As we go
through our day-to-day activities we come across bunches and bunches of stuff. Much of it is quite inconsequential. However, if you stop and make just a little
bit of effort even the most normal, run-of-the-mill thing can be most
entertaining.
For example,
the other day my wife was giving the family dog (let’s be honest, he is her dog
and he tolerates the rest of us as long as we are not in his preferred napping
locations) his flea treatment. One
direction proved ironic if not downright ridiculous. It read as follows “To the User: If you cannot speak English, do not use this
product until the label has been fully explained to you.” If you can’t speak English it is a safe bet
you cannot read the sentence telling what to do if you cannot speak
English. This is like the signs saying Braille
menus are available upon request, especially such signs at a drive
through. Then I looked a bit
closer. The flea medicine instruction
guys did include the same statement in Spanish.
You have to ask yourself why bother putting that warning instruction in
English at all. If you can read English
you don’t need the warning and if you can only read Spanish the warning in that
language gets the job done. My guess is
they put it in English so people prone to paranoia wouldn’t go down a rabbit
hole of worry.
Interior
dialogue of paranoid dog owner: I see there is a single sentence of Spanish in
the instructions for giving my dog his flea treatment. Why is this and only this sentence in
Spanish? Why aren’t they telling me what
it says? Maybe it is only for Spanish
language dogs. Wait just a dog gone
minute. My dog is a Chihuahua. I might need to know what this is
saying. Maybe these instructions aren’t
the original instructions. Maybe these
instructions were substituted by some evil doer and they changed one of the
most important steps from English to Spanish just to wreck havoc on monolingual
dog owners. Maybe this one instruction is the difference between being safe
from fleas and actually attracting fleas from a five county radius straight to
poor little Sparky. Somebody call the
FDA. Somebody call the SPCA. Somebody call somebody who speaks
Spanish. Somebody call for a pizza. All this panicking is making me hungry.
See what I
mean? Just one odd little quirk in flea
treatment instructions and you can spin it into an entertaining scenario of a
dog owner with severe trust issues freaking out. This idea of taking something small and
extrapolating it into a full entertainment is one of the things my family will
do for fun as we sit around the living room. This is either a positive sign of
togetherness or a pathetic sign of what happens when a family has no
television.
The other
afternoon my daughter, Alice, was very focused on the screen of her phone. This is not unusual in most households which
contain a high school aged child. I made
a joke about how if Lewis Carroll were writing today his Alice wouldn’t go
through the looking glass to Wonderland but would by sucked through her smart
phone. And we were off…
The White
Rabbit would not be running around saying “I’m late! I’m late!”
He would be scurrying about lamenting “They can’t hear me now! They can’t hear me now!” The Cheshire Cat wouldn’t vanish to the point
where Alice could only see his teeth. He
would slowly disappear until all she could see was his Bluetooth device. The Mad Hatter’s tea party would have them
all communicating via Skype. The Queen
of Hearts would not scream “Off with their heads!” She would threaten others with “Cut off their
web access!” Tweedledum and Tweedledee
would become Tweedletext and Tweedletweet.
This kind of
one-upmanship story and joke making is fairly common when two or more of us
congregate and it is one of the reasons I would gladly spend nearly all of my
time in my house. I am truly blessed to
find myself in a family I actually like, not just love because that is what you
are supposed to do, but genuinely enjoy as human beings.
Remember how
with many game shows there was a home version?
Well, here is a starter for you and your family taking the mundane and
creating fun riffs. Hanging with a group
of festive family friendly piñatas is one made to look like a bottle of
beer. Have at it…
Christopher Pyle invites you to share
any Alice in Cell Phone Land or piñata jokes with him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
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