Posts from — November 2007

I will never understand or approve of auto-flush toilets. Nasty little beasts.

My office installed them last year, and they continue to annoy the … well … crap out of me. The one in the first stall is an aggressive flusher. Walk by the door, it flushes. Walk in the stall, it flushes. Sit down and lean forward a bit, and it flushes. Then again when you stand up, again when you bend over to pull up your pantyhose and a final time when you open the door in a snit. If you open the door too wildly in an effort to escape the incessant flushing and the door bangs open and then closed, it will flush AGAIN, with a “good riddance!” flourish.

And everyone looks at the crazy-mad flusher as she flees the restroom in a huff.

But that’s not the worst part. It’s the butt misting I can’t stand. If you do anything to activate the flushing when you’re sitting, you get a fine piss mist of all your own output along with a sprinkling of whatever germs linger from the previous visitor. Lovely. One feels SO fresh.

I can’t imagine that these trigger-happy flushing mechanisms are saving the company any money with all the water they waste. It’s like low-flow toilets — where are the savings if everyone flushes two or three times for adequate water flow? No more than the auto-dispensing soap squirters by the sink are saving on the expense of suds despite the fact that they dispense a half-thimbleful of soap per use, since I sometimes hear them squirting off into the sink when there is, technically, no one in the immediate vicinity. What’s setting them off — a cloud of mist from the toilet stall area?

Or maybe they’re set off by the hand motions of annoyed people gesturing in indignation about the toilets.

Your Linguistic Profile:

40% General American English30% Dixie 15% Upper Midwestern 5% Midwestern 5% Yankee

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

1. Play with Flarp at work. I just pinch off a bit and roll it around with my left hand, pinch holes in it, and make shapes until it’s all dried up, and then I toss it and get another pinch. Keeps me at equal opportunity of developing carpal tunnel in BOTH wrists, I guess.

2. Tweeze my husband’s ears. Seriously. I LOVE plucking those little bastard hairs that spring up on the lobes when they think I’m not keeping watch. Give me a good pair of tweezers and back lighting, and, “Oh yeah, I’m tweezin’ tonight.”

3. Put a thin layer (almost a film, really) of mustard in my grilled cheese sandwiches. (Shh. Now you know the secret to tart, cheesy goodness.)

4. See creepy films on romantic holidays. On anniversaries or Valentine’s Day, my husband and I noticed that we ended up watching things like Hannibal, Predator, Pulp Fiction … you get the idea.

5. Think of satisfying and idiosyncratic ways to deal with things that annoy me. For example, I always wait until I get to the drive-up window before I tell the local Burger King folks that I want extra ketchup. (Otherwise, they forget to add it or I end up looking like a micro-managing noodge as I check the bag before driving away. Just feels rude.) But that’s not the weird thing … here it comes … sometimes it’s the stingy manager working the window, which just makes me sigh. He doesn’t like my ketchup requests, and he usually responds by asking how many ketchup packets I want. (I don’t know … “Enough?”) So one day on the spur of the moment, I said, “Seven” cheerfully, which turns out to be perfect because it’s an oddly precise and large number, just large enough that it bugs him but not outrageous enough for him to clamp off my ketchup supply. Sometimes he just hands over a fistful, and sometimes he looks at me for a long second and then counts out seven packets. (I’m sure I’m the “7-Ketchup-Packet Lady” by now.) Quantifying ketchup needs for customers everywhere.

6. Clean out a stopped-up vacuum cleaner. (Wouldn’t Freud have a field day with that.) Oh, sure, it’s glamorous, removing the stray bit of thread from the brush and a filthy wad of long silky Sheltie hair from around the brush spindle, and who doesn’t love digging out a compacted pod of lint and one of my children’s necklaces from the hose? It’s best when the stoppage is so far up that I have to use a coat hanger to tease it out, using my Best Trick Ever … the pants hanger. Just get a wire pants hanger from the cleaner’s, remove the narrow cardboard tube that makes the base, and the little hook that’s at the end (you know, the part that fits snugly into the cardboard tube) is the perfect size and shape for digging into a grit obstruction. Kind of a sad day, really, when we got a better vacuum.

7. Put two HUGE scoops of oatmeal into my morning diet shake. It adds fiber and a bit more belly-filling goodness to a watery chocolate shake, and I love the chewiness the little blended bits of oats give to the mix. Although the dishes, if left lying around too long before washing, do tend to look like someone barfed in them and imperfectly rinsed them out. (My recipe: 1 scoop SlimFast, 1 teaspoon plain cocoa, 1 big glug of real vanilla extract, 1 cup of low-fat milk, a handful of ice cubes, and the oatmeal — clattered violently together in my 22-year-old Oster blender. My older daughter, whose room is directly above the kitchen, is not in love with the process.)

8. Read the funnies (is that an old-fashioned name for the comics?). I always read the newspaper in this order: Funnies, the features/lifestyle section, op/ed pages, Page 2A, and then the sections in alphabetical order (skipping the sports section).You’d think I’d have my priorities straighter, but I think of it as gradually easing myself into the harder news, or getting the proper perspective for the absurdities of the “real” stories. My children know better than to call dibs if I get to the paper first.

9. Organize. Anything, really. Whether it’s untangling necklaces with a straight pin and tweezers, rearranging my dresser or (I confess) putting my spice cabinet in alphabetical order (you can find things faster!), I find this very satisfying. It’s only the fact that I stay too busy that I fail to do enough of this. (You would NOT guess this is one of my secret joys if you peeked at my house right now. You would assume there is no joy in Muddville.)

10. Edit. I *love* to do this, whether it’s by hand or on the computer. There’s something about correcting and refining text until it’s the sharpest and brightest and most naturally paced that it can be … I just groove on it. It’s like making homemade mayo in the blender when you see the egg and oil and lemon juice “catch” as you’re pouring and it’s starting to spin from clear fluids into opaque creaminess … it’s like magic.

So … what weird winding makes YOUR personal clock tick?