Bad Habits Page 2

  So here’s my plan: I’m going to get some old cameras and microphones and position them around my house. I figure that before long I’ll have dozens of people just dying to do housework in front of my cameras. Sure,most of them will eventually figure out that they’re not going to be in a commercial, but new ones will come along to replace them. Meanwhile, I’ll be at work.

  Three-Pronged Attack

  I have two major complaints about electricity.

  First, I cannot understand my electricity bills. I never even read them anymore: I just pay whatever random amount the electric company puts after “PAY THIS AMOUNT.”

  Frankly, I suspect the electric company doesn’t have the vaguest notion how much electricity I use. I have an electric meter, but it is on the side of the house where a large contingent of killer wasps has lived since 1977, and nobody, not even my dog, ever goes there. I suspect that whoever is supposed to read my meter is lying out in the bushes somewhere, covered with stings.

  So I think the electric company is just making my bill up out of thin air. Oh, they’re very clever about it: They make the bill so elaborate that I won’t suspect anything. It looks like this:

  Adjusted basic flat usage charge rate: $34.70

  Charge for usage of ajusted basic flat: $22.67

  Flatly basic adjustable usage rate: $17.31

  Maladjustment of usable, chargeable flat rate: $4.12

  Ferrous Mineral Tax: $5.12

  Tax to Pa $0

  The Spanish-American War Debt: $2.89

  Gratuity: $1.68

  As I said, I always pay these bills. I’m afraid that if I don’t pay, the electric company will send huge jolts of electricity through the wire: one minute I’d be carving poultry with the electric carving knife, and the next minute I’d be a shriveled lump of carbon lying on the kitchen floor. So I pay, but I don’t like it.

  My other major electrical complaint concerns appliance plugs. You may have noticed that something very sinister has happened to appliance plugs since you were a child. I grew up during the Eisenhower administration in a normal, God-fearing home with a normal, God-fearing electrical system. All the outlets had two holes, and all the appliance plugs had two prongs, and everything worked just fine. Also the inflation rate was very low.

  Now, suddenly, the appliance manufacturers are putting three prongs on their plugs, and you can’t plug them in. What is going on? Has there been some huge mistake in the shipping department, so we’re all getting appliances that were supposed to go to Yugoslavia? Has the government decided that appliances are so dangerous that consumers shouldn’t be allowed to plug them in? Maybe it has something to do with the metric system. Whatever it is, it’s a problem.

  The simplest solution is to get a hacksaw and saw off the third prong. Unfortunately, this is a violation of federal law. It’s like removing those little pillow tags that say “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.” If you are convicted, agents of the Consumer Product Safety Commission will come to your house and lock you in a room filled with government safety publications and not let you out until you can pass an eight-hour written safety test.

  So most people use those little plug adapters. This seems to work fine, but if you read the appliance instructions carefully, you’ll note that plug adapters are Not Recommended:

  WARNING: IF YOU USE ONE OF THOSE LITTLE PLUG ADAPTERS TO PLUG THIS APPLIANCE IN, ALL THE WARRANTIES AND GUARANTEES AND PROMISES THE SALESMAN MADE ARE NULL AND VOID AND YOU MAY BE UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.

  The most radical solution to the three-pronged plug problem is to build a new house with three-hole outlets, or rewire your old house (which costs about the same). But this is really no solution at all, because as soon as everybody has three-hole outlets, the appliance manufacturers will come out with four-pronged plugs, and it will just keep escalating until your average plug contains so much metal that you will need the help of three or four strong men just to lift it.

  So there is no good way you can solve the three-pronged plug problem. I think you should write your congressman and tell him to get off his butt and do something about it. Tell him you want the Defense Department to have a few large army tanks cruise up to the appliance manufacturers’ factories and suggest that they start producing two-pronged plugs again pronto. And while you’re at it, tell your congressman to straighten out the electric-bill mess, and maybe do something about my wasps.

  They’ve Got Our Number

  What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the middle of the night. These people have been abducted by large publishing companies and placed in barbed-wire enclosures surrounded by armed men with attack dogs, and unless they sell 350 magazine subscriptions per day, they will not be fed. These people are desperate. They will say anything to get you to subscribe, and you cannot stop them merely by being rude:

  CALLER: Hello, Mr. Barry?

  ME: No, this is Adolf Hitler.

  CALLER: Of course. My mistake. The reason I’m calling you at eleven-thirty at night, Mr. Hitler, is that I’m conducting a marketing survey, and ...

  ME: Are you selling magazine subscriptions?

  CALLER: Magazine subscriptions?

  ME: Selling them? Ha ha. No. Certainly not. Not at all. No, this is just a plain old marketing survey. (Sound of dogs barking in the background.) If you’ll just answer a few questions, we’ll send you a million dollars.

  ME: Well, what do you want to know?

  CALLER: Well, I just want to ask you some questions about your household, such as how many people live there, and what their ages are, and what their incomes are, and whether any of them might be interested in subscribing to Redbook?

  ME: I don’t want to subscribe to anything, you lying piece of slime.

  CALLER: How about Time? Sports Illustrated? American Beet Farmer?

  ME: I’m going to hang up.

  CALLER: No! (The dogs get louder.) Please! You can have my daughter!

  ME: (Click.)

  The first telephone was invented in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell attached a battery to a crude electrical device and spoke into it. Everybody thought he was an idiot. He would have died in poverty if Thomas Edison hadn’t invented the second telephone several years later.

  The first telephone systems were primitive “party lines,” where everybody could hear what everybody else was talking about. This was very confusing:

  BERTHA: Emma? I’m calling to tell you I seen your boy Norbert shootin’ his musket at our goat again, and if you don’t—

  CLEM: This ain’t Emma. This is Clem Johnson, and I got to reach Doc Henderson, because my wife Nell is all rigid and foaming at the mouth, and if she don’t snap out of it soon the roast is going to burn.

  EMMA: Norbert don’t even own a musket. All he got is a bow and arrow, and he couldn’t hit a steam locomotive from six feet, what with his bad hand, which he got when your boy Percy bit it, and which is festerin’ pretty bad.

  DOC HENDERSON: You better let me take a look at it.

  BERTHA: The goat? Oh, he ain’t hurt that bad, Doc. He’s mostly just skittery on account of the musket fire.

  CLEM: Now she’s startin’ to roll her eyes around. Looks like two hard-boiled eggs.

  EMMA: What kind of roast is it?

  DOC HENDERSON: If it’S just skittery, you should stroke it a bit and keep it in a dark place.

  EMMA: Well, I ain’t no doctor, but I ain’t never heard of stroking a roast.

  CLEM: Only dark place we got is the barn, and I’d be afraid to put Nell in there on account of she’d scare the chickens.

  BERTHA: Chickens ain’t a roast, Clem; chickens is poultry. Take ‘em out of the oven when you can wiggle the drumstick.

  EMMA: I told you already, Norbert don’t even own a musket.

  CALLER: Hi. I’m conducting a marketing survey. Is Mr. Hitler at home?

  CLEM: No, but I’ll take a year’s worth of American Beet
Farmer if you got it.

  The party-line system led to a lot of unnecessary confusion and death, so the phone company devised a system whereby you can talk to only one person at a time, although not necessarily the person you want. In fact, if you call any large company, you will never get to talk to the person you’re calling. Large companies employ people who are paid, on a commission basis, solely to put calls on hold. The only exception is department stores, where all calls are immediately routed to whichever clerk has the most people waiting in line for service.

  But we should never complain about our telephone system. It is the most sophisticated system in the world, yet it is the easiest to use. For example, my twenty-month-old son, who cannot perform a simple act like eating a banana without getting much of it in his hair, is perfectly capable of direct-dialing Okinawa, and probably already has. In another year, he’ll be able to order his own magazine subscriptions.

  Okay, Now Try The Engine

  You should do your own car repairs. It’s an easy way to save money and possibly maim yourself for life.

  You’re probably afraid to repair your car because you think cars are complicated. This is nonsense. Many teenage boys understand cars, and on any scale of intellectual achievement teenage boys rank right down there with newts. At least they did when I was one of them.

  When I was in high school, we boys would stand out on the corner at lunchtime and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and spit frequently and guys would pull up in genuinely hideous-looking cars with the front ends jacked way up. They’d open the hoods and we’d stare inside and have conversations like this:

  LOOKERS: Three eighty-nine?

  DRIVER: Four twenty-seven.

  LOOKERS: Fuel injected?

  DRIVER: Headers.

  LOOKERS: Dual?

  DRIVER: Quad.

  LOOKERS: Boss.

  Then we’d all spit approvingly. Sometimes the conversation would turn ugly, particularly if some participants favored Fords and some favored Chevrolets. The Ford-Chevrolet conflict was a major issue, considerably more important to us than, say, the fate of the Free World. Those who favored Fords would yell “Fo Mo Co,” which is short for “Ford Motor Company.” Those who favored Chevrolets would yell “Fo No Go,” which is short for “Ford No Go.” This was considered a very witty insult. Sometimes fights would break out.

  What I’m getting at is that we had the intellectual depth of lima beans, and we still managed to understand cars. So you can, too.

  The trouble with most do-it-yourself car articles is they tell you how to do things you don’t really need to do, like change the oil. Most Such articles rave on for pages about changing the oil, as if it were some kind of sacred ritual, never once telling you how degrading and pointless it is. I have been driving for eighteen years, and I have never once had a car problem I could have solved by changing the oil. If the Good Lord had wanted us to change the oil, He would have put different oil in the car in the first place.

  But if you believe the do-it-yourself articles, you traipse along, changing your oil regularly, and one day your car ceases to run, and you try changing the oil a couple more times, and it still doesn’t run, and you end up taking it to an auto mechanic, and you have this conversation:

  You: What’s wrong?

  MECHANIC: It seems to be either the transmission or the engine. (Translation: I’m not sure, so I plan to replace every part in the car.)

  YOU: How long will it take to fix?

  MECHANIC: We should have a pretty good idea by Friday. (“One hundred and sixty-two years.”)

  YOU: How much will it cost?

  MECHANIC: Well, I have to Check on some of the parts and labor, but figure about $130. (“Eight billion skillion dollars.”)

  So what you need to know is how to do major car repairs, the kind most do-it-yourself articles don’t talk about. There are two major kinds of car problems, which we in the automotive community refer to as The Two Major Kinds of Car Problems:

  Problems that cause your car to make loud noises.

  What you do here is turn up the radio. If your car doesn’t have a radio, you can sing loudly as you drive. Some people try to deal with noise problems by messing around with the muffler, but I advise against this. Mufflers are filthy, disgusting objects covered with parts of every dead animal you have ever run over. I would no more touch a muffler than I would change my oil.

  Problems that cause your car to stop.

  Generally these problems involve the engine, which is a large object you’ll find under your hood, unless you live in a high-crime area. Open the hood and poke around among the wires with a screwdriver, or, if you have no screwdriver, the tip of an umbrella. Have somebody sit in the car. As you poke, yell “Try it now” or “Okay, try it now.” This is how most professional mechanics solve engine problems. Before long you’ll be fixing cars as well as they do, by which I mean about 30 percent of the time.

  The Problem With Pets

  Everybody should have a pet. Pets give you all the love and devotion of close relatives, but you can lock them in the basement for hours at a time if they get loud or boring. The pets, I mean.

  Have you ever wondered why people have pets? Neither have I. I suspect it’s because pets are easy to talk to. I spend hours talking to my dog, explaining my views on world affairs. She always listens very attentively, although I’m not sure she understands me. If I could hear what she’s thinking, it would probably go like this:

  ME: The situation in the Middle East certainly looks serious.

  MY DOG: I wonder if he’s going to give me some food.

  ME: It is unfortunate that an area so vital to the economic well-being of the world is so politically unstable.

  MY DOG: Maybe he’ll give me some food now.

  ME: The Russians certainly are making it difficult for our government to achieve a lasting Mideast peace.

  MY DOG: Any minute now he might go into the kitchen and get me some food.

  My first pet was a group of ants in one of those educational ant farms with clear plastic sides. My mother gave it to me for Christmas when I was about ten. She had to send away to Chicago to buy the ants. The ironic thing is that our house was already overrun with local ants, which came out during the summer in hordes. I mean, it was like one of those science fiction movies in which insects take over the Earth. Every summer we had huge, brazen ants striding around the kitchen demanding food and running up long distance telephone charges. My mother spent much of her time whapping at them with brooms and spraying them with deadly chemicals. Nothing worked. The ants used to lie on their backs, laughing at the brooms and the chemicals and calling for more.

  What I’m getting at is that my mother hated ants, but she sent good money all the way to Chicago so I could have ants for Christmas. Christmas does horrible things to people’s values.

  Anyway, I got the ants and put them into their ant farm and fed them sugar and water. The idea was that they would build a lot of ant tunnels and stuff and I would learn about Nature. Instead, they died. My mother was astounded. I mean, here she spends whole summers trying to kill local ants that she got for free, and these Chicago ants, ants that she paid money for, ants that had their own little farm and their own little food, just die. If we had been smart, we would have put our local ants into the ant farm and fed them sugar and water; that probably would have polished them off.

  The lesson to be learned here is that insects make lousy pets. Even the best-trained, most intelligent, and most loyal insect pets tend to look and behave very much like ordinary common-criminal insects. Also you can’t explain your views on world affairs to an insect, unless you drink a lot.

  Fish and Green Cheese

  Tropical fish are not much better. My wife and I went through a fish period, during which we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tanks and pumps and filters and chemicals and special plants and special rocks and special food. We had enough tropical-fish technology to land a tropical fish on the moon. What we coul
d not do was keep any given tropical fish alive for longer than a week. Just as soon as we’d pop one in the tank, it would develop Fin Rot. Medical science has developed no cure for Fin Rot, so our fish would languish around among the fish technology, rotting. We were constantly buying replacement fish. Whenever one of us would leave the house, the other would say: “Don’t forget to pick up several tropical fish.” I have no actual proof, but I strongly suspect that these fish were manufactured in Chicago.

  The most popular pets are dogs and cats. Now when I say “dogs,” I’m talking about dogs, which are large, bounding, salivating animals, usually with bad breath. I am not talking about those little squeaky things you can hold on your lap and carry around. Zoologically speaking, these are not dogs at all; they are members of the pillow family.

  Anyway, dogs make good pets because they are very loyal (NOTE: When I say “loyal,” I mean “stupid.”) I once wrote a column in which I said dogs are stupid, and I got a lot of nasty mail from people who insisted, often with misspelled words, that dogs are intelligent. Perhaps from their point of view dogs are intelligent, but I don’t want to get into that here. I’ll just stick with “loyal.”)

  Yes indeed, dogs are loyal. Here is an example of how loyal dogs are: When two dogs meet, they will spend the better part of a day sniffing each other’s private parts and going to the bathroom on any object more than one inch high. Talk about loyalty.

  Cats are less loyal than dogs, but more independent. (This is code. It means: “Cats are smarter than dogs, but they hate people.”) Many people love cats. From time to time, newspapers print stories about some elderly widow who died and left her entire estate, valued at $320,000, to her cat, Fluffikins. Cats read these stories, too, and are always plotting to get named as beneficiaries in their owners’ wills. Did you ever wonder where your cat goes when it wanders off for several hours? It meets with other cats in estate-planning seminars. I just thought you should know.