Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Page 7

  I’d vote for the presidential candidate who stood on a platform that demanded “enough electrical outlets for all!” It’s time for each of us to demand enough outlets in our homes. Not only should there be enough but they should be put where we need them and where we can get at them. Why are they always installed along the baseboard, on the longest section of wall, where any fool should know the couch is going to go? How do they expect us to plug anything into the wall behind the couch? And why did they put two outlets there instead of six?

  Is there anyone who doesn’t have an electric clock in the bedroom? A radio? Some lamps? Possibly even a television set, a hair dryer or an air conditioner? Then why in the world did the people who built the house only install two electrical outlets? Are they in business with the companies that make those gadgets that convert one outlet into three? Do they get a percentage from the makers of extension cords?

  The kitchen in this house is lined with a tangle of power-carrying cords. There’s a clock over the stove, a blender, a Cuisinart, a toaster oven, an orange juicer, a small black-and-white television set, a radio and on occasions I bring in an electric griddle for pancakes, a popcorn popper, a deep-fat fryer or a small Waring ice cream maker.

  A moratorium ought to be declared on the invention and manufacture of new electrical appliances until they work out a better system for plugging them in. Half the time when you start to connect an appliance, you find the maker was so concerned about the possibility you’d be electrocuted, that he put a three-pronged plug on the end of the cord.

  There are few experiences in life more frustrating than having a three-pronged plug and a two-hole outlet. In my lifetime I’ve bought a hundred three-pronged adapters, but where are they when I need one?

  I have no objection to grounded plugs if the experts tell us we should use them but then why do they ever put in a wall plug that isn’t equipped to take a three-pronged plug? It should be illegal. I could probably go to jail for it but I confess that in moments of frustration I have gone to the kitchen drawer with the pliers in it and used them to bend off the offending ground pin so that the plug will fit into the wall socket.

  With so many fools in the world, it’s impossible to make the world foolproof. The people trying to make the world safe for everyone are fighting a losing battle and one that makes life difficult for the average person.

  Fifteen or twenty years ago some electrical genius decided to make plugs whose prongs were a different size. The larger of the two prongs doesn’t fit into the old standard wall plug. I have never understood what this latest development in the field of power cords does for me but I managed to stay alive without being electrocuted for many years before we had plugs in which one of the prongs was bigger than the other.

  It seems inconceivable to me that the minds that came up with the fantastic array of electrical appliances available to all of us couldn’t come up with some new idea for wall sockets that would be convenient, safe and good-looking. It should not be necessary to hide them under the bed, behind the couch or in the next room, where you can’t get at them.

  The Privacy of a Public Person

  A year ago I was walking along a street in Greenwich Village having a good time doing not much of anything when a man wearing a sweater and blue jeans and carrying a violin case grabbed me by the arm.

  “Hey,” he said, “aren’t you Andy Rooney?”

  It seems presumptuous of anyone to grab me under any circumstances but even more so when the person doesn’t even know for sure who he’s grabbing.

  “A lot of people ask me that,” I said, and walked on.

  “Hey, no kidding,” he said, grabbing my arm again, “are you Andy Rooney?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m minding my own business. Why don’t you mind yours … go play your violin.”

  The young man looked shocked.

  “You ought to be in some other business,” he said, and walked away.

  Should I be in some other business? Does a stranger have a right to grab me by the arm, stop me in the middle of a pleasant, private walk because I appear on television and write a newspaper column?

  I have been with close friends, far better known than I am, who are unfailingly gracious in these situations. Walter Cronkite will charm a stranger with his smile, sign his name on a sheet of paper and listen as though he were interested to silly small talk from anyone who stops him. If I could be like Walter, I would be, but I can’t.

  This all comes to mind because I’ve been reading about a lawsuit brought by the author of The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger. Salinger, a notorious recluse, won’t give interviews to newspeople or appear on television. He certainly won’t talk to strangers. He wants to be known for what he writes, not for what he looks like or sounds like. I admire him for it.

  The story was about an unauthorized biography of him, publication of which he tried to stop. Most of us would be flattered by even an unflattering biography, but Salinger wants no part of it.

  I’m on J. D. Salinger’s side and yet the question from the man with the violin often comes to mind after I’ve been rude to a stranger. Have I sold my right to privacy by appearing in public for money?

  A couple named Lipovsky wrote from Vancouver, British Columbia, after I’d laughed at some letters I’d received, to say how pompous and arrogant I was for not appreciating the people who had taken the time to write.

  Well, I appreciate about half the letters I get and I get some that I actually treasure but I get a lot of mail from idiots, too, and I see no reason why I should pretend I’m grateful to the people who wrote them.

  Considering how desperately hard people work to get themselves a reputation and to become widely known, it’s interesting how empty a thing well-knownness seems to be once you have acquired it. I’m nervous every time I sit down to write or do something on television. At that very moment I am nothing until I’ve produced something. If what I produce is poor it makes my semi-well-knownness seem all the more hollow to me.

  There seem to be thousands of people in the United States whose only job in life is to get people with familiar names to loan them out for some good cause. Anyone with any kind of public name at all gets hundreds of requests a year from well-meaning organizations that wish to use the person’s name in a long list of names that goes down the left-hand side of their stationery.

  It embarrasses me to turn down charitable organizations that ask if they may use my name as a sponsor or honorary committee member on their fund-raising letters, but it doesn’t embarrass me nearly as much as seeing my name used that way, endorsing something I know nothing about and in whose work I have taken no part. It’s a minor fraud.

  It seems to me anyone who becomes well known through what he or she has written owes the people who have liked it nothing but to continue to write as well as possible.

  The Keys to Our Kingdoms

  We’ve gone crazy with keys. If we want to get in, we’re all forced to carry eight or ten keys around with us. We carry keys all day, every day, that we don’t use once every six months. I don’t notice the number of thefts going down because of our keys, either.

  If keys and locks were the answer to dishonesty, we’d have a theft-free country.

  The drawers in which everyone keeps life’s bric-a-brac and memorabilia have keys in them we haven’t used in years. In many cases we no longer know what it is the keys unlock but we’re afraid to throw them away.

  Between the dresser drawers, the kitchen drawers and the small, thin drawers in hall and living-room tables, there must be thirty dead keys in our house. I still keep the keys to a couple of cars that were probably turned into scrap and melted down ten years ago. Is there a market for the key to the trunk of a 1957 Ford Fairlane?

  People have a terrible time throwing a key away. A key seems like such an important item even though it no longer fits anything we own. If I saved money the way I save keys, I’d have enough to make a takeover bid for IBM.

  Most of us have at
least seven basic keys. We have two house keys, one for the front door and one for the back door. We have one for the garage, whether we lock the garage or not. We have two car keys, one for the ignition and one for the trunk. (This isn’t counting the backup set that comes with the owner’s manual.) Many Americans have at least one key that opens a door or a locker at work, and usually we have a small key that opens some kind of padlock we own.

  Those are the basic keys, although there may be many more. If you own two cars, you have a total of eight car keys. Often there are two locks on the door of a house, and an office in a city building can mean you’ll have to carry three keys. You’ll need one to get into your office area, another to get into your office door and a third to unlock your desk.

  We pretend keys are more important than they are. How serious an impediment to entry is a lock and key when the only thing that stands between a burglar and the possessions in your house is a pane of glass?

  I often ride a train to work, and I’m amused to see businessmen carrying little briefcases with tiny, expensive brass locks on them. It’s ridiculous for the same reason a lock on a suitcase doesn’t make any sense. If someone wants to steal something in a briefcase or a suitcase, the thief isn’t going to stop to unlock it. He’s going to take the whole lot in the handy little carrying case you’ve provided for him. He can open it later, at his leisure, with an ax.

  There must be ten tiny keys in my dresser that came with suitcases I’ve bought. I’ve never locked anything with them and I’ve never thrown them out. I always ask a luggage salesman for a suitcase without a lock on it and suggest to him that it should be cheaper. Most suitcases, of course, have locks.

  Some of my battered and abandoned suitcases in the upstairs hall closet are themselves repositories for keys. I often find two or three hotel keys for rooms I checked out of seven years ago floating around the bottom of a suitcase along with the other flotsam and jetsam of long trips. All the keys say on them DROP IN ANY MAILBOX, NO POSTAGE NECESSARY. I feel terribly guilty but I never get around to returning those keys.

  People make a big deal out of locking their cars with keys. More than a million cars a year are stolen in the United States and I bet all but about four of those are locked tight with the ignition key in the owner’s pocket when the car thief comes along. The lack of a key doesn’t seem to deter the car thieves.

  I have a feeling that if we all threw away the keys, our kingdoms would still be there in the morning.

  A Dose of Double-talk

  “Delicious,” I heard the flight attendant say to the passenger behind me. “It’s really delicious,” she said.

  “OK,” I thought to myself, “I’ll take that as her opinion even though I can’t see what she’s talking about.”

  “I tasted it,” the flight attendant continued, “and it’s really delicious. I never had anything so delicious. Delicious.”

  This was five “deliciouses” I’d heard in the space of twenty seconds and it was irritating. I’m easily irritated in flight.

  “I’ll try some,” I heard the passenger say.

  “You’ll love it,” the flight attendant said.

  “It’s really delicious,” I said quickly to myself, mocking what I anticipated the flight attendant would say next. She didn’t disappoint me.

  “It’s really delicious,” she bubbled for the sixth time.

  I reached in the pocket for the bag provided for passengers who think they’re going to be sick. If I wasn’t a sweet, mild-tempered person I’d have stood up and whacked this young woman over her pretty head with my seat cushion and yelled, “All right already … so it’s good.”

  Is it my imagination or are people repeating themselves more than they once did? I’m continually hearing people say the same thing not twice but four or five times.

  It’s hard to know what brought this on. It seems as though people either enjoy hearing themselves say these things or they don’t trust people to hear what they’ve said the first time. They want to make sure.

  This morning I happened to be outside my office door when the man who delivers the newspapers showed up. He also delivers to Charles Kuralt just down the hall and the personnel office next door.

  “I’m going to leave their papers with you too,” he said. “I can’t get in so I’ll leave them with you. The door is locked there and I can’t leave them so I’ll leave them here.”

  There’s a subject for someone’s doctoral thesis here somewhere: “The Theory and Practice of Repetition in Everyday Conversation.”

  There are phrases people use that have repetition built into them. I have a friend who often says something like “I just had a small little breakfast this morning.”

  He always uses the words small and little together as if one improved on the other.

  I don’t know whether he invented it himself or whether it was written for him, but for a reason I can’t figure out, back in 1984, President Reagan started using the phrase “a new beginning.”

  Are there any old beginnings? It’s repeating the same thing over again, twice, repeatedly.

  There seems to be a proliferation of unnecessary talk everywhere. I can think of several possible reasons for it.

  The first reason may be that there’s so much unnecessary noise in the world that in order to carry on a conversation, people have to shout and constantly reiterate. The chances of anyone hearing everything they say the first time they say it is minimal. There’s either a radio or a television set blaring away or someone’s running a lawn mower or power saw or the street-maintenance people are working with a pneumatic jack hammer nearby.

  I often take a cab in New York. Invariably the driver has his radio on too loud and, in addition, he has a two-way radio with someone on it competing with the other sounds, trying to give him the name and address of a customer. When I tell him where I want to go, I notice I often repeat the address to make sure he heard it.

  And then there’s another reason for all the verbal repetition. I don’t want to get over my head in psychology, but I think people are uncertain about so many things in their lives that they get some sort of primal satisfaction from saying something that doesn’t call for any thought.

  If we expressed an idea just once, telephone calls, interviews and everyday conversations could be cut in half.

  Gift Shop Gifts

  If it came from a gift shop, please don’t give it to me. There is a whole category of things that I don’t want for Christmas and most of them come from gift shops. Don’t get me a tie rack, for instance.

  There’s something wrong about a place that specializes in things to be given away. It can’t be as down to earth as the everyday store that you’d go into to buy something you need for yourself. Most of the items in gift shops are things no one has any use for. I am uncertain about why they have been categorized as “gifts.” Why would anyone decide to give a friend something that the store owner, by designating it “gift,” has declared to be something the person wouldn’t want for himself?

  The only kind of gift to give is something you’d like to own yourself. You aren’t dying to have a set of hand-embroidered pot holders, a bag of fragrances for your underwear drawer or a copper-plated watering can.

  There are some nice gift shops just as there are nice cups of tea. The people who run them tend to be struggling entrepreneurs who aren’t making much of a living. I like the people and I feel sorry for them but they’re in the wrong business. We don’t need any more gift shops. No one really likes anything that has the look of a gift about it.

  The worst gift shops in the world are those terrible places at airports. If you fly into St. Louis, the gift shops at the airport feature caps and T-shirts saying ST. LOUIS CARDINALS on them and coffee cups bearing the likeness of Charles Lindbergh’s plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.

  The names on the caps and T-shirts are about the only distinguishing feature in airport shops across the country.

  The shops usually make a failing effort
to have some local products. In an airport in Burlington, Vermont, you’ll be able to buy maple syrup. The airport in Orlando will send a crate of oranges home for you, and one in Chicago will have ashtrays, highball glasses and key chains featuring the Chicago Bears football team. In San Francisco there are redwood-tree plaques saying HOME SWEET HOME. Everywhere you can find seashells, pictures of movie stars in cheap frames, fancy candles and expensive little calendar books.

  It’s hard to put your finger on what’s wrong with gift shops. They often try too hard to be clever but, worse than that, nothing in the shop is of much use in the real world. The only purpose served by a breadboard with flowers painted on it is as a gift. It’s a gift and nothing more because the chances are it never will be used to cut bread on.

  What does anyone do with a gift shop gift? No one wants an apron with a crossword puzzle on it or a glass paperweight that gives the impression it’s snowing when you turn it upside down.

  Our houses are filled with this useless kind of stuff and we don’t dare throw anything away because we don’t know when the person who gave it to us is going to show up again.

  If you’ve got to bring home a gift from your trip, make sure you buy it in town before you hit the gift shop at the airport. I actually had a friend years ago whose marriage ended in divorce over something he brought his wife from Kennedy Airport in New York.

  My friend was about to board the plane when he realized he hadn’t bought anything for his wife. Feeling guilty, he rushed back into the terminal and went to the gift shop. From there he brought her a bronzed thermometer in the shape of the Empire State Building.

  She was apparently already in sort of a bad mood when he arrived home late, and when he gave her the gift shop gift she took one look at it, threw it at him and left home forever.