Sunday, January 17, 2016

Val People Problems

Hey! Remember the week before Christmas, when Val got a brand new Acadia?

We took it to my sister the ex-mayor's wife's house on Christmas day. And as I was getting into the passenger side (I like to let Hick think he's in charge sometimes), I was not pleased to see a smudge on the ceiling over the door. It was tiny fingers. Almost like a child's size hand. No worker in the dealership's auto shop could have such tiny fingers, unless maybe he was Charla from Season 5 of The Amazing Race. But no child could have such greasy fingers unless he worked in an auto dealership shop. Such a conundrum.

Anyhoo...I told Hick he needed to drive that Acadia to work, and stop by the dealership, and have them clean it with their special made-for-Acadia ceiling upholstery foaming cleanser. But Hick took matters into his own hands, which are much bigger than the hands of whoever left that black handprint in my new Acadia.

"I think I got it all out, Val. I used a Wet One." Oh, dear. Not only did Hick scrub away a greasy handprint from my new Acadia with a pilling, fibrous-crumb-leaving baby wipe...he called it a WET ONE! Does anybody even use those anymore? It is SO 1980s!

But that is neither here nor there. That's not the point of this story. It's just a rabbit trail. An excuse to throw in the picture of Val's new Acadia again. And to point out that even a brand new car can have its faults.

So it came as no surprise to Val when, the week after Christmas, she got a part in the mail. It was nothing she had ordered. But it had her name on it. From a fulfillment center. So Val just assumed that something had been left off her new Acadia, and was now being sent to her, courtesy of the dealer. After all, we'd been getting thank you cards and Christmas cards and formal letters from the dealership and General Motors bigwigs every other day.

I laid that part on the kitchen counter, near Hick's cache of bananas, where he would see it every morning, and may one evening decide to put it in my new Acadia.

I figured it was a speaker cover. You know. Like to a little speaker in the door, or down under the dashboard. Please excuse this view, which was taken by Genius after he deleted the picture taken by The Pony with his new hand-me-down phone that used to belong to Genius, upon which he discovered that Genius had not deleted all of his photos. There went the pr0n! That's what he gets for speaking up.

Anyhoo...Genius is not so careful taking pictures for me, showing the veneer ripped off our coffee table the week after we got it, by Genius his own self, who unwrapped my Christmas gift of a mouse pad with a bumpy rest for my wrist, and promptly peeled off the backing, and stuck it to the table. Perhaps one should actually read about the product before explaining how the new gift works. And...that's not an orb, but the reflection of a recessed ceiling SPOTLIGHT that Hick saw fit to install two of right over the side of the living room ceiling between the La-Z-Boy and the TV. Uh huh. Val retreats to her dark basement lair so as not to feel like she's trapped in the interrogation room of a squalid police station.

We're getting there. Don't give up. We're almost to the point of this story.

Genius came home a day before he had announced, to switch out his new phone and the old one he was giving The Pony. Upon sauntering around the homestead, a buddy in tow, navigating the end-of-the-work-week mess of the kitchen, scamming half of The Pony's sweet & sour chicken, all of his fried rice, two fortune cookies, some stale Christmas cookies left from the gift of my best old ex-teaching buddy Mabel, and the very last tub of Chex Mix...Genius exclaimed

"OH! I'm glad you got my French Press filter!"

Screech of phonograph needle on an LP. The sound that Tim Allen made on Home Improvement. WTF?

Genius was waving my speaker cover for my new Acadia!

"What do you mean?"

"My French Press that you got me for Christmas. It had a card in it saying you could get a free filter. I guess they sent it to you because they sent the French Press to your address. This will be handy to have."

"I thought that was a part for my new Acadia!"

"Ha ha! You and technology! I can't believe you thought that was a car part!"

"Well...I guess that explains why your father has been ignoring it for weeks, and never put it in my new Acadia."

Val people problems. You can't make this up.

10 comments:

  1. This post made me guffaw. Once. A nonproductive laugh. A dry one.

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    1. Maybe you should see your doctor for that. But don't try to look at your file! You might find out that they've labeled you "difficult."

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  2. What could possibly be so bad in a French newspaper that it would have to be filtered? And how would that work anyway?

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    1. I see what you did there! The way I understand it, French people drink coffee out of their newspaper! I haven't asked Genius the specifics yet, but that's what I've deduced from his comments so far.

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  3. I would not have known either, unless the package had an explanation ...... You would think they could have at least put a name on the item!

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    1. I searched EVERYWHERE! No writing on the plastic package, no insert to tell what it was, nothing on the outside of the little square flat cardboard envelope that it came in.

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  4. Technology. It's a mystery best left to the young.

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    1. Yes. Just like youth is wasted on them. They act like it's all routine.

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  5. Guess this is one time Hick's way of doing things (procrastination?) worked out for the better. Still, if that French filter had gone over a car speaker what kind of sounds would come out? Ouah incroyable!

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    1. Heh, heh. Maybe every song would have come out sounding like "Alouette."

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