.
The human body—mine in particular evidently—is extremely good at doing this. Tree shrews can’t do it at all. They must spend every waking moment eating. “This may be why tree shrews have produced so little great art or music,” Atrens quips. Ha! Ha! Ha!
Then again, it may be because the tree shrew eats leaves, whereas I eat Ben and Jerry’s double chocolate fudge ice cream.
The other interesting thing Atrens points out is that fat is exceedingly stubborn. Even when you starve yourself half to death, the body shows the greatest reluctance to relinquish its fat reserves.
Consider that each pound of fat represents 5,000 calories—about what the average person eats in total in two days. That means that if you starved yourself for a week—ate nothing at all—you would lose no more than three and a half pounds of fat, and, let’s face it, still wouldn’t look a picture in your swimsuit.
Having tortured yourself in this way for seven days, naturally you would then slip into the pantry when no one was looking and eat everything in there but a bag of chickpeas, thereby gaining back all the loss, plus—and here’s the crux—a little something extra, because now your body knows that you have been trying to starve it and are not to be trusted, so it had better lay in a little extra wobble in case you get any more foolish notions.
This is why dieting is so frustrating and hard. The more you try to get rid of your fat, the more ferociously your body holds on to it.
So I have come up with an ingenious alternative diet. I call it the Fool-Your-Body-Twenty-Hours-a-Day Diet. The idea is that for twenty hours in each twenty-four you ruthlessly starve yourself, but at four selected intervals during the day—for convenience we’ll call them breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack—you feed your body something like an 18-ounce sirloin steak with a baked potato and extra sour cream, or a large bowl of double chocolate fudge ice cream, so that it doesn’t realize that you are actually starving it. Brilliant, eh?
I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me years ago. I think it may be that all this bran has cleared my head. Or something.
Congratulations. You have purchased an Anthrax/2000 Multimedia 615X Personal Computer with Digital Doo-Dah Enhancer. It will give years of faithful service, if you ever get it up and running. Also included with your PC is a bonus pack of preinstalled software—Lawn Mowing Planner, Mr. Arty-Farty, Blank Screen Saver, and Antarctica Route Finder— which will provide hours of pointless diversion while using up most of your computer’s spare memory.
So turn the page and let’s get started!
Getting Ready
Congratulations. You have successfully turned the page and are ready to proceed.
Important meaningless note: The Anthrax/2000 is configured to use 80386, 214J10, or higher processors running at 2472 Herz on variable speed spin cycle. Check your electrical installations and insurance policies before proceeding. Do not machine wash.
To prevent internal heat build-up, select a cool, dry environment for your computer. The bottom shelf of a refrigerator is ideal.
Unpack the box and examine its contents. (Warning: Do not open box if contents are missing or faulty, as this will invalidate your warranty. Return all missing contents in their original packaging with a note explaining where they have gone and a replacement will be sent within twelve working months.)
The contents of the box should include some of the following: monitor with mysterious De Gauss button; keyboard; computer unit; miscellaneous wires and cables not necessarily designed for this model; 2,000-page Owner’s Manual; Short Guide to the Owner’s Manual; Quick Guide to the Short Guide to the Owner’s Manual; Laminated Super-Kwik Set-Up Guide for People Who Are Exceptionally Impatient or Stupid; 1,167 pages of warranties, vouchers, notices in Spanish, and other loose pieces of paper; 292 cubic feet of Styrofoam packing material.
Something They Didn’t Tell You at the Store
Because of the additional power needs of the preinstalled bonus software, you will need to acquire an Anthrax/2000 auxiliary software upgrade pack, a 900-volt memory capacitator for the auxiliary software pack, a 50-megaherz oscillator unit for the memory capacitator, 2,500 mega-gigabytes of additional memory for the oscillator, and an electrical substation.
Setting Up
Congratulations. You are ready to set up. If you have not yet acquired a degree in electrical engineering, now is the time to do so.
Connect the monitor cable (A) to the portside outlet unit (D); attach power offload unit suborbiter (Xii) to the coaxial AC/DC servo channel (G); plug three-pin mouse cable into keyboard housing unit (make extra hole if necessary); connect modem (B2) to offside parallel audio/video lineout jack. Alternatively, plug the cables into the most likely looking holes, switch on, and see what happens.
Additional important meaningless note: The wires in the ampule modulator unit are marked as follows according to international convention: blue = neutral or live; yellow = live or blue; blue and live = neutral and green; black = instant death. (Except where prohibited by law.)
Switch the computer on. Your hard drive will automatically download. (Allow three to five days.) When downloading is complete, your screen will say: “Yeah, what?”
Now it is time to install your software. Insert Disc A (marked “Disc D” or “Disc G”) into Drive Slot B or J, and type: “Hello! Anybody home?” At the DOS command prompt, enter your License Verification Number. Your License Verification Number can be found by entering your Certified User Number, which can be found by entering your License Verification Number. If you are unable to find your License Verification or Certified User numbers, call the Software Support Line for assistance. (Please have your License Verification and Certified User numbers handy as the support staff cannot otherwise assist you.)
If you have not yet committed suicide, then insert Installation Diskette 1 in drive slot 2 (or vice versa) and follow the instructions on your screen. (Note: Owing to a software modification, some instructions will appear in Turkish.) At each prompt, reconfigure the specified file path, double-click on the button launch icon, select a single equation default file from the macro selection register, insert the VGA graphics card in the rear aerofoil, and type “C:>” followed by the birthdates of all the people you have ever known.
Your screen will now say: “Invalid file path. Whoa! Abort or continue?” Warning: Selecting “Continue” may result in irreversible file compression and a default overload in the hard drive. Selecting “Abort,” on the other hand, will require you to start the installation process all over again. Your choice.
When the smoke has cleared, insert disc A2 (marked “Disc A1”) and repeat as directed with each of the 187 other discs.
When installation is complete, return to file path, and type your name, address, and credit card numbers and press “SEND.” This will automatically register you for our free software prize, “Blank Screensaver IV: Nighttime in Deep Space,” and allow us to pass your name to lots and lots of computer magazines, online services, and other commercial enterprises, who will be getting in touch shortly.
Congratulations. You are now ready to use your computer. Here are some simple exercises to get you off to a flying start.
Writing a Letter
Type “Dear ——” and follow it with a name of someone you know. Write a few lines about yourself, and then write, “Sincerely yours” followed by your own name. Congratulations.
Saving a File
To save your letter, select File Menu. Choose Retrieve from Sub-Directory A, enter a backup file number, and place an insertion point beside the macro dialogue button. Select secondary text box from the merge menu, and double-click on the supplementary cleared document window. Assign the tile cascade to a merge file and insert in a text equation box. Alternatively, write the letter out longhand and put it in a drawer.
Advice on Using the Spreadsheet Facility
Don’t.
Troubleshooting Section
You will have many, many problems with your computer. Here are some common problems and their solutions.
Problem: My computer won’t turn on.
Solution: Check to make sure the computer is plugged in; check to make sure the power button is in the ON position; check the cables for damage; dig up underground cables in your yar
d and check for damage; drive out into country and check electricity pylons for signs of fallen wires; call hotline.
Problem: My keyboard doesn’t seem to have any keys.
Solution: Turn the keyboard the right way up.
Problem: My mouse won’t drink its water or go on the spinning wheel.
Solution: Try a high-protein diet or call your pet shop support line.
Problem: I keep getting a message saying: “Non-System General Protection Fault.”
Solution: This is probably because you are trying to use the computer. Switch the computer to OFF mode and any annoying messages will disappear.
Problem: My computer is a piece of useless junk.
Correct—and congratulations. You are now ready to upgrade to an Anthrax/3000 Turbo model, or go back to pen and paper.
We’ve been back in the States for nearly two and a half years now, if you can believe it (and even, come to that, if you can’t), so you would think I would be getting the hang of things by now, but no. The intricacies of modern American life still often leave me muddled. Things are so awfully complicated here, you see.
I had occasion to reflect on this the other week when I went to pick up a rental car at the airport in Boston, and the clerk, after logging every number that has ever been associated with me and taking imprints from several credit cards, said: “Do you want Third-Party Liability Waiver Damage Exclusion Coverage?”
“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly. “What is it?”
“It provides coverage in the event of a Second-Party Waiver Indemnification Claim being made against you, or a First- or Second-Party Exclusion Claim being made by you on behalf of a fourth party twice removed.”
“Unless you’re claiming a First-Party Residual Cross-Over Exemption,” added a man in the line behind me, causing me to spin my head.
“No, that’s only in New York,” corrected the rental car man. “In Massachusetts you can’t claim cross-over exemption unless you have only one leg and are not normally resident in North America for tax purposes.”
