Tag: microwave

Don’t need it. Don’t want it.

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Photo by Terje Sollie on Pexels.com

Years ago I owned a small handyman business. I had installed a microwave in to a wall for a customer and she was telling me just how useful a microwave was to her. I had been thinking about getting one for my wife for some time and this was all the push I needed to get her one. As soon as I got home, I told her that I was going to get her a microwave. Her response was that she didn’t need one. I ignored her and we drove out to the appliance store and bought one. For the first week I don’t think she used the stove. We are on our third microwave now, we wore out the previous two.

I bought her a minivan that she “didn’t need, didn’t want “. She was happy with her four door sedan. She is now on her third minivan. She drives it every single day, going shopping, and ferrying children to and from school, work, sports etc.

The most recent one I bought her has a number of options that she “didn’t need”. She said she didn’t need a backup camera but this one has one. She recently said that she would never get another van without this option. DVD player? What does she need that for? It only took a short time for her to learn that this was an ideal way to keep the kids quiet in the back of “Nana’s Bus”. A power lift gate seemed lazy to her. She thought she could continue doing this manually like she did with her old minivans. Now it’s push a button it opens, push a button it closes. Same with the power sliding doors. Another win!

The next thing I got her that she “didn’t need” was a cell phone. She said if anyone wanted to reach her they could call on our home phone. I have bought her several phones since then. From a brick phone to a flip phone to whatever phone was currently available. Today she can surf the web with her phone. She panics if she misplaces her phone now. We occasionally have to dial her phone number so she can find where she left it.

She recently dropped her phone and shattered the screen. We had to opt for expedited shipping to get a replacement for her. Of course this new one is a different size from her old one so we had to buy a new case for this. She also bought a small purse to carry this around so she can misplace this too. She has developed a malady that I call “cell phone hand “where she is frequently carrying it with her left hand.

We have Roombas. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is a robotic vacuum cleaner. You push a button and it takes off. It wanders around aimlessly cleaning your floors and when it is done, drives itself back to the charging station. You can leave the house and it will operate without any human intervention at all. It doesn’t get any easier than this and it does a darn good job.

She didn’t want one of these either. “I can vacuum the floor” was her way of saying thank you, “I can carry the vacuum cleaner down from the upstairs closet whenever I need to vacuum.” The vacuum weighs almost as much as she does. I don’t think the very expensive machine I bought her has seen the light of day since the first Roomba arrived.  We now have two of these. She calls them her upstairs maid and her downstairs maid. We have also worn one of these out. Again, I ordered a replacement online. Our upstairs maid got a real workout until the replacement Roomba arrived. Our upstairs maid even talks to us in either French or English. Knida sexy to have a French maid living upstairs.

She loved to read and would go to the library at least once a week to get new books. She would load up a large bag and walk the 1.1 miles to get there.  She would spend quite a bit of time selecting books, refill her bag and then walk back home.

Enter a Kindle. She didn’t want this either. She said that she could easily go to get the books she needed and that the Kindle was just too expensive. She used this via our Wi-Fi to surf the web, stay in touch with people, look for recipes, etc.  It’s not just for reading. She wore the first one out recently. It started to have a mind of it’s own. It would change screens when it wanted, wouldn’t charge and generally became a pain. I had to replace it. Until it arrived, she struggled with her old one.

Of course the new one was slightly larger than her old one so the case wouldn’t fit. We had to buy a new case. It also worked differently than her old one so she had to learn how to use it. The last problem was we had to load all her Wi-Fi passwords, Facebook accounts, Emails, etc. on the new one. This took the better part of a weekend.

Yes technology is scary at first but once you get used to it, it becomes indispensable.

Norb is a writer and an early adopter who currently uses 2 laptops and is on his fifth cell phone. He can be reached at nrug@juno.com.

Milkbone, Buffalo

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For 10 years of my life I worked at Milkbone in Buffalo where I was a maintenance man on the packing floor. A large part of my day was spent sitting around waiting for a break down. I didn’t have a lot to do most of the time and as they say “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” The guys I worked with and I would come up with creative ways to prank the rest of the employees.

One day I super glued a quarter to the floor in front of the coffee machine. We all then sat at “our” table and watched. People would see it and look around to see if anyone was watching them. They would then try to pick it up. One guy even tried to kick it with his heel. They knew they had been had when they would hear us all laughing. This was good for a full day of laughs for only a quarter.

Another time I caught a bull frog on my way home. The following day I brought it to work in an old lunch box. At dinner time the plant nurse was fixing her meal in the lunch room. Right next to her was a microwave oven. I took the lunch box to the counter and purchased a buttered bulky roll from a vending machine. I opened the roll and slapped the frog inside.

The frog wasn’t very pleased about this and was kicking like mad. I turned to the nurse and asked if she knew how to operate the microwave and she said she did. I said great and pulled out the roll with the frog in it and asked her what you did with the legs. I don’t think she ate dinner that night.

Speaking of legs, another prank we pulled involved a false pair of legs that I built, complete with pants and shoes. We would put this sticking out from under a pallet of product and watch people’s expression as they came around the corner and saw the legs hanging out. The results were hilarious. This pair of legs would disappear and reappear periodically.

I don’t know who was doing this but I suspect multiple people. One of the next times “the legs” appeared was during a health inspection. They were stashed behind a shelving unit in my shop when the health inspector and the plant manager spotted them. The manager yelled at the legs, kicked them and finally grabbed them and pulled them out. We were called to the office where we all denied any knowledge of the legs.

The legs were confiscated but they were easy to duplicate and I made another pair that week. We placed them around until the bottom of a flour silo fell open. It dumped the entire contents on the floor, something like 50,000 pounds of flour. A buddy of mine took the legs and buried them deep in the pile of flour. Several days later while they were shoveling up the mess the legs popped out. The person doing the shoveling took one look, walked out the door and went home without punching out.

I had the ability to lock the men’s room door that had an inside bolt from the outside using a bit of string. People could smoke in the men’s room at the time. A man was leaning on the window sill enjoying a cigarette when I locked the door. We then ran upstairs and got a piece of conduit to tap on the window above his head. This is where the story went south.

My buddy Jerry hit the glass too hard causing two small holes in it. The smoker hit the ground and crawled over to the door to find it locked. Quite some time later he told us he thought he was being set up because he was fooling around with a married woman and he thought her husband had locked the door and was  at him.

When I was building my tool cart, we got a call that a packaging machine was malfunctioning. My buddy Joe, picked up his tool pouch, got into my cart and I locked the doors. I wheeled it over to the broken down machine and listened to the operator explain the problem. At that point I unlocked my tool cart and let Joe out. He then repaired the problem. When he was done, he climbed back into my cart and I closed and locked the door. Then I proceeded to wheel him back into the shop.

I think the best prank I perpetrated was on my last day working there. Over the 10 years working there I managed to figure out how to get into every room and office in the place including all the front offices. I also knew the security guard’s routine and where he would be at any given time. This allowed me to dodge the guard.

They had this newfangled electronic phone system just installed and I managed to get ahold of an operating manual. This system had the capability of forwarding calls from one phone to another by punching in a three digit code. I programmed the phones to forward all calls to the plant manager’s office. I never heard anything about this but I can imagine the havoc this caused because every phone had to be reprogrammed. I can’t remember all the practical jokes I pulled while I was there this is just a few of them.

Like Luca Fortunato an electrician at Nabisco used to say, “At least we laugh.”