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"Nice vanity cabinet you have there," one of our guests said, referring to the two four-by-fours that held up our bathroom sink.
"Thanks," I said. "Wasn't it like that last Christmas?" "Yeah," I acknowledged. "It's been like that for a year and a half now." It was a sad, sad truth. Since one of the lines to the faucet sprung a leak and we tore out the old vanity cabinet, which had been saturated with water, there has been nothing there except for two four-by-fours and a square of bare concrete. It wasn't that we hadn't tried to replace the cabinet. My wife and I spent hours in the major hardware stores looking for just the right one. Like Goldilocks, we had become a bit picky: "That cabinet is too big. That cabinet is too small. That cabinet would be just right if it didn't cost more than a recreational vehicle." The decision became overwhelming, and so we consulted a number of sources. The last source was a "Magic Eight Ball," which gave us the cryptic and rarely seen message, "Are you kidding me?" This gave us no option but to do what we are best at - procrastinating. We are "pros" at crastinating, because we are better at it than others are. We call those people "amateurcrastinaters." Once we finally did venture out and find a vanity cabinet, it sat in our dining room for a week or so until we unpacked it. After all, we are pros at this crastinating stuff. When we did open it up, we found that there was a problem. Between the two doors in the front of the cabinet there was a quarter-inch space like the gap in a hillbilly's teeth. The gap in the cabinet was the result of the hinges being put on wrong. The wood where one of the hinges was screwed in was stripped. The vanity had been assembled poorly, but I knew better than to take it out on the cabinet. After all, both the cabinet and I were starting to become unhinged. "Why does there always have to be some kind of problem?" my wife asked. "Oh," I said, "You must be thinking that we live in the tolerable universe. That's the universe next door. You and me, we live here in the crazy, messed-up universe." She didn't find this to be the least bit helpful. As I stared at the vanity cabinet trying to rationalize a way to keep it and not send it back (which I knew, deep in my heart, was futile), she got on the phone and spoke to the manager of the hardware store. She hadn't originally intended on talking to the manager, but the store hung up on her twice, and the third time around, talking to the manager seemed like the appropriate thing to do. I tried to demonstrate to my wife what was happening by using visual aids. I held out my left hand and bunched it up into a ball. "See this? This is the good universe, where things usually go right. Now this..." I said, holding out my other hand, "is our universe, which is wacky and uncooperative. You can't get from one to the other. We're stuck here." She wasn't paying attention. The manager on the other end of the phone had begun fumbling his way through an attempt at figuring out how to start to begin to go about solving our problem. I didn't hear the full conversation. I just got a general impression of it from what my wife said and from her facial expressions (mainly a lot of grimacing and eye rolling). But here's what I made of the conversation from my side: The manager had absolutely no idea what to do. He was going to go to a management training class on how to solve this kind of problem, and he was going to call us back when he had completed the course. Again, this may not be how the conversation actually transpired. My wife hung up. We returned to the vanity cabinet, lowered the box back over it, and taped it up for transport back to the hardware store. "Well," she said, "You're off the hook." She was right! Suddenly a ray of sunshine pierced the grayness of gloom and frustration that had begun to overtake me. Today was going to be a better day than I had anticipated. I wasn't going to have to hold a wrench! I wasn't even going to have to work with tools! I was free! Free to live! Suddenly, and only for a moment, I felt as if I lived in the best of all possible universes. "Hey," my wife added, "you wanna go shop for cars?" |
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