When Directions Don’t Follow

The other day, my dishwasher didn’t drain all the way.

I got out the instructions that came with it. (Felt pretty proud of myself that I still had them.) It contained directions on how to change the filter, complete with a diagram.

After suctioning out the gross water with a turkey baster (yuck), I took a look.

The bottom of my dishwasher looked nothing like the diagram. Was I crazy? Stupid?

No.

(Well, not because of this.)

That diagram, in the instruction booklet for my specific dishwasher, was not of my dishwasher.

And those directions about a filter? Turns out my dishwasher doesn’t even have a filter.

There is a special place in hell for the person who threw those directions together.

Today, I had to figure out how to transfer recordings of an interview from an app on my phone to my computer. The instructions from the app mentioned email (files too big), Dropbox (after setting that all up, files too big) and using iTunes (that didn’t work at all, was stymied at the first damn step).

As I, with increasing despondency, dutifully went through the trouble-shooting directions for iTunes, I saw a bit of software I had originally downloaded onto my computer when I got the app a couple years ago. (I don’t use it much.)

It synced the app to my computer beautifully.

But now, when I needed it, why was there no mention, not one, in the app itself or on the company’s website, of this software?

Because that omission wasted a couple hours for me.

For people who write the directions for things: Yes, we all say we don’t read them, but for those times when we are forced to, please take care when composing them.

You are toying with people’s sanity here.

Are You What You Wear?

Yup, particularly when, like me, you more often than not wear clothes that have slogans actually written right on them.

My mom got me this t-shirt, which declares, “Dogs (Because People Suck).”
It came from IHeartDogs.com; the purchase was a donation that fed seven shelter dogs. My mom chose “Ursin purple” as the color, of course. And, yes, I totally wear it.

My sister-in-law got me these socks, on which a little girl whispers with wonder to her pet horse, “I hate everyone too.”

Let’s just say: My mom and sister-in-law know me.

Foods That Aren’t Really Food

See? People trying to make
pomegranates edible.

There are some things we all say are food that really aren’t. 

Take, for example, pomegranates. By the time you get through cutting it open, careful not to get any on yourself, it stains, and digging out the seeds, just so that you can get that tiny bit of edibleness around them … No, not food.

Grapefruit: absolutely not a food, more of a torture.

Lots of diet food – rice cakes, melba toast – fall less into the “food” category and more into the “cardboard” category.

Popcorn, in my opinion, is similar to rice cakes and melba toast, except you can drench it in butter.

In fact, there are a lot of foods that are inedible except as vehicles, excuses, really, for eating melted butter: steamed clams (breading and frying those also works), escargot, lobster.

Fondant, that weird clay-like icing bakers use when they are building something that looks cool out of cake ingredients, is not food.

Neither are marshmallows and cotton candy.

Legally, restaurants are not supposed to put anything on your plate that is not edible, in case you are too dumb to tell that that flower blossom isn’t really meant to be eaten. But it isn’t. Ditto: those sprigs of parsley and cilantro and those dried red peppers in your General Tso’s chicken. Not food.

Likewise, spicy ingredients – hot chiles, horse radish, wasabi – while fine as an accent to the actual food on your plate, are not, in my opinion, food themselves. Just picture yourself trying to eat a bowl of any of them.

Anise, the flavoring for black licorice. My grandmother was so proud of her anisette cookies. Blech. When she gave me, ordinarily a cookie fiend, one, I would sneak it back onto the plate when she wasn’t looking.

Did I miss any?

Pay Attention!!!

Image courtesy of Sixninepixels at

 FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Is there an adult in America today who doesn’t wonder, if they haven’t already been diagnosed, that they might have attention-deficit disorder? (And if there is, can they tell me their secret?)

A study done at Harvard in 2010 showed that people’s minds are not on the task at hand 47% of the time.

That’s all?

This New York Times columnist, quoting a survey, says currently the average human attention span is eight seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish.

That sounds about right.

As I’ve sat here, my daughter, away at college, texted me. So did several other people, including a spammer. Even if I don’t respond, I look: Who is it? Is it an emergency?

Then, the stupid thing beeps a second time several seconds later.

I supposed I could figure out how to reset that.

But meanwhile, since I looked, I see my mom responded to my email.

Oh, and I have some notifications from Facebook.

Facebook is its own particular distraction vortex. Oh, awful: A childhood classmate died. Oh, sweet: Another is getting married. Oh, a sponsored ad is looking for women who suffer from ovarian cancer who used talcum powder. Is that something to worry about? Oh, I feel sick: A video automatically plays of an abused dog so skinny, he can’t stand. Oh, but there are some sweet horses or goats or kittens or babies who are obviously doted on … My brain struggles to process all of this.

Where was I? Oh, yes, distraction.

But who am I kidding? I can remember the pre-Internet days. And I distinctly remember veering away from tasks I didn’t want to do.

Attention, at least for me, is this fleeting, fluttering, easily damaged thing.

It’s like herding butterflies.

And I still don’t have the hang of it.

My Life is Shit

These two produce an inordinate amount of poop.

When we decided to get our second dog, Tony, I did not think of how I was going to have double the dog shit in our tiny yard, nor did I think house-training him would be a big deal.

Where we are with the house training: I am inordinately proud of myself for teaching Tony to ring the bells I hung on the doors when he wants to go out.

Honestly, though, that was easy, took about a day for him to get it.

The hard part: convincing Tony that, yes, it is important to never pee or poop in the house.

Also, he abuses those bells, sometimes ringing them every few minutes, and for a wide variety of reasons, such as he’d like to lay out in the sun.

Which is fine, except we have discovered that it is impossible to make our driveway gate “Tony-proof.” He can get under it when it’s closed. However, we can’t make that gap any smaller or it won’t open.

(Contemplating an “invisible fence,” if you’ve got any advice about that.)

So, for weeks, I have been at the other end of the leash, poop bag in hand, every time Tony (and Lola, who always comes along) has pooped or peed.

There are times in life when biology is much more front and center than usual. 

I told this to my husband, a gastroenterologist. “Yeah, tell me about it,” he said.

I am reminded of bringing home new babies with all that entails, from spitting up (etc.) for the baby to let-down (etc.) for the mom.

Working on getting Tony's and Lola's biology back to humming along without quite so much of my involvement.

Be Glad You’re Not A Honey Bee

Image courtesy of anankkml

at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Even being the queen bee is no prize. The queen bee doesn’t issue orders; she doesn’t control

anything in the hive. Her one role is to lay eggs, which she does all day long, in 30-second intervals. She’ll lay up to 2,000 per day, which is more than her body weight. She only leaves the hive once or twice in her life. Oh, and she gets to be queen by assassinating all the other baby queen bees.

Drone bees famously exist just to have sex. Sounds like that might be OK, right? Except the “lucky” drone bees who get to get it on with the queen die because they explode during sex, which happens in the air, with their genitals tearing off to remain lodged in the queen while the rest of their body falls to the ground.

And the ones who don’t have sex with her get driven out of the hive to starve to death.

If you’re a bee, keeping a low profile and just being a worker doesn’t make things much better. Worker bees make honey by transferring the nectar from the tongue of the bee who collected it to another bee who holds it on her tongue until the liquid evaporates, turning the substance into honey. (Changes how you think of honey, doesn’t it?)

And the wax they make? It oozes through pores on their bodies and they chew it off, to make it soft enough to use.

And you know what keeps honey-bee hives warm – 93 degrees Fahrenheit in the center – in cold weather?

The worker bees’ shivering.

Yeah, be glad you’re not a honey bee.

Why Are DMV People So Rude?

My son got his driver’s license this week. (Watch out, world!)

I was once again struck by how rude the people at our DPS (Texan for DMV) are. I am not the only one to wonder why: look here and here and here, for starters.

It’s almost comical. The first woman we encountered, who just had to hand my son a form, was absolutely stone-faced and clearly was trying to speak without moving her mouth, like that would be too much effort. The second, to whom my son handed a certificate from his driving school, barked, “It’s not signed!” And indeed, there was a blank line, marked “Instructor Signature.” “Oh, no, did they forget to sign it?” I asked. “How do I know?!” she said. “Did he have 10 hours of nighttime instruction?!”

My son and I looked at each other. Of course, he hadn’t been at the driving school at night. It isn’t even open at night.

Yes, we both answered.

Turns out I, the parent, was supposed to sign that he had driven at night with me (which he had), something she could have just said, the jerk.

After we caught on and she had had her little thrill, I signed it.

I have been around long enough to realize if everybody in a certain group acts a certain way, they probably have some sort of reason. Like when we arrived in Houston and wondered why everybody drove those big, piggy, gas-guzzling SUVs. (The streets flood.)

And I found this about a fascinating study. Turns out the “petty tyrant” theory we all have is correct. When someone is in a “high power” but “low status” position – like DMV clerk, they have a tendency to use that power to behave like jerks.

Explains a lot, about a lot of people.