Tonight is trash night! The night that I wheel the stuff out to the curb…
That might not sound exciting to you, but last week I made an interesting discovery while performing that mundane task: My trash cart has instructions on it.
Does yours? If it doesn’t, how do you know how to operate it? Surely, surely you don’t just wing it the way I did for all those years. (It can be done, but I am loathe to recommend it, lest I be sued if things go wrong.) I’ve had that blue thing for I don’t know how many years now, and to think — I had never been properly briefed on its proper use.
This reminds me of the guy in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish who dropped out and built an “asylum” (an inside-out house, with the interior walls facing out, and the brick and shingles and stuff indoors) to keep the world in after he read a set of instructions on a box of toothpicks, and decided that’s it; the whole world has gone over the edge:
Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
I felt sort of that way when I read the above instructions. Who knows what exciting discoveries I’ll make when I take out the trash tonight, if only I pay attention?
May you never play in or around…
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Now I see why it’s been so danged hard to get ours to the curb. I’ve been doing step 3 before step 2.
Conan O’Brien, in a memorable commencement speech at Harvard, said, “Congratulations–now for the rest of your life, do one simple thing wrong, and you hear, ‘Well, I didn’t go to Harvard, but I know…’–Once, just once, you forget that your underwear goes inside your clothes, and it’s ‘Well, I didn’t go to Harvard…'”
Well, you didn’t go to Harvard…
Hey, they’ve seen the SAT scores for South Carolina. I’m surprised they didn’t just put pictures on it.
You know those same instructions could be applied to how Alvin Greene won the primary…
You sure that was on a box of “toothpicks”?
My bride and I went out for wings last night. Todd, the young man who waited on us, thoughtfully supplied us with moist towelettes to clean our fingers with after dinner. Fortunately, the package had instructions as shown here.
OK–that link should look like this:
http://www.mrivey.com/Images/freshnap.jpg