by Dave Barry
I received a letter from a reader named Dick Demers, who relates a shocking story:
It seems Dick and his wife had driven a long distance to visit his wife's sister. Wishing to refresh himself, Dick went into the guest bathroom, took a shower, then dried himself off.
That's the story. Pretty shocking, huh?
Dick's wife thought so. She was horrified.
“You used the GOOD TOWELS!” she said.
And he had. It's a mistake many guys make. A guy will be in a guest bathroom, dripping wet, and he sees a towel, and for some insane reason he thinks it was put there for guests to dry themselves with.
In fact, as Dick's wife angrily pointed out to him, the towels they were supposed to use were NOT in the bathroom; they were (of course!) in the bedroom. The towel Dick used was intended solely as decoration.
Here's a similar bonehead error that guys often commit in guest bathrooms: They see soap on a soap dish, and they use it to wash their hands. This of course ruins the guest soap, which is defined as “soap that guests are not supposed to use.” Its purpose is to match the guest towels.
In his letter to me, Dick criticized this kind of thinking by comparing it to a hypothetical situation involving guys. Suppose, he wrote, that a guy is working on his car, and he asks you to hand him a 9⁄16 wrench. You go over to some wrenches hanging on the wall, and you start to take one, and the guy yells, “NOT THOSE! THOSE ARE FOR DECORATION!”
Dick, when you put it that way, the concept of purely decorative towels DOES seem silly. But there's actually a very logical explanation for it: Women are insane.
No, I am of course just kidding. There really is a good reason. I just don't know what it is. What I do know is that the practice of providing guests with conveniences they cannot use is not limited to the bathroom. The guest bedroom is usually equipped with decorative candles that you must not burn, because that would ruin them. Also you must never throw any waste into the decorative wastebasket, which has never contained any waste and may have been waxed just prior to your arrival. If, during your visit, you generate waste, you should hide it in your suitcase and take it home.
But the trickiest thing is the guest bed. Oh, it may have attractive pillows on it, and a comfy-looking quilt, but you are NOT supposed to use these. You're supposed to take the pillows—which are called “shams”—off the bed and replace them with the real pillows, which are hidden somewhere, generally in the closet, which is where you're supposed to put the quilt, which is on the bed solely to match the shams and should NOT come into contact with your disgusting, oily guest body.
If your hostess subscribes to Martha Stewart Living, the guest bed may be so massively fortified with decorative objects that it can be deconstructed for sleeping use only by a licensed interior designer. I'm talking about a bed that is surrounded by a dust ruffle and buried under a complex, towering arrangement of approximately forty-six shams and other decorative pillows, which are on top of the quilt, which may be encased in a “duvet cover” and further accessorized by (these are real decorator names) a “soutache.” In extreme cases, the entire bed will be surrounded by a giant net, as if to protect it from vampire bats (which will be dyed to match the duvet cover).
If you, as a guest, encounter such a bed, do NOT approach it. Back slowly out of the room, and sleep on the lawn.
Of course, you won't encounter these problems if you're a guest in a household run by a guy, because he won't have fancy guest bedding. In fact, he won't have a guest bed. You'll sleep on the sofa under a Batman beach towel with stains dating back to the Reagan administration. In the morning, you can use this towel to dry yourself after your shower. Feel free to use the guest soap, which you can assemble yourself from ancient shards of Dial on the shower floor.
But to get back to Dick Demers's letter: Dick, you make a logical point about the towels. But this is not about logic; this is about etiquette, and too often we males forget the basic underlying principle of all etiquette, which is: We are scum. So I urge you to apologize to your wife's sister, and henceforth show proper respect for her good towels by not treating them as if they were towels.
And do NOT blow your nose on the shams.
Ban Cellphones—Unless You're Attacked by a Giant Squid
It was a beautiful day at the beach—blue sky, gentle breeze, calm sea. I knew these things because a man sitting five feet from me was shouting them into his cellular telephone, like a play-by-play announcer.
“IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY,” he shouted. “THE SKY IS BLUE, AND THERE'S A BREEZE, AND THE WATER IS CALM, AND . . .”
Behind me, a woman, her cellphone pressed to her ear, was pacing back and forth.
“She DIDN'T,” she was saying. “No. She DIDN'T. She DID? Really? Are you SERIOUS? She did NOT. She DID? No, she DIDN'T. She DID? NO, she . . .”
And so on. This woman had two children, who were frolicking in the surf. I found myself watching them, because the woman surely was not. A giant squid could have surfaced and snatched the children, and this woman would not have noticed. Or, if she had noticed, she'd have said, “Listen, I have to go, because a giant squid just . . . No! She didn't! She DID? No! She . . .”
And next to me, the play-by-play man would have said: “. . . AND A GIANT SQUID JUST ATE TWO CHILDREN, AND I'M GETTING A LITTLE SUNBURNED, AND . . .”
It used to be that the major annoyance at the beach was the jerk who brought a boom box and cranked it up so loud that the bass notes caused seagulls to explode. But at least you knew where these jerks were; you never know which beachgoers have cellphones. You'll settle next to what appears to be a sleeping sunbather, or even (you hope) a corpse, and you'll sprawl happily on your towel, and you'll get all the way to the second sentence of your 467-page book before you doze off to the hypnotic surge of the surf, and . . .
BREEP! BREEP! The corpse sits up, gropes urgently for its cellphone, and shouts, “Hello! Oh hi! I'm at the beach! Yes! The beach! Yes! It's nice! Very peaceful! Very relaxing! What? She did? No, she didn't! She DID? No, she . . .”
Loud cell-phoners never seem to get urgent calls. Just once, I'd like to hear one of them say: “Hello? Yes, this is Dr. Johnson. Oh, hello, Dr. Smith. You've opened the abdominal cavity? Good! Now the appendix should be right under the . . . What? No, that's the liver. Don't take THAT out, ha ha! Oh, you did? Whoops! Okay, now listen very, very carefully . . .”
The good news is, some politicians want to ban cellphone use. The bad news is, they want to ban it in cars, which is the one place where innocent bystanders don't have to listen to it. Granted, drivers using cellphones may cause accidents (“I gotta go, because I just ran over a man, and he's bleeding from the . . . What? She DID? NO, she didn't. She DID? No, she . . .”). But I frankly don't believe that drivers yakking on cellphones are nearly as dangerous as drivers with babies in the backseat. I'm one of those drivers, and we're definitely a menace, especially when our baby has dropped her Elmo doll and is screaming to get it back, and we're steering with one hand while groping under the backseat with the other. (“Groping for Elmo” would be a good name for a rock band.)
So we should, as a long-overdue safety measure, ban babies. But that is not my point. My point is that there is good news on the cellphone front, which is that several companies—including Image Sensing Systems and Netline—are selling devices that jam cellphone signals. Yes! These devices broadcast a signal that causes every cellphone in the immediate vicinity to play the 1974 hit song “Kung Fu Fighting.”
No, that would be too wonderful. But, really, these devices, which start at around $900, cause all nearby cellular phones to register NO SERVICE.
Unfortunately, there's a catch. Because of some outfit calling itself the “Federal Communications Commission,” the cellphone jamming devices are illegal in the United States. I say this stinks. I say we should all contact our congresspersons and tell them that if they want to make it up to us consumers for foisting those lousy low-flow toilets on us, they should put down their interns for a minute and p
ass a law legalizing these devices, at least for beach use.
I realize some of you disagree with me. I realize you have solid reasons—perhaps life-and-death reasons—why you MUST have your cellular phone working at all times, everywhere. If you're one of those people, please believe me when I say this: I can't hear you.
Quality! Craftsmanship! Service Contract!
Recently I was in an electronics store, trying to buy a telephone that was just a telephone. I did not want the conference-call feature, the intercom feature, the programmable memory feature, the coffee-making feature, or the feature (this is a new one) that displays the exact current latitude and longitude of Rep. Gary Condit. All I wanted was the feature that lets you talk to the person on the other end.
After much searching, I found a phone—probably manufactured during the Spanish-American War—that hardly did anything. (“Hardly Does Anything!” would be an excellent product slogan, if you ask me.) While I was looking at this phone, a previously invisible salesperson materialized next to me and said the words that I have come to detest more than any others in the English language except “prostate exam.”
Those words are: “You definitely should get the service agreement.”
In case you just got here from the Lost Continent of Atlantis, let me explain the service-agreement concept: When you buy a product, you pay extra money to the store, and the store gives you a piece of paper. This gives you, the consumer, the peace of mind that comes from knowing that if, for any reason, at any time, something goes wrong with your product, you will not be able to find the service agreement. Most likely you won't even remember you bought it. Your brain will be clogged with too much other information, such as how to work the intercom feature.
Stores LOVE service agreements, for the same reason you'd love to have money fall on you from the sky. As a result, when you buy a product today, you get this bizarre multiple-personality sales pitch, because at the same time that the salesperson is telling you how swell the product is, he's suggesting it will need a LOT of service:
SALESPERSON: . . . so this is an excellent product. Totally reliable.
YOU: I'll take it!
SALESPERSON: It's going to break.
YOU: What?
SALESPERSON: There's this thing inside? The confabulator? You're lucky if that baby lasts you a week.
YOU: So you're saying it's NOT a good product?
SALESPERSON: No! It's top of the line! Totally dependable!
YOU: Well, okay, then, I guess I'll . . .
SALESPERSON: Of course if the refrenestator module blows, you're looking at a $263,000 repair, plus parts and labor. One customer had to sell a lung.
In some stores, selling you a product seems to be merely an excuse to sell you the service agreement. Several months ago, my wife and I were shopping for a computer, and a salesperson attached himself to us, lamprey-like. His sole professional contribution was to inform us, no matter which computer we looked at, that we would definitely want the service agreement. At one point he took me aside and told me, Man to Man, that we especially needed the service agreement, because—this is a direct quote—“You know how women can be with computers.” He did not elaborate, but the implication was that, as soon as a woman is alone with a computer, she has some kind of massive hormonal surge that causes her to, I don't know, lactate on the keyboard.
We did not get that service agreement. Nor did I get the service agreement for the cheap telephone that hardly did anything. In each case, after I said “no” for maybe the fifth time, the salesperson backed slowly away, giving me a look of pity mixed with apprehension, as if the product, unprotected by a service agreement, was going to explode at any moment.
It's only a matter of time before we see stores that have no products at all, just empty aisles prowled by salespersons who glom onto you and relentlessly hector you until you buy a service agreement. Think of the profit margin.
In closing, let me stress that this column is in no way intended to be critical of the retail community, especially the many fine retailers who advertise in this newspaper. If you are such a retailer, and you are for any reason unhappy with anything I've said, simply write me a letter explaining the problem. I'll be happy to correct it!
Be sure to enclose your service agreement.
At 17 (Months), Her Music Tastes Match Dad's
You will die of jealousy when I tell you whom I recently saw live in concert: The Bear in the Big Blue House.
For those of you who do not have small children, let me explain that The Bear in the Big Blue House is a major morning-TV star. I'd go so far as to say that, with his talent, some day he could be as big as Elmo. We watch his show every morning while we're feeding our seventeen-month-old daughter, Sophie, her breakfast, by which I mean picking her food off the floor and checking to see if it's still clean enough to eat.
I like the Bear's show because it meets the single most important artistic criterion for children's TV: It is not Barney. I hate Barney, because he is a large annoying purple wad of cuteness, and his songs are lame, and some of the “children” on the show appear to be in their mid-twenties. They are definitely too old to skip, and yet they skip everywhere. They must have a mandatory skipping clause in their contracts, because it is their only mode of transport. If they were in a burning building, they would skip to the exits. I suspect that when they finish taping the Barney show, they skip behind the studio and drink gin.
On The Bear in the Big Blue House, there are no children, only animals, the main one being the Bear, which I assume is a guy wearing a bear suit, although it moves in a realistic manner, so it could be an actual bear wearing a bear suit. The Bear has various animal friends, which are played by people's hands inside puppets. (DISCUSSION QUESTION: Do the hands wear the puppets when they rehearse? Or is the rehearsal just a bunch of naked hands talking to each other?)
Anyway, one morning we were reading the newspaper and picking Sophie's food off the floor, and suddenly my wife said: “The Bear is going to give a live concert in Miami!”
“The Bear in the BIG BLUE HOUSE??” I said.
“Yes!” she said, and we both became more excited than when the Berlin Wall fell. This gives you an idea how pathetic it is to be the parent of a small child.
Of course we got tickets to the show, which was also attended by, at a conservative estimate, every small child in the western hemisphere. There has probably never been an event where more audience members were wearing diapers, other than a Tom Jones concert.
The Bear's show was excellent by any artistic standard, except the standard of being able to actually hear it. That was because at any given moment, at least a third of the audience was crying. Fortunately, Sophie was in a good mood: She stood on our laps for the whole show, clapping and shouting “Yayyyy!” in response to everything that happened, including the announcement that flash photographs were prohibited.
Despite the audience noise level, it was possible, if you listened hard, to follow the program. It opened with one of the Bear's hit songs “What's That Smell?”
“Hey!” I shouted to my wife. “He's singing ‘What's That Smell?'!” We sang along, as did many other parents. Meanwhile, all over the theater, youngsters responded to the song by shouting, shrieking, falling down, running away, crying, babbling, rolling on the floor, sleeping, gurgling, burping, and going to the bathroom. At the end of the song, Sophie clapped her hands and went “Yayyyy!” This was the basic procedure for all the rest of the songs.
During the intermission, vendors came into the theater to sell—I swear—helium balloons. Many children got them, which meant that the audience, in addition to not being able to hear, could not see. Nevertheless, we parents continued to sing along to such hit songs as “Magic in the Kitchen,” “The Bear Cha Cha Cha” and my personal favorite, “Otter Love Rap,” a hip-hop style of song that explores the too-often-ignored topic of otters who love, and the otters who love them. I don't mind saying that I was “getting down” to that part
icular song, and so was Sophie, to judge from her comment when it ended (“Yayyyy!”).
It was a fine father-daughter moment, made only slightly bittersweet by the knowledge that, soon enough, Sophie will want to go to concerts by some synthetic prefabricated soul-free “boy band.” She'll want me to drop her off out front of the concert and then disappear, lest I embarrass her in front of her friends by the mere fact of my existence. But for now, for a little while, I'm as cool as anybody she knows. Yayyyy.
He's Got a Broom and He's Not Afraid to Use It
A very important issue that we all need to be concerned about is global warming, and we will get to that shortly, but first we need to discuss the issue of what happened the other night in my kitchen.
It began when I was in the bedroom, flossing my teeth (I keep my teeth in the bedroom). Suddenly my wife, who is not normally a burster, burst in and said: “There's a bat in the kitchen!”
A good snappy comeback line would have been: “No thanks! I already ate!” But snappy comebacks are not what is called for in this type of situation. What is called for, by tradition, is for The Man of the House to put down his dental floss and go face the bat.
So I went to the kitchen, passing en route through the living room, where my wife and her mother, who was visiting us, were huddled together, protecting each other. Neither one made a move to protect ME, the person going to his doom.
I opened the kitchen door and peeked inside, and, sure enough, there was a large black thing flitting around, banging itself against the ceiling. This was a perfect example of why—no matter what you hear from the liberal communist news media—private citizens have a legitimate constitutional need for machine guns. No single-shot weapon is going to bring down a flitting bat in a kitchen at close range. To stop one of those babies, you need to put a LOT of lead into the air. Yes, innocent appliances could get hurt. But that is the price of freedom.
