Tooting My Own Horn
Hello World,
Well, when the poets said, "What is so rare as a day in June," they certainly weren't thinking of this week of days, not by any means. Two weeks ago, it was 50 degrees and raining, and suddenly this week, it's close to 90 degrees and the humidity is off the charts. I thought we were all going to drop dead with this crazy weather just going from one extreme to another. Now they're warning us about dangerous thunderstorms, related to Hurricane Arlene, of all things, off Florida. I realize there's no standards any more, but I thought one thing we could all agree on is that hurricane season starts in September, and there's no such thing as hurricanes in June. Of course, like professional sports, this could be the pre-season hurricane training camps, but I can't say that I care for it much.
Every year over the Memorial Day weekend, my sister Linda organizes a famous and long-standing barbecue at the log cabin, for about 150 million of their closest friends from around the country. This has been going on so long now (this year was the 33rd) that people who had gotten married and brought their children, now these same children are married and bringing children of their own. I don't usually go, finding it a little crowded and noisy for my tastes, but this year I threw caution to the winds and drove up for a few hours last Sunday. It wasn't particularly crowded or noisy when I was there, and the weather was even cooperating for the most part, which is very often not the case. I had a nice time and was glad I made the trip. Later, my sister sent me a digital photo that one of her friends had taken of the two of us, which she complained, was perfectly wonderful except for a smelly ratty sneaker on a shelf behind us, that appeared to be coming out of both of our heads. I told her that Bill (who as we all know, loves a challenge) would be happy to edit the photo to remove the offending footwear, and put Paris Hilton in there instead. I was only kidding, because Bill has been known to "improve" family pictures by inserting incongruous elements, such as Groucho Marx, Orson Welles or space aliens. Anyway, Linda sent the photo to Bill, asking him to fix the sneaker problem, and while he was at it, make her look 20 years younger. So he took Linda out and put Paris Hilton in her place. This was only funny because Bill and I hadn't discussed it ahead of time, and yet somehow both managed to hit on the idea of Paris Hilton independently. Everyone knows that I'm nothing if not diplomatic, so I told Linda that I would rather have her as a sister than Paris any day.
Meanwhile at work, our crack IT department has been going to great pains to prove that even people who understand a lot about computers can still be borderline illiterate. Here's a sampling of some of their less intelligible messages that have greeted us in the mornings lately:
====================================
ATTN ALL USERS PLEASE SIGN OFF YOUR TERINALS
any users still active will be terminated imediately
ANY JOB STILL ACTIVW WILL BE IMMEDIATELY TERMINATED
all devices still active will be terminated immeidately
ANY USERS STILL ACTIVE WILL BE TERMINATED IMMEDITAELY
ANY JOBS STILL ACYIVE WILL BE TERMINATED
can you please sign off oyur terminals
WE WILL BE PERFPRMING OUR DAILLY BACKUPS
====================================
Honestly, this is enough to bring Casey Stengel back from the beyond to wonder, "Can't anybody here play this game?" Also at work, one of our sales reps stopped by Purchasing to drop off some paperwork, and was bemoaning the condition of the economy in general, and the state of health care in particular. He complained that his commissions were being decreased through no fault of his own, but because hospitals in his territory keep closing. He said that he had already lost 5 or 6, and now another one was going out of business in Brooklyn. I told him, "You're a jinx! We should probably make you stop coming here. After all, the one thing all of those hospitals have in common is YOU!" He laughed.
Back in the old days (and how I do miss my old friends, the dinosaurs) when they built cars, they gave you a horn that was right out in plain sight and anyone could use it, including infants in arms and the family dog, with no trouble (and sometimes without even meaning to) because it was right there on the steering wheel and easy to use. Somewhere along the way (and here I blame jealous violinists) it was either decided that the horns were too unsightly for the aesthetics of modern interiors, or else there was some sort of conspiracy afoot to prevent people from using their horns altogether, because now, trying to find a horn in the car is like a quest for the Holy Grail. First of all, it could be anywhere - on the steering wheel, the dashboard, center console, the shift lever, the floor, just anywhere. Even when it's some place that you can see it, they give you a picture that makes no sense, so that you have no idea what it's supposed to be anyway. God forbid it was some kind of an emergency, by the time you found the darned horn, the runaway freight train would have long since crashed over the side of the collapsed trestle and plunged into the river below. No thanks to you and your stupid horn, mind you.
Anyway, the Gremlin, bless its little purple heart, came with a very handy horn right in the center of the steering wheel and you could press it and make horn noises all the livelong day if you wanted to. It worked like a charm, and I would never complain about not being able to honk it when I wanted to. The problem with that horn was that it was so faint and sweet (more of a "tweet" rather than a "TOOT!") that whenever I would try to honk at people doing stupid things while they were driving, they would invariably turn and wave at me, figuring that I was trying to be friendly. I finally had to give that up as a lost cause, with the moral being, I suppose, that you can't drive a funny-looking purple car and tweet at people and expect them to understand that you're mad at them. The Tempo, on the other hand, has a fine deep basso profundo sort of horn that gets people's attention and no nonsense about it. Well, it would do that, if only I could find it when I needed it. This is one of those cars that suffers badly from "horn camouflage" and even though it's on the steering wheel, it defies all attempts to locate it. The helpful Ford engineers (or perhaps this was just their idea of a joke) provided two horn-shaped designs on the steering wheel that serve a decorative purpose which in no way engages the horn mechanism. After years of driving the Tempo, I resigned myself to the fact that the horn was an elusive feature whose mysteries I would never unravel.
The problem with taking the Tempo to work however, or in fact any car with no horn, is that there are so many one-way streets along the way. In some places, they go right from one to another to another, with veritable waves of traffic all rolling along in the same direction. It's at times like this, when everyone behind you is all going the same way, and you look up to find some poor lost soul driving straight at you, that you wish you had a horn that you could count on when you need it. This finally happened to me one too many times when I was coming home from work, and I said I was going to find that darned horn or know the reason why. I started pushing every part of the steering wheel one at a time, starting with the picture of the horn (AS IF!) and moving outward from there. I was more surprised than anybody to actually find the horn several inches down and to the left of the picture, but when I did, it let out a clear and full-bodied TOOOOT for all the world to hear. I was so tickled with my success that I did it again, with the same result. Then to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I pressed it again. By now, I'm sure that people would have been wondering what I was honking about, since I was driving along pretty much by myself, and no traffic to speak of around me, and honking merrily all the way home. I got plenty of practice at finding the horn without any clues, and the next time that somebody comes lurching at me going the wrong way on a one-way street, you can believe that I'm really going to let them have it. Unless it's Paris Hilton, of course.
Well, when the poets said, "What is so rare as a day in June," they certainly weren't thinking of this week of days, not by any means. Two weeks ago, it was 50 degrees and raining, and suddenly this week, it's close to 90 degrees and the humidity is off the charts. I thought we were all going to drop dead with this crazy weather just going from one extreme to another. Now they're warning us about dangerous thunderstorms, related to Hurricane Arlene, of all things, off Florida. I realize there's no standards any more, but I thought one thing we could all agree on is that hurricane season starts in September, and there's no such thing as hurricanes in June. Of course, like professional sports, this could be the pre-season hurricane training camps, but I can't say that I care for it much.
Every year over the Memorial Day weekend, my sister Linda organizes a famous and long-standing barbecue at the log cabin, for about 150 million of their closest friends from around the country. This has been going on so long now (this year was the 33rd) that people who had gotten married and brought their children, now these same children are married and bringing children of their own. I don't usually go, finding it a little crowded and noisy for my tastes, but this year I threw caution to the winds and drove up for a few hours last Sunday. It wasn't particularly crowded or noisy when I was there, and the weather was even cooperating for the most part, which is very often not the case. I had a nice time and was glad I made the trip. Later, my sister sent me a digital photo that one of her friends had taken of the two of us, which she complained, was perfectly wonderful except for a smelly ratty sneaker on a shelf behind us, that appeared to be coming out of both of our heads. I told her that Bill (who as we all know, loves a challenge) would be happy to edit the photo to remove the offending footwear, and put Paris Hilton in there instead. I was only kidding, because Bill has been known to "improve" family pictures by inserting incongruous elements, such as Groucho Marx, Orson Welles or space aliens. Anyway, Linda sent the photo to Bill, asking him to fix the sneaker problem, and while he was at it, make her look 20 years younger. So he took Linda out and put Paris Hilton in her place. This was only funny because Bill and I hadn't discussed it ahead of time, and yet somehow both managed to hit on the idea of Paris Hilton independently. Everyone knows that I'm nothing if not diplomatic, so I told Linda that I would rather have her as a sister than Paris any day.
Meanwhile at work, our crack IT department has been going to great pains to prove that even people who understand a lot about computers can still be borderline illiterate. Here's a sampling of some of their less intelligible messages that have greeted us in the mornings lately:
====================================
ATTN ALL USERS PLEASE SIGN OFF YOUR TERINALS
any users still active will be terminated imediately
ANY JOB STILL ACTIVW WILL BE IMMEDIATELY TERMINATED
all devices still active will be terminated immeidately
ANY USERS STILL ACTIVE WILL BE TERMINATED IMMEDITAELY
ANY JOBS STILL ACYIVE WILL BE TERMINATED
can you please sign off oyur terminals
WE WILL BE PERFPRMING OUR DAILLY BACKUPS
====================================
Honestly, this is enough to bring Casey Stengel back from the beyond to wonder, "Can't anybody here play this game?" Also at work, one of our sales reps stopped by Purchasing to drop off some paperwork, and was bemoaning the condition of the economy in general, and the state of health care in particular. He complained that his commissions were being decreased through no fault of his own, but because hospitals in his territory keep closing. He said that he had already lost 5 or 6, and now another one was going out of business in Brooklyn. I told him, "You're a jinx! We should probably make you stop coming here. After all, the one thing all of those hospitals have in common is YOU!" He laughed.
Back in the old days (and how I do miss my old friends, the dinosaurs) when they built cars, they gave you a horn that was right out in plain sight and anyone could use it, including infants in arms and the family dog, with no trouble (and sometimes without even meaning to) because it was right there on the steering wheel and easy to use. Somewhere along the way (and here I blame jealous violinists) it was either decided that the horns were too unsightly for the aesthetics of modern interiors, or else there was some sort of conspiracy afoot to prevent people from using their horns altogether, because now, trying to find a horn in the car is like a quest for the Holy Grail. First of all, it could be anywhere - on the steering wheel, the dashboard, center console, the shift lever, the floor, just anywhere. Even when it's some place that you can see it, they give you a picture that makes no sense, so that you have no idea what it's supposed to be anyway. God forbid it was some kind of an emergency, by the time you found the darned horn, the runaway freight train would have long since crashed over the side of the collapsed trestle and plunged into the river below. No thanks to you and your stupid horn, mind you.
Anyway, the Gremlin, bless its little purple heart, came with a very handy horn right in the center of the steering wheel and you could press it and make horn noises all the livelong day if you wanted to. It worked like a charm, and I would never complain about not being able to honk it when I wanted to. The problem with that horn was that it was so faint and sweet (more of a "tweet" rather than a "TOOT!") that whenever I would try to honk at people doing stupid things while they were driving, they would invariably turn and wave at me, figuring that I was trying to be friendly. I finally had to give that up as a lost cause, with the moral being, I suppose, that you can't drive a funny-looking purple car and tweet at people and expect them to understand that you're mad at them. The Tempo, on the other hand, has a fine deep basso profundo sort of horn that gets people's attention and no nonsense about it. Well, it would do that, if only I could find it when I needed it. This is one of those cars that suffers badly from "horn camouflage" and even though it's on the steering wheel, it defies all attempts to locate it. The helpful Ford engineers (or perhaps this was just their idea of a joke) provided two horn-shaped designs on the steering wheel that serve a decorative purpose which in no way engages the horn mechanism. After years of driving the Tempo, I resigned myself to the fact that the horn was an elusive feature whose mysteries I would never unravel.
The problem with taking the Tempo to work however, or in fact any car with no horn, is that there are so many one-way streets along the way. In some places, they go right from one to another to another, with veritable waves of traffic all rolling along in the same direction. It's at times like this, when everyone behind you is all going the same way, and you look up to find some poor lost soul driving straight at you, that you wish you had a horn that you could count on when you need it. This finally happened to me one too many times when I was coming home from work, and I said I was going to find that darned horn or know the reason why. I started pushing every part of the steering wheel one at a time, starting with the picture of the horn (AS IF!) and moving outward from there. I was more surprised than anybody to actually find the horn several inches down and to the left of the picture, but when I did, it let out a clear and full-bodied TOOOOT for all the world to hear. I was so tickled with my success that I did it again, with the same result. Then to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I pressed it again. By now, I'm sure that people would have been wondering what I was honking about, since I was driving along pretty much by myself, and no traffic to speak of around me, and honking merrily all the way home. I got plenty of practice at finding the horn without any clues, and the next time that somebody comes lurching at me going the wrong way on a one-way street, you can believe that I'm really going to let them have it. Unless it's Paris Hilton, of course.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 6:31 PM
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