Post #501 - Mental Images - Part 1

A few days ago, I got a much appreciated e-mail from ChicagoLady that brought a smile to my face.

After reading it, and thinking about it for a moment, an event that happened over 30 years ago quickly entered my mind and just about as quickly it left, leaving only a mental image. As LadyStyx might have said, "It could of been a Kodak moment," but sometimes we don't need the camera and the film for something to "stick in our heads" for a long, long time.

The e-mail began:

'Twas the Day After Christmas - "On the gridger board, align the zagenator, whindler and biceptor units 2.725 inches apart."

by NED CRABB

The following instructions, coffee-stained and torn, were found in a box amid a jumble of tools and mechanical parts on the sidewalk outside a Manhattan apartment building along with discarded trees and other holiday trash. Just visible inside the box was a gift tag that read "Merry Christmas to Johnny. Love, Mom and Dad."

Congratulations! You are the lucky owner of the Model ZVZ156 Vangplotz High-Digenation Wide-Scringe Framulator, Series 7000, with fernillated quick-response WorzelT and 20,000 zurlebytes of scringe-view quorms. Follow these simple instructions and soon you will enjoy untold hours of pleasure.

IMPORTANT: Begin by lifting out the plune-wrapped section marked "Lithinode Distrillitor" and refer to the blue-colored picrochit-regulator intensity chart on the side. If the chart has the fuchsia-colored code BRZ3434, your unit requires an AC4(x2z3) power influrger. Extract the influrger pack from the distrillitor's surge-protection splange and check the code. If you have an AC5(x3z4) influrger instead of an AC4(x2z3) model, or if the intensity chart is colored burnt orange instead of blue, then call your local Vangplotz "Speedy Geek" home service provider at 1-800-UONHOLD. (WARNING: If the intensity chart is colored silver with pink stripes, then your distrillitor must be activated in person by a Vangplotz lithinode technician within 48 to 72 hours. Vangplotz service centers are conveniently located in the Yellow Dog, Ala., industrial campus and the six-story Grendel Mall-City in Frozen Badger, N.D.)

...and on it went in this vein, listing the needed assembly tools and going into great details for steps 1 and 2 of part 1, where almost mercifully, it left off.

I smiled at the "call your local Vangplotz "Speedy Geek" home service provider" and the "conveniently located in the Yellow Dog, Ala., industrial campus and the six-story Grendel Mall-City in Frozen Badger, N.D." since neither location would be convenient for me, if indeed, these towns actually exist.




This e-mail reminded me of a birthday gift my old next door neighbor got many years ago - he was a really all-round nice, kind, and decent run of the mill guy that sang in his Church's choir every Sunday morning. He served in the Navy as a cook in the south Pacific, married a woman that made his life hard (she was a chronic gossip, hypochondriac and nag), had three girls, and if you ever needed a hand, he was there to lend his - he just wasn't the brightest bulb in the box - but that didn't matter.

His birthday fell on the same day as one of his daughters, so he was often "left out" of the birthday celebration spotlight, but one year his birthday gift from his three daughters was a outdoor Bar-B-Que grill from Sears. It came with "some assembly" required, and the instructions were printed on some badly mimeographed paper and poorly translated from some other language (possibly Chinese) and had hand-drawn sketches of the parts (that only vaguely resembled the real parts) - the assembly instructions were like two or more dozen pages long.

He must of stared at them for a week or two and one day while I was cutting grass out back (I was maybe 12-14 years old at the time and this was one of my chores) he ambled over and asked me if I would mind "looking at this thing he had gotten" to see if it was even possible to assemble it. I guess even then I was a thought of as a "Speedy Geek."

I went over as soon as I finished the lawn - and oh my, the Grill was a hideous shade of brown and had what looked to be 1,000 pieces. He had out a screw driver and set of socket wrenches and had assembled absolutely none of it. I looked at the directions and I must of groaned out loud because he said "Well, that bad?" And I just kind of nodded - he had some assembly instructions for one of his girl's bikes (which has also been a gift that year) mixed in the bunch and that was the page he had started with - anyway I discretely moved the pages around until I had them in the right order (and the ones for the bike at the bottom) and just said something like, "Wow.. this is going to take a while."

And it did... My younger brother and I spent two days assembling this hideously colored BBQ grill (it had an electric motor to turn the spit and all that) and we ended up with 3 dozen parts left over. For a change of pace, I put the girl's bike together on the side when the old guy wasn't hanging around.

He came over to my folks house a week or two after I had assembled the BBQ Grill - knocked on the door and when I opened it, he ducked a bit under the door frame, being quite tall and reached in, shook my hand, gave me a wink, and said, "Thanks for doing the bike - my girl thinks I'm a hero now." I just smiled back and said, "anytime."

I think that BBQ grill sat out back of his place for nearly a decade. It eventually rusted away and if I had to say so, it looked better and better the rustier it got.

No camera or film required, I can still see that bemused, proud, happy, goofy, grin on his face - he wanted so badly to be a great Dad to his girls - and he really was...