Cameron Bane

Notes from all over--

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

 

We had to have the garage door repaired. The Sears repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a 'large' enough motor on the opener. I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one Sears made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower. He shook his head and said, "Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower." I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4. He said, "NO, it's not. Four is larger than two..."

We haven't used Sears repair since.

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

 

My daughter and I went through the McDonald's take-out window and I gave the clerk a $5 bill. Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her a quarter. She said, "You gave me too much money." I said, "Yes I know, but this way you can just give me a dollar bill back." She sighed and went to get the manager who asked me to repeat my request. I did so, and he handed me back the quarter, and said "We're sorry but we cannot do that kind of thing." The clerk then proceeded to give me back $1 and 75 cents in change.

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road. The reason: "Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore."

 

IDIOT SIGHTING IN FOOD SERVICE:

My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for 'minimal lettuce.' He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce.

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, "Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?" To which I replied, "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?" He smiled knowingly and nodded, "That's why we ask."

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

 

The stop-light on the corner buzzes when it's safe to cross the street. I was crossing with an intellectually challenged co-worker of mine. She asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red. Appalled, she responded, "What on earth are blind people doing driving?" She was a probation officer in Wichita, KS.

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

 

I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the sake of her life, couldn't understand why her system would not turn on. A deputy with the Dallas County Sheriff's office, no less.

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

 

When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. "Hey," I announced to the technician, "It's open!" His reply, "I know. I already got that side." This was at the Ford dealership in Canton, MS.

 

IDIOT SIGHTING:

 

When I left Hawaii and was transferred to FL, I still had the Hawaiian plates on my car, as my car was shipped from Hawaii . I was parking somewhere (I can't remember) and a guy asked me "Wow, you drove from Hawaii to here?" I looked at him and quickly said, "Yep. I took the Hawaii/San Francisco Bridge." He nodded his head and said, "Cool!"

 

STAY ALERT! They walk among us... and they vote.

Fifteen years ago a freak wind storm knocked out power to Cincinnati for nearly a week, and one of the first things we bought when we were able was a 3500-watt portable generator. In the following decade-and-a-half we only fired it up a couple times a year to keep the seals fresh ... until two weeks ago. This time Cincinnati was hit by an ice storm that obliterated power to nearly a hundred thousand people. So there my wife Barb and I were, in a dark house that was rapidly getting colder, but this time we pulled out Old Sparky for real.

 

We gassed him up, and for the next twenty-four hours--and as long as we kept him fueled--we had enough juice to run a couple of space heaters and a floor lamp (we could even unplug one of the heaters long enough to fire up the microwave when needed; which we did). Between the heaters and our fireplace there was enough to keep us relatively warm, and if the outage had kept it up, we could have shunted power to our refrigerator and upright freezer long enough our to keep from losing anything.

 

Moral of the story? If you live in an area with an iffy climate, you could do worse than spending a couple hundred bucks on one of these bad boys.

 

Thus endeth the lesson.

Have you ever walked out on a bad movie? For that matter, have you ever sat through a bad movie and then you WISHED you had walked out? For Barb and me, the latter would be a tossup between A Clockwork Orange and All That Jazz.

 

You?

It's funny. A person can live their entire life the right way and then something unexpected happens, leading them to a bad decision. And that one wrong choice--that one single lapse of judgment made in a split second--changes it all.

 

So consider: should that person be judged for their last bad act, or should their life be viewed as a totality, and they be given a second chance? 

 

Something to think about, no?

For a great piece of proto-SF, download a copy of The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. Written a hundred years before the invention of teh intertoobz, it perfectly limns a society so introverted its inhabitants can only interact with each other over television screens. And then it tells what happens when ... well, when the machine stops. Chilling.