Honk If You Understand

Do you ever infuriate yourself?

It sounds difficult to do and yet, I do manage to infuriate myself quite a lot. I get angry at myself for forgetting things. I get angry at myself for being too clumsy and for not being clumsy enough! I get angry at myself for being too quick and for not being quick enough! I get angry at myself for being too slow and for not being slow enough!

You get the idea. I sometimes find myself so aggravating, I positively exhaust myself.

I’ll eat too fast and then bite my tongue. I’ll carry too many items and drop one of them. I’ll bang my elbow on door jams and stub my toe on stairs. On it goes!

I don't ask for these idiotic outcomes and yet, I get the feeling I'm not doing enough to guard against them.

In one incident which seems to have gained legendary status in our home, I was hurriedly rinsing utensils in the sink before putting them in the dishwasher. Out of the corner of my eye, in the midst of all the clattering, I was fairly sure I saw a butter knife fall through the slot and down the drain. It was too dark to see down there. Questioning whether a knife could even fit through a drain slot, I slowly lowered one of our butter knives into the drain slot and then, accidentally dropped it down the drain!

To this day, two butter knives still sit in the kitchen drainpipe.

Infuriating!

Last night, I got home after midnight. It was dark. I was about to put my key in the door when I noticed an insect of some sort on the door frame, near the keyhole. Not fond of spiders, I took out my smart phone in the hopes of identifying the bug. The glow of the screen allowed me to determine it was a moth. No problem. As I turned the screen off, I somehow started the car alarm honking. It was blaring loudly, over and over!

The quiet neighborhood echoed with the sound of the infernal car alarm.

I know my own car remote pretty well, so I pressed the alarm button to stop the honking. Pressing my remote started my car alarm blaring! It had actually been my wife’s car alarm that I had triggered, but, since we both drive vehicles made by the same automaker, the alarms sound identically obnoxious. Now I had the alarm on my wife’s SUV honking, along with the alarm on my car!

Infuriating!

As neighbors began to turn on lights and peer out windows, I ended up dropping my smart phone on the cement stoop. I first turned off my car alarm and then, in the dark, stared with great concentration at the remote to my wife’s vehicle. We haven’t had her vehicle for a long time and, while it does hang on my keychain, I’m not as familiar with her remote. On top of that, in the darkness, the alarm button on her remote seemed to be pretty much the same color as the “lock”, “unlock” and “trunk” buttons!

@#%$^&^!

It took me what seemed an eternity to finally stop both alarms from honking.

%^#@*&^!

Naturally, the mishap woke my sleeping wife. My son, who’s a night owl anyway, greeted me in the hallway with a giant, patronizing grin, miming applause.

Infuriating!