I was waiting for my friend Mary to come over for Girls’ Night Out.
“Where have you been?” I asked her when she finally arrived, so late that I was actually ready.
“Laundry,” she snapped. “Don’t ask.”
Of course, I asked. “What’s wrong? Is your washing machine broken?”
“No, worse. Far worse. We have a brand new one.”
“And that’s bad… why?”
“Because I have no idea how it works! My old one was perfect — until it died. If I wanted to run it, it ran. If I wanted to let things soak for an hour, they would soak. If I wanted it to get half-way through a cycle then sit overnight, and finish in the morning, that’s what it did. But now I have this new machine, and it has so many buttons and dials, it may as well have none, for all the good they do me.”
“Hmm. Sounds difficult.”
“It’s hopeless! It needs to know what kind of fabric everything is, cotton or silk or polyester, and what percentage, and do I want the delicate or the time-release or some other kind of cycle — it’s making my head spin when the only thing spinning should be the laundry! Tell me, how does anybody deal with all those buttons?”
“I don’t think anybody does,” I told her.
“So why do they put them all there?”
“I bet they’re just for the salesmen to impress each other, in the appliance stores.”
“Then maybe I’ll bring the salesmen my next load of laundry!”
“You need to relax,” I told her, “and join the group. Here, have a smoothie.”
She took a long sip before she spoke again. “Um, Judy, I hate to complain but this isn’t very smooth.”
“Oops! Sorry about that. I guess I haven’t quite finished reading the blender’s instruction manual.”
Luckily, our friend Chris came through the kitchen just then and finished blending Mary’s drink. “Tell us the truth, Judy,” Chris asked. “Did you ever even start reading the instructions?”
“What’s the point? They lost me at ‘find the control panel, as depicted in figure one point seven.’” I’ve had calculus homework that was easier to make sense of!”
Just then, the kitchen phone rang.
“Oh, don’t answer that,” I warned everybody. “Let it go to voicemail.”
“Do you ever answer those?” asked Mary.
“Of course I do, eventually. Why?”
“Because I called you a few months ago and left you a message, and I never heard back.”
“Let’s pretend it erased itself in a power failure — what did you call about?”
“I was just calling to offer you one of the free tickets I won to see ‘Hamilton.’ I figured you must have been out of town, or sick, or you would have called me back.”
Yikes! The truth is, I haven’t listened to any of those messages for years.
It started out with my being unsure which number buttons to push, for fear of erasing something by mistake. Then I didn’t have time to listen to it all. Now I’m just afraid of what I’ll find out if I do. Who knows? There might be another ticket-goer begging, or perhaps a job offer. Heck, maybe I’ve missed out on receiving a Nobel prize!
Just then, music started from somewhere. We all jumped.
“What is that?” Mary wanted to know. “Is it a poltergeist? Is your kitchen haunted?”
By the time she finished asking I had remembered. “It’s just my clock radio, starting itself up whenever it wants to. This happens every day — at least, when I’m home.” I leaned over and started randomly pushing buttons on the front of the clock. Eventually, the music stopped.
“Why does it do that?
“I have no idea. I suppose that once upon a time, somebody thought an alarm at 7 p.m. was a good idea,” I answered.
Chris pushed a different button, and a little hatch in the side of the radio opened. “Well would ya look at that,” she said. “Somebody left a CD in here!”
“I guess that explains the music,” I said. “But I don’t know how I’ll ever turn it entirely off. I guess I’ll just have to live with it.”
And so it goes — another day, in a world with too many buttons.
