by Andy Simmons
“May I please have the remote?”
If she thinks she can take that tone with me…
Earlier, Jennifer had pointed out that she doesn’t ask me for much. And it’s true. I’m the needy one. The one who must have his jokes laughed at, who needs his hand held when we go to parties, the one who asks when we go out for dinner, “Can I get dessert?”
“C’mon, I’ll massage your feet,” I offered. Before I knew it, she was on the couch and her calloused, bunioned, corned feet on my lap. If only I knew Braille—what a story those feet could tell.
Now it was her turn. She switched on ESPN. And as the Mets scored the go-ahead run…
“So,” she said, “do you think Jennifer Love Hewitt will grow out her hair?”
“In Five Hundred Feet, You Will Be Lost”
“Men,” goes the old chestnut, “will drive to Minsk before stopping to ask for directions to the corner store.” Not me.
I’ll burn branches in the form of SOS on the hood of my car rather than navigate my way out of being lost. And lost in a car is where you’ll usually find me. See, I have this problem: If I ask someone for directions and the response is longer than, “It’s over there,” I zone out.
Case in point, on a family trip last year I stopped and asked a gentleman for directions. As we drove away, I turned to my wife, Jennifer. “Did you notice his teeth?”
“You didn’t listen to a word he said, did you?” she asked.
“Not a one. I was looking at his teeth. Both of them were yellow—curry color, actually. More Thai than Indian…”
“So we’re still lost.”
“Yes.”
Well, my wandering days are over, for I am now the proud owner of a TomTom One Global Positioning System!
“A what?” asked Jennifer.
“A GPS, a NAV, a little thingy that uses satellites to get us from point A to point B without having to stop and ask strangers.”
Jennifer doubted I could master such a complex piece of machinery. “You can’t even get the time stamp off our photos,” I was reminded. It’s true. Every photo we take is dated February 12, 1983 (the year, it so happens, that camera manufacturers figured out how to put the red dot in everyone’s eyes). Now obviously I’m not the first person to use a GPS. They’ve been around a few years. But this was a pretty big leap for me, a charter member of the Rand McNally fan club.
It’s not that I’m a technological ignoramus, as the guys in IT insist. I’m a “tech-no,” which means I’m a technological ignoramus by choice. But I don’t want to become an anachronism, so I vowed to kick the tires on some new technology.
The first thing I did was buy a Spinbrush for my teeth. I then downloaded songs onto an iPod. (Have you heard of these things? You input music into them, then spend the rest of the day trying to keep the earbuds from falling out of your ear.) Now it was on to the GPS. If I’m going to get lost, I want to be able to blame it on an expensive piece of machinery.
TomTom came fully loaded: route planning, traffic and weather alerts, and an optional warning when I’m exceeding the speed limit. I declined the last feature, as my car was already equipped with that feature. It’s called Jennifer.
TomTom also let me choose a celebrity voice to give me directions. I passed on John Cleese because when you’ve made a wrong turn, the last thing you want is to be berated by your navigational system. It struck me as odd—not to mention dangerous—to be taking driving tips from Gary Busey, so I nixed him. The same went for Mr. T. Listening to him say, “I pity the fool who doesn’t take the next left,” for two hours would have resulted in my driving over a cliff.
Of the nonceleb voices, Sylvie had a come-hither-to-yon-destination bedroom voice, while Mandy’s bland, nonconfrontational demeanor reminded us of everyone’s second-favorite aunt. We went with Mandy.
We were now prepared to put TomTom to the test on a trip that would take us from Jennifer’s mother’s home in Rochester, New York, to my sister’s in Ithaca—two hours and six minutes away. I tapped in the coordinates (a fancy term for addresses) on the NAV’s touch screen, which—since I was able to do it—means it was pretty easy. Seeing the colorful screen come alive, our four-year-old, Quinn, assumed it was a small TV. “Hannah Montana!” she shouted.
“No, upstate New York,” I corrected. With bags packed and car humming, we put our trip in Mandy’s hands.
At the first intersection, Mandy promptly intoned, “Turn right.”
“Aren’t we supposed to turn left?” Jennifer asked.
We were already lost. We’d made this trip dozens of times, and this was not our normal route.
“Maybe she knows a better way,” I said, making the right turn.
“In a quarter-mile, turn left.…In one hundred twenty-five yards, turn left,” said Mandy. “Turn left.”
Maybe because Mandy’s not much of a conversationalist, Quinn put in another request for Hannah Montana.
“Do you know where we’re going?” asked Jennifer.
“Not a clue, but it’s pretty,” I said.
Mandy, it appears, is a bit of a sightseer. Rather than have us take 390 to 90, as I had assumed, she had us toodling through bucolic Pittsford. It then dawned on me that when I input my preferences, I’d opted for the cheapskate route, skipping all tolls, something we’d never done before. Mandy was saving me money. If we could just skip 372 more tolls, she would pay for herself. I was fully prepared to forget all about the coquettish Sylvie when Mandy grew quiet. Too quiet.
“I think that’s a flaw,” said Jennifer. “Mandy should be making encouraging remarks all along, just to assure us that she’s still on the job. Things like ‘You’re on the right track’ and ‘You’re an excellent driver.’”
“In half a mile, turn right.” Mandy was back in the game!
“In one hundred twenty-five yards, turn right.…In fifty yards, turn right.…Turn right.”
I turned left. I am sometimes susceptible to the same Right Shoe, Left Foot syndrome Quinn suffers from, and in this instance, I put on my left shoe when I needed my right. Mandy was confused. She didn’t know where we were and had to ad-lib.
“I’ve never heard a computer say ‘Uhhh…’ before,” said Jennifer.
“Let Mandy get her bearings.”
“Hannah Montana!”
“Turn left, then right,” said Mandy with a forcefulness we’d not known. “Take the second left.” I did exactly as I was told and turned into a Home Depot parking lot.
What she’d meant was the left after Home Depot. This seems to be a growing problem—idiots like me taking our directives literally. In Germany, a man followed the command “turn right now” thirty yards before the intended junction. He drove his four-by-four onto a building site, up a stairway, and into a Porta-Potty. Another guy plowed into a pile of sand on a highway after trusting his GPS more than a Closed for Construction sign.
Getting out of Home Depot was hungry work, so I tapped the NAV’s screen until I got to a cool feature—Points of Interest. Some taps later and, voilà, a list of restaurants in the area appeared. You can also find gas stations, hotels, even a hospital, which was good, since while I was punching away at the tiny keyboard, I almost punched us into the back of a Toyota parked at a red light.
The jury is out on just how safe GPS devices are—there are no major studies proving one way or the other. But common sense suggests that Mandy telling me where to go saves me from fumbling with cumbersome maps. On the other hand, human nature being what it is, why watch the road when I can watch my progress on the small, colorful screen, or surf the NAV for the area’s best French cruller?
Other systems offer voice recognition, which means you don’t have to tap anything. Simply say in a loud, clear voice, “Find cruller,” then Mandy tells you how to get there.
“You have reached your destination,” said Mandy, sounding relieved as we pulled into my sister’s driveway. It took us two hours and thirteen minutes, seven minutes longer than if we’d taken the t
oll routes.
Frankly, a map would’ve also gotten us to Ithaca, and for $495 less. But I did appreciate how Mandy took charge when I got lost, and who knows, maybe in the future we’ll use a GPS for everything. Like finding that golf ball I launched into the forest, showing me how to bypass the scented-soaps aisle in the supermarket, or pointing out to this dim father just who Hannah Montana is.
“Plutonic” Friends
It was bedlam in the formerly tranquil Simmons household. Voices were raised, fists pounded tables, Mr. Potato Head was torn asunder.
I could see it on the evening news—our neighbor Mrs. Stein telling the world, “But they were such a nice family, even if they didn’t always mow their lawn, or remember what day to put out the garbage, or…”
What was the to-do about? What could stir such animosity?
“Pluto is too a planet!” yelled Jennifer.
“Is not!” I bellowed back.
Jennifer poured a glass of wine and stood by the window, staring defiantly into the night sky at Pluto. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was gazing at a streetlamp.
“The International Astronomical Union is the sole authority for classifying, naming, and making things up about outer space,” I reminded her as I squished into our new wing chair. “These are very smart people, smart enough to figure out how to make a living from going to Star Trek conventions. So if they think that, after seventy-six years of placing the word planet on its business card, Pluto is only an icy rock playing dress-up, then case closed.”
Jennifer wasn’t buying into what she considered an arbitrary new rule: that a planet isn’t just something that’s round and orbits the sun—it must also be big enough and have enough gravitational force to “clear its area” of any similar-sized objects.
“If that’s the case, your aunt Ruth could be a planet,” she sputtered. “She’s round, cold, and she cleared her area of everything long ago, including your uncle Danny, who ran off with the dog walker.”
Hearing that Pluto was planet non grata, our three-year-old, Quinn, removed the Pluto action figure from her Disney display. It made Jennifer even sadder.
“I wonder, if it had a more serious name, say Sidney or Desmond, might its fate have been different?” Jennifer asked aloud.
“Look,” I said, shifting my weight around on the chair, hoping circulation would return to my legs. “As the sole authority for classifying, naming, and making things up about our home, let’s use Pluto’s demotion to make a few changes around here, starting with this wing chair.”
“My grandmother left me that.”
“Sorry, but this does not fit the new definition of a chair.”
“What new definition?”
“The one I’m making up as I speak. From here on out, a chair isn’t just something that someone sits on. Otherwise, I’d be a chair if Quinn had her way. In my dictionary, a chair is something you want to sit on, preferably in front of a TV. It also needs to be ratty enough to chase everyone but me from its orbit. That’s a chair. Oh, and my father’s penchant for leaving diners with his pockets full of Sweet’N Low? That’s now shopping, and not—as your family refers to it—stealing.”
Through the window, I could see Quinn walking in the yard, holding a bag of okra.
“Bravo!” I shouted as I jumped to my feet. Quinn had redefined okra as a garden tool to be stored in the outdoor shed, thus guaranteeing that neither Jennifer nor I would ever find it and cook it for dinner.
Jennifer was still upset. And when she stews, all of her 83,543,291,732 brain cells are put on time and a half.
“Should we get rid of Quinn because she’s the shortest and hasn’t learned to clear her Polly Pocket dolls from her orbit or ours?” she asked. “What does this mean for anything that doesn’t quite fit the mold? What does this mean for Rhode Island? For doughnut holes? For Danny DeVito?”
Jennifer was looking at the larger picture, larger than the universe. “What does it say about a galaxy that changes the rules for convenience’s sake?”
I didn’t have an answer, other than to say, “Hey, wanna watch TV?”
In the end, Jennifer, Quinn, and I were one happy planet, seated on our uncomfortable wing chair, our eyes orbiting The Biggest Loser. If little Pluto was in need of loving, it would find it in this household.
But for its own comfort, tell it to bring a chair.
How to Ruin a Joke
A classic joke goes like this: A nurse rushes into an exam room and says, “Doctor, doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room.” The doctor says, “Tell him I can’t see him.”
Pretty simple, right?
Here’s how I tell it: “A nurse—her name is Joyce—feels a presence in the waiting room. She looks around but sees nothing. She jumps up from her desk, carefully replaces her chair, and runs down the lavender-hued hallway to the doctor’s office. She knocks on the door. No response. He’s not there. Where can he be? She continues down the hall, admiring a lithograph of an eighteenth-century Mississippi paddleboat along the way.” By this time, my audience has left, but I soldier on. “She bursts into the exam room and says, ‘Doctor, doctor!’ The doctor, I should mention, is a urologist with a degree from Ohio State, which is where my nephew…”
You get the idea. I’m an embellisher. I can’t leave a simple gag alone.
I’m not the only joke-challenged member of the family. My sister’s worse than I am. Her problem: She can’t remember them. “A nurse rushes into an exam room and says…Uh, let me start all over again. A nurse rushes into a waiting…No, it’s not the waiting room. She just came from the waiting room. Let me start all over again. A doctor rushes into…No, wait…”
My grandfather’s different. He’s guilty of taking a perfectly fine joke and selling it as the second coming of Oscar Wilde: “Okay, this is a good one. Ready? No, really, ready? Okay, fasten your seat belts. Ready? A nurse…Got it? A nurse? Okay, ready? A nurse rushes into an exam room and says, ‘Doctor, doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room.’ Now, this is where it gets funny. Ready?”
No one is ever ready, so they leave before he gets to the punch line.
My uncle is on Wall Street, so he hears all the jokes before they hit the web. And he lets you know he knows them all by telling you all of them. He also knows that most people don’t like jokes. So he slips them in under the radar: “I was chatting with Ben Bernanke the other day. You know Ben, don’t you? The Fed chief? Anyhoo, we were reviewing the Fed’s policy on long-term interest rates, and he told me it had evolved into its current iteration only after a nurse rushed into an exam room and said, ‘Doctor, doctor, there’s…’ Hey, where are you going?”
My brother Mark understands that the secret to good joke-telling is to know your audience. When he entertained my grandmother’s mah-jongg club one evening, he made it a point to adapt the joke to them: “A stacked nurse rushes into an exam room…”
No one in my family has ever finished this joke.
But as bad as it is not to be able to tell a joke, there’s something worse: not being able to listen to one. Take my cousin Mitch.
“Why couldn’t the doctor see him?” he asked.
“Because he’s invisible,” I said.
“Now, I didn’t get that. I thought the doctor couldn’t see him because he was with a patient.”
“Well, yeah, okay, but the fact that the guy was invisible…”
“Could the nurse see him?”
“No. She’s the one who said he was invisible…”
“How’d she know he was there?”
“Because he…”
“When you say he was invisible, does that mean his clothes were invisible, too?”
Here’s where I tried to walk away.
“Because if his clothes weren’t invisible,” Mitch said, stepping between me and the exit, “then the doctor could see him, right?”
“Yeah, but…”
“At least his clothes.”
“I guess…”
“Unless he was naked.”
“Okay, he was naked!”
“Why would he go to his doctor naked?”
Next time you see my family and someone’s telling a joke, do yourself a favor: Make yourself invisible.
Itching for a Fight
I’ve suddenly become nostalgic for my old one-room, half-bath, twelve-story walk-up in the city’s hovel district. Let me explain.
It all started simply enough. Soon after we moved to the country, Jennifer decided that our backyard was sorely in need of some landscaping work.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “Look at how fat and sassy our grass is. I bet we have the fattest, sassiest lawn in the neighborhood.”
That’s when Jennifer let me in on a little secret. There is no grass on our lawn. Only fat, sassy poison ivy.
I pointed out that, unlike everything else in the yard, the ivy was thriving and maybe we should go after something else, like that malingering rosebush.
“Why evict the one thing that actually wants to be here?” I reasoned.
Here’s why: Jennifer doesn’t like poison ivy. Something about the word poison makes her think it can’t be good for you.
So we called in landscapers to get estimates. The first took one look at our lawn, then called his car dealer and ordered a BMW, the one that comes with a chauffeur. The second charged by the blade of grass. That’s when I drove into town looking for one of those cheap illegal aliens the media insists is on every street corner in America.
“Are you an illegal alien?” I asked the first man I saw.
“No, I’m the mayor,” he said.
“Are you an illegal alien?” I asked another.
“No, I’m your neighbor.”
“Are you an illegal alien?”
“No, I’m your wife, you idiot,” said Jennifer, shoving a rake in my hand and telling me to take care of things myself.
One of the problems with poison ivy is you can’t simply grab it by the collar and toss it out like some drunk from a bar. You have to suit up for battle—rubber gloves duct-taped to a long-sleeved shirt buttoned to your neck. Long pants with the cuffs duct-taped over your socks and work boots. A scarf wrapped tightly around your neck and face, duct-taped to goggles and a hat, completes the jackass look. Armed with a pruner and some weed killer, I was no longer simply a homeowner unable to find an illegal alien to do the work he didn’t want to do. I was, in fact, a Knight of the Backyard Realm.