Tales from the Shark Tank

I’m concerned about a friend of mine. She lives in Florida now, and Florida does not look like a particularly good place to be. I don’t know where in Florida she is, so I can’t make an educated guess as to how badly her area has been clobbered. On the other hand, judging from the news, there isn’t much of the state that hasn’t been pretty well trashed by the hurricane.

I sent e-mail, but I’m fully expecting it to be a while before she can answer it. So Kerry, if you’re reading, please let me know how you and yours are doing, ok?

Several weeks ago, headed for an interview, Wick asked if I needed our cell phone that day. I said I did not, and he unplugged it from its charger. Thereafter it vanished, which is to say that he couldn’t find it and thought he’d put it down somewhere between the charger and the front door.

The good news is that the cell phone is now found. He used it to call me. It’s been in his car all along. The bad news is that, as he put it, he seems destined not to have a car stereo. It was removed from his car in our driveway. This is the second time he’s had one stolen in less than six months. The first one was an unpleasant surprise, but the location was the parking lot of a dying mall where he used to play chess one night a week, and it was no great surprise. (That mall, Eastgate for you local types, is no longer dying; it is dead.) This time is more disquieting. We tend to think of this as a very safe neighborhood. There’s some pranking – we do, after all, live across the street from a high school. There was a period when cheap lawn chairs were walking off. Wick’s theory, which seemed logical, was that teens were partying in the tree farm between our subdivision and the next and taking easily accessed chairs for the purpose. This is bigger, and more disturbing. Though I doubt we will do so until we’re replacing Wick’s car, the stereo itself is easily replaced. The sense of safety is not.

The sink in the master bath has been running at a pace best described as “glacial” for quite some time. Saturday impatience and time attained cosmic correspondence, and we decided to do something about it.

Now, we’ve tried drain-snake, chemicals, plunger, and chemicals again. The basic problem is that the sink itself has rusted considerably by the overflow drain and sent quantities of metal chips down into the pipes. These, in turn, make marvelous crud-catchers. So none of the things we tried worked for more than half a day. It was time for dismantlement. This was accomplished with minimal cursing, made interesting by the fact that Wick has the strength to turn bolts and the like that do not wish to be disturbed, but I’m the one who knows how everything is put together and therefore how it comes apart. At least this way my back-seat plumbing advice is solicited rather than the reverse.

We uncovered a number of things, including some amazing smells and what I can only describe as “gunk”. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find evidence of the weapons not found in Iraq. There was a point at which Wick fled while I turned on the exhaust fan and opened every nearby window. For some reason, I seem to have the strongest stomach in the house where that sort of thing is concerned.

So we got it cleaned out and running, whereupon a test for drips showed one…directly from the bottom of the sink, which is evidently beginning to rust through where the pipe is connected. Sigh. I’ve got it sealed with plumber’s tape at the moment, but now we know what our next project is. We will be replacing the bathroom sink. And anyone who claims I am all wet will be telling no more than the literal truth.

I’ve been handling a few private cases that have come my way since the Agency cut me loose. (The more I hear from friends, the more grateful I am to have gotten out when I did, but I digress.) In the course of that I’ve had to deal with a suburban bank manager, who doesn’t get much call to set up things like attorney escrow accounts.

Now, I can deal with that. She’s a wonderful person, and beyond willing to keep at the problem until she resolves it. What boggles my mind is her awe of my computer skills. She’s about my age, so I can’t believe that it’s a matter of lack of opportunity. But when we needed to locate state rules or even phone numbers that weren’t in the local book, I had to talk her through it. When it came time to open two applications at once, I talked her through that. At one point, she said that if her own regulations didn’t so strictly forbid it, she’d simply trade me places and let me find what she needed on her own computer. As it was, I talked her through the search utility.

None of this is rocket science, brain surgery, or anything else particularly more complicated than driving a car. I remember being a bit perplexed initially, and there have been times since when I’ve been lazy and let Wick figure out something new and show me rather than do it myself. But that’s laziness, not inability. These things are machines. They are very literal machines. They do what you tell them to do. And I am just wog-boggled, as Dorothea puts it, that some people are still afraid the darn things.

I just saw an ad on my browser for a bank. Either they need a proofreader, or someone is very opinionated.

The institution in question? “First Notional Bank of ______”.