Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (12 page)

On the highway, there's always the driver who passes you at eighty and then slows down in front of you to fifty-four. My blood boils.

The next new gadget they might consider building into our cars is a hypnotic windshield wiper that talks:
“Don't fight. Don't fight. Don't fight.”

There ought to be some legal standard for what can be called a tag sale. A real tag sale is a great American tradition that also may be called a garage sale or a yard or lawn sale, but now there are imposters who are ruining tag sales for the rest of us.

The original idea was that, since once in about every ten years the average American household accumulates a lot of things the owners no longer use but they can't bring themselves to throw away, they have a friendly little sale on their front lawn, in their backyard or in their garage. The spoilers are making a business of tag sales. Some neighborly-appearing con artists have a tag-sale sign they bring out every year to trap unsuspecting passersby.

The unwritten rule about these sales always has been that they offer no newly acquired items specially bought to be resold. No tag sale was ever intended to be a bargain basement. Just as soon as someone starts having a tag sale every summer, you know these people are not playing the game fair and square. They are in the tag-sale business and can't be trusted. Chances are, they travel around to other tag sales, buy junk, mark it up and sell it on their own front yards as genuine homemade junk when, in fact, it's imported.

Naturally, exceptions will be allowed to the resale rule. If something is acquired at a tag sale that seems like a good idea to buy at the time but which turns out to be a terrible idea, this is a legitimate item for resale.

Any longtime tag-sale devotee knows the genuine tag-sale items when he sees them. The following are examples of genuine tag- or garage-sale items:

—An old bicycle, slightly rusty, usually junior-size.

—A souvenir plate with a picture of Richard and Pat Nixon on it.

—A bundle of
National Geographic
magazines for the years 1951 through 1953, tied with string.

—Two used jigsaw puzzles with some missing pieces.

—A hand-push lawn mower that hasn't been used since the power mower was invented.

—A Christmas-present scarf, unused and still in its original wrapping with the see-through plastic cover.

—A set of six cute little pronged forks with tiny handles shaped to look like ears of corn, designed to hold ears of corn while they're being eaten.

—An old iron with a frayed cord.

—A wooden box of rusty old tools.

—Bad wood carvings or porcelain figurines.

—Several unopened copies of
Reader's Digest Condensed Books
.

Almost anything goes in a tag sale, but it must be an average American household's attempt to unload junk it doesn't want. Money should not be the first consideration in a genuine tag sale.

In all my years of tag-sale buying, my favorite purchases, aside from seventeen Underwood No. 5 typewriters I've lugged home, have been a six-foot wooden toboggan, a brass coal scuttle, an old, small wooden plane, a set of four heavy wheels eight inches in diameter with rubber tires, and a souvenir mug with Spiro Agnew's picture on it.

It's possible to get lucky at a tag sale. People look for that painting worth $10,000 that they buy for $12 because it has been hidden in someone's attic for forty years, but that doesn't happen at tag sales in real life. Those are just newspaper stories. In real life, the old painting you buy for $12 is actually worth only $3.

The luckiest you can be at a tag sale is to see a big, homely old chair you want to buy and discover it's too big to fit into your car. Anything you can't buy at a tag sale, for whatever reason, is usually a blessing.

I call on Congress to pass tag-sale legislation that will protect this great American institution from ending up as just another chain store on the stock exchange.

There is so much competition for our attention that everyone is using up all our good superlatives to get it. I say “using up” because there's just so often you can use a superlative before it loses its comparative effectiveness.

Advertisers and salesmen of all kinds are describing things in ultimate terms in order to get us to buy. Even friends talking together about everyday things describe them in superlatives.

Here are some conversations you're apt to hear:

“How was your weekend?”

“Terrific.”

A weekend experience is never described with any of our middle-ground adjectives like “good.” If a weekend wasn't either “great” or “terrific,” it was “a real disaster” or “the pits.”

If you go out for dinner and you're asked the next day how it was, you say: “Absolutely delicious. The best I ever tasted.”

“How was the dessert?”

“Fabulous. Absolutely fabulous.”

In foreign affairs, nothing is merely a “problem.” Everything is described as “a crisis in foreign affairs.” Or, “The United States faces its worst crisis in this decade.”

When local police find cocaine in someone's apartment, it is usually described as “one of the biggest drug busts in history.”

Movie actors and good athletes are no longer mere stars. They're all superstars. Never mind that you never heard of them before. Someone who is only a “star” is practically an unknown. Superstars play football in the Super Bowl. They're “world class” athletes.

On television and in the newspapers, games are hardly ever simply “won.” Michigan “crushes” Ohio State or Ohio State “destroys” Michigan. A good play by an athlete is always described as “unbelievable.” The word “awesome” is beginning to get quite a bit of play too.

Book reviewers and movie critics don't ever seem to read or see anything that's average. Books are “brilliant” or “trash.” A movie may be either “provocative,” “superb drama” or “spectacular.”

Every movie I see advertised these days is called “One of the year's ten best.”

No movie is ever “funny” anymore. The movie is at least “hilarious.” The comedy also may be “a sheer delight.” You wouldn't want to see a movie that was just a plain “delight,” without being a “sheer” one. One movie being advertised now is called “a raucous rib-tickler … Steve Martin is savagely funny … one of the year's ten best films.”

Some serious movies are “haunting.”

A movie with dancers in it may be “dazzling” or “mind-boggling.” The fact that most of us don't understand exactly what it would mean to have our mind “boggled” doesn't stop people from using the word.

Movies also may be “stupendous” or “monumental in scope.” The photography is “gorgeous” and chances are the movie has been “brilliantly directed” by someone.

When a store has a sale, it doesn't simply “reduce” prices. Its prices
are DRASTICALLY REDUCED!!! Often its reductions are described as ONCE IN A LIFETIME BARGAINS!!!

For some reason, it seems more acceptable for a commercial enterprise, like a store or a movie theater, to use nothing but superlatives in describing the things they're trying to sell. We all know you have to take advertising with a grain of salt. It seems too bad that our ordinary, everyday conversation between friends has degenerated to the point where the frequent and thoughtless use of the superlative as a trick to attract our attention has lessened the importance of language generally.

Thank you very, very much for listening, Readers. You're the greatest.

When you go through the office door into the waiting room, there's usually a receptionist behind the desk. Sometimes she's behind a glass partition because she also answers the phones. (I have never seen a male receptionist, and as a male, I resent it.)

“May I help you?” the receptionist says, nice as pie, just as if she really wants to help you. You know darn well she hates you but she tries to act as if she's helping. You can tell she hates you, because if she didn't hate you she wouldn't make you feel as though you didn't have any business there.

After taking your name she says, “Please sit down.”

She doesn't say it in a nice way as though she wants you to be comfortable. She doesn't mean it when she says “Please.” It's more of an order she's giving. “SIT DOWN!” is what she's really saying.

Very often I don't want to sit down. I don't feel like sitting down. I'm not tired. Whether it's the office of a dentist, a lawyer or a tax accountant, I'm more apt to be nervous than tired.

I don't want to give receptionists the idea I'm relaxed, either. I don't want them to think time doesn't matter to me and they can keep me waiting as long as they feel like it once they have my weight off my feet. That's why I always remain standing.

Gradually, a clearly visible tension mounts between me and the receptionist until she reluctantly admits that the person I've come to
see will see me. You can tell that, if she had her way, I wouldn't get in until I'd darn well sat down the way she told me to.

I don't know why receptionists, whose job ought to be to make people feel at home, are so unfriendly. They have a way of making you feel unwanted every time.

At home at night receptionists must practice making people feel unwanted. They have phrases they use.

“What is this in reference to?” they ask.

If you wanted to talk to a receptionist about something, you'd have made the appointment with her in the first place. It's none of her business what you want to talk to her boss about. Maybe you're someone who wants the job she has. How would that sound if you told her that?

“Yes. I'd like to talk to your boss about getting your job. You're such a sourpuss that he's trying to find someone nice.”

That's what I always feel like saying.

Receptionists have a hundred unfriendly ways of greeting people who come through the door.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“May I say who's calling?”

What does she mean “May I say …”? Why is she being so condescending? Why doesn't she come right out and ask, “What's your name?”?

I'd rather find an armed guard at the door than the average receptionist. At least I know where I stand with an armed guard. He doesn't give me a lot of artificial charm. He just says, “You can't go in there, buddy.”

The receptionist says, “I'll see if Mr. Jones is in.” That's what she says even though she knows darn well Mr. Jones is in because she was sitting at the desk when he showed up for work and she has seen him go to the coffee machine twice and the bathroom once, since then.

Just once, I'd like to be confronted with an honest receptionist in an office.

“Hi,” I'd say as I came in. “Ed Jones around?”

“Yeah,” my ideal receptionist would say. “He's goofing off somewhere back there.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Let me see if he's off the phone with his wife yet. He spent the last hour talking to the school principal about one of his kids and he's having an awful time collecting from an insurance company on a car he cracked up last week. I'll see what he's doing now.”

You never find a receptionist like that, though. They're all the same. They ought to be called “rejectionists.”

The same government that passed the idiotic law that limited automobile speed to fifty-five, whether the car is traveling on an eight-lane highway without a curve for the next hundred miles in the middle of Wyoming or on a bumpy, two-lane macadam trail in a mountainous area of Colorado, might have done everyone a bigger favor if it had banned horns on cars.

On at least 98 percent of the occasions when a horn is blown by a driver, it is a sign of impatience, not imminent danger to anyone. If there's danger, it's best for the driver to keep both hands on the wheel and hit the brakes. If the driver has time to blow the horn, chances are nothing serious is about to happen.

Most frequently the driver who blows the horn is mad at the driver of the car in front. Horns have no practical influence on the average driver whatsoever. We blow at the drivers in front of us with full expectations that they'll get out of our way. We are angered when they do not but it doesn't occur to us to move over when the drivers behind us lean on their horns.

Last night at about quarter to ten, I was taking one last look at the newspaper when I heard a car horn up the street from our house. It blew once and then there was a pause. Then there were two short honks and finally a series of longer blasts.

Who is so rude, in a street with a row of houses on both sides of it, to sit outside one of them and blow a car horn for attention? Doesn't this idiot understand that it will inconvenience several dozen people attracted to the sound and forced, against their will, to wonder what or who it's for?

Whenever a street is blocked by a garbage truck, a person parking a car, an accident or a sticky traffic light, someone in the rear of the line of cars always starts to blow. Does that driver think all the cars in front are sitting there from choice? Is the sound of the horn really the thing that's needed to get traffic moving? Would it, if the driver didn't blow, stay where it is all day?

When I take the train home from work to the commuter station, there are always fifteen or twenty wives waiting in cars for their husbands. One of them invariably blows the horn to get her husband's attention. Of all the cars in the station, what makes this woman think she is justified in being the only one blowing her horn? Has she considered what it would sound like if all the wives of all the husbands getting off the train blew their horns? (I recognize that I have assumed it is always a wife waiting for a working husband doing the blowing. That just happens to be the way it is at the station I use. If I ever see a husband waiting for his wife to come home from work and hear him blow his horn to attract her attention, I'll report to you.)