January
For the first time in years,
I found myself entering into the New Year as a 'couple'. Not since
before Dick Clark became so painful to watch as the ball descended
upon Times Square had I been with someone to share the beginning of
a New Year. And, while I wasn't expecting
much more from 2009 than I had from 2008, at least I was reasonably
certain that I would be entering this year with a kiss.
I've been dating Amy for a couple of months now and we have become
quite comfortable with several rooms in her house. Wine had been
poured in the kitchen, dinner had been eaten in the dining room, and
television
had been watched in the living room. But the bedroom was still unexplored
territory. And, while driving home from the New Year's Eve party
at my friend Jim's house, it was this unfamiliar room that I was
thinking about.
Was I expected to drive myself home after dropping her off or was I
going to be invited to spend the night? And, if an invitation was
extended, would I be invited to share the bed with her or would I
be sleeping on the couch? And, if I actually made it into the
bedroom, would there be any additional bedroom related activities
that I would be permitted to indulge in beyond just sleeping?
While pondering all of this from the driver's seat of my Ford, Amy
cuddled up next to me and rested her head on my shoulder.
“So which side of the bed do you prefer sleeping on?” she asked, thus
answering several of the questions that had been occupying my mind
and had almost caused me to drive through a red light a few blocks
back.
“Well, I can't really claim to being an all-right or all-left side
of the bed sleeper,” I told her, “because I
always choose the side that's closest to the alarm clock so that
I have easy and immediate access to the snooze button.”
She yawned and said, “Well, I always sleep on the side farthest from
the alarm clock so that I'm forced to wake up enough to walk over in
order to reach the snooze button. So this is perfect.”
And as we drove the last few miles to her house, I dared to wonder
if perhaps this was a sign as to how the new year would be. Perfect.
Amy decided that for
Valentine's Day we should share a home-cooked meal rather than make
reservations. “These fancy restaurants," she told me, "all raise
their prices to take advantage of people on Valentine's Day."
I pointed out that the price
of a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast was the same on Valentine's Day as
it was on any other day.
"We are not going to
Denny's...and I for one refuse to fall prey to this type of blatant
exploitation that nice restaurants employ,” she announced.
Though she really didn't mean 'I for one' but rather 'we for one'.
“Besides,” she continued, “I think it would be very romantic for the
two of us to cook a meal together. It's very domestic, you know?
They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and
if we're going to be together I want to make sure that you enjoy the
type of things I can cook. So I'll come over to your place on
Valentine's Day and bring all the ingredients that I'll need to make
my eggplant parmesan.”
That Saturday, she arrived with a multitude of bags filled with
pastas, sauces, and other foods that I had no idea even existed. She
set all her bags down upon the counter, unpacked and asked
where I kept my cooking ware.
I headed over to the far cabinet and pulled out a pot, a pan, and an
old cookie sheet.
“Where do you keep all the others?” she asked.
“The other what?”
“All your other pots and pans...you do have other things to cook in,
right?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I mean, I used to have a Tupperware bowl but it
broke when I tried standing on it to change a light bulb. So this is
now the entirety of my kitchen supply inventory.”
“You used a Tupperware bowl to change a light bulb?” she asked. “Why
didn't you use a chair?”
“The bowl was right there...so instead of walking all the way over
to the table to grab a chair and drag it into the kitchen, it just
seemed...at the time, anyway...more practical. Besides, I thought
that Tupperware was supposed to be unbreakable.”
She just rolled her eyes and stood thinking, with arms crossed, in
the middle of my kitchen. Finally, she said, “I'm just not going to
be able to make anything for us with one pot, one pan, and a cookie
sheet. How in the world are you able to cook anything? What do you
usually eat?”
So I revealed my culinary secret to her. Which is why, this
Valentine's Day, we enjoyed a romantic dinner of Chinese take-out.
March
We were gathered together for an
office meeting after lunch. It's always been my suspicion that
our boss calls these meetings at this precise time in order to maximize
the indigestion potential in his staff.
"As I'm sure you all know,” he began, “the economy is really bad
out there, so we're all just going to have to buckle down.”
I sat, waiting for the natural progression of his speech
which, I was positive, would be to inform all of us that we had
to start selling more. Sales were down, we were slacking, and
don't think for a minute that he wouldn't fire every single one
of us. We had heard this several times before.
“This being said,” he continued, “I've decided to let go of the
maintenance service that cleans the office each night. Instead,
I'm assigning some of you to do these housekeeping duties.”
It's a small office with only six employees, and three of
us, myself included, were added to his newly formed cleaning
crew.
For the rest of the afternoon, our boss worked on
a spreadsheet outlining his new cleaning schedule...time that he
could have spent selling, which could have increased sales
and eliminated the need to create a cleaning schedule since the
cleaning service could have been retained.
Once
finished, he posted his schedule on the bulletin board next to
the monthly sales chart. I saw that my Monday and Wednesday
afternoons would be spent sweeping the carpets and my Tuesday
and Thursday afternoons would consist of cleaning the bathrooms.
The following day, I found myself wearing yellow, rubber gloves,
and standing over the toilet, gingerly poking the inside of the
porcelain bowl with the toilet brush. The nature of my job was
taking an alarming, and unfortunate turn...though I guessed that
this fell under the 'other duties as described' section in my
job description. At least I'm still receiving a paycheck, I told
myself...puny as the check may be.
Once I had poked at
the toilet enough to deem it 'clean', I checked to make sure
that an adequate amount of toilet paper remained in the dispenser to
accommodate everyone's toilet paper needs. Our office's
particular toilet paper dispenser is a NeverOut 3000, which is
simply an impressive sounding name for a toilet paper dispenser
that housed two rolls of toilet paper, one on top of the other.
As I checked the roll status of the NeverOut 3000, I began
wondering how NeverOut people came up with the number 3000. Was this an attempt
to make the cheap plastic casing sound futuristic? Doubtfully, I
thought, because by the year 3000 I'm quite sure that pedestrian
activities such as going to the bathroom will be a thing of the
past. By then, I figured, bathrooms would consist of high
powered laser beams shot toward our colon region and vaporizing
all the excrement that had built up for the day, thus
eliminating the need for any type of paper products, toilet or
otherwise, in the bathrooms of the future.
And I couldn't
imagine that this was the 3000th model of NeverOut toilet paper
dispensers...because how hard would it be to simply design a
dispenser that housed two rolls, one on top of the other? Even
I, a lowly sales/bathroom cleaning associate, could have
designed something like this...and I'm quite certain that it
wouldn't have taken 3000 attempts. 25 or 30, perhaps, but not
3000.
At most, I thought, this might be the third
generation of NeverOut toilet dispensers, but the NeverOut
executives, fearing that a product called the NeverOut 3 didn't
sound very impressive, decided to add a few zeros. A large
number such as 3000, rather than 3, would ensure everybody that
NeverOut only utilized the most up-to-date toilet paper
technology available.
Which, as I stood in the middle of
the office bathroom wearing my yellow, rubber gloves and
contemplating our toilet paper dispenser, made perfect sense.
Adding zeros to anything makes it sound more impressive and
exciting! Would Thriller have been such a revered album if it
had sold 45 copies instead of 45,000,000? Of course not. And,
with another birthday coming up only a few short weeks away, I
decided that I would employ this same logic.
So, coming
this May, I am proud to introduce the new and improved Terry
3700!
