Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Misnomer

So, awhile back was Thanksgiving, ja? Bravo was showing back-to-back turkey episodes of The West Wing and my favorite one was called, “The Indians In The Lobby”. In it, our loveable (and sadly fictitious) president calls the Butterball Hotline for advice on cooking stuffing. It went like this:

Prez: Stuffing should be stuffed inside the turkey, am I correct?
Butter: It can also be baked in the casserole dish.
Prez: Well, then we'd have to call it something else, wouldn't we?

Its especially funny for me ‘cause around this time I had a drooling, gibbering, miscreant zombie-crack whore screaming in my face as I drove an apartment building down the hwy at 70 mph all the while pressing the panic button attached to what’s called a DriveCam. –btw, a neat little aside about the DriveCam setup, its actually kinda cool. See, its constantly recording and when it gets activated, it will save to internal memory everything that it saw 10 seconds before the activating event and 10 seconds after. Neat, huh? This way, when the Virgin Mary gets sooooo worked up that she spits on you in the course of her narco-psychotic episode, you can rest easy knowing that even if you take 9 whole seconds to wipe away spittle or overcome shock or wonder about things like hep-b or HIV, even IF you take all 9 seconds- if you press the panic button, it will have saved to memory the actual incident and the disgusted (and yet somehow unsurprised) look on you face for future litigation. Or the gag reel. Or funniest infectious diseases or something. Sounds groovy, right? Well imagine my surprise when I pressed the shiny, candy-like button and nothing happened. Nada. Not a gorram thing.
Well, of course the situation was eventually resolved, Souxie Homemaker suddenly remembered a PTA meeting she had to get to so she got off right there in the middle of the highway. (hey, it was safe… honest) Thoughtful drone that I was, I dutifully jotted down the little tidbit about the utter failure of the panic button, caused a little more trouble for the evening then went home.
The next day went predictably with my good friend getting into trouble over the incident because A) he had allowed me access to a marker and a dry-erase board and B) the handling of the previous evening’s situation didn’t include a visit from the police to ensure the safety of the maniac-psycho (who, btw, may have actually been Margot Kidder) when she was callously deposited on the highway. That very evening when I was getting ready to go home I found a note from the maintenance staff concerning the panic button. It said simply, “Press and hold panic button for 10 seconds to activate.”
10 seconds. Hmm.
But the device will only record 10 seconds previous to and after activation. Wouldn’t this simply cause the device to capture 10 seconds of me holding the gorram button? NOT the preceding crazy-bitch antics that led up to WANTING to press the gorram button? Were we expected to prognosticate an incident using our finely honed ass-hat spidey-sense?

Me: A panic button should be able to be used in a panic, am I correct?
Them: Actually, the button will only activate the device after pressing and holding it for 10 seconds. Because we hate you.
Me: Well, then we'd have to call it something else, wouldn't we?
Them: Die. And don’t write stuff on the dry-erase board anymore.

1 comment:

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