I began making my tea—an Assam blend from Upton's—this morning as usual. Water on the boil, teapot warmed, tea measured into the teapot infuser; fill the teapot with boiling water, fasten on the lid, and then reach up to snag the tea cozy that hangs on a hook on the kitchen chimney immediately to the right of the counter.
The cozy came down just fine, but the stick-on hook came down with it. Oh, drat, I thought. After popping the cozy onto the teapot, I rummaged around on the facing counter where I keep a messy assortment of hooks and tape and toothpicks and bottlecaps and the like on a Japanese lacquer tray. In searching for the cardboard-and-plastic-bubble container of stick-on kitchen hooks, I managed to dump about half of the contents of the lacquer tray onto the floor. Picked them up and separated out the stick-on hooks. Opened the trash can and threw away the old stick-on hook that had just fallen off the wall. Noticed too late that I hadn't put a new liner into the trash since last night when I took the old bag down to the garage trash bin. So I had to reach in and retrieve the hook.
The half-empty package of stick-on hooks proved resistant to my efforts at opening. It opened only after a good solid yank. The contents rocketed into the air and dropped to the floor all around me. For the second time in about five minutes I was scuttling around on the kitchen floor scooping up flotsam and jetsam.
Attaching a stick-on hook is a relatively straitforward process. The tab thing with the glue is two-sided; the red-printed side goes on the hook; the black-printed side on the wall. Before you can attach hook to tab, or tab to wall, you have to peel off the covering. I managed to peel off the red-printed covering easily enough and fasten the tab to the hook. But the black-printed side, the one you have to peel off before you can press the hook to the wall, resisted being peeled. It took several minutes of holding the damn thing up to eye level and seeking a starting point before that paper cover would detach itself. Finally it did.
At last I had a new hook up on the chimney beside the kitchen counter. I scooped up the two peeled-off bits of paper (red and black) and dumped them into the trash. Then I remembered that I still needed to put a new liner bag into the trash. So there I was again, reaching down into the kitchen trash container for those two fluttering bits of paper (red and black). Need I say that one of them resisted being picked up and hugged the bottom of the trash can as though it was its long-lost brother?
Good morning, Mr. Foglesong. Welcome to the Gitmo of petty annoyances, those sudden flurries of trivial everyday actions that suddenly, for no ascertainable reason, turn surly.
A particularly obnoxious annoyance is the discovery that you have run out of some household staple that, by virtue of being exceptionally long-lasting, is something you never give a second's thought to having around. I would put salt at the very top of that list. How often do we need to buy a container of salt? Especially nowadays when we're all increasingly salt-conscious? But several weeks ago, while in the midst of cooking dinner, I discovered that not only was my chef-sized stainless-steel salt shaker empty, but there was no blue cylindrical salt container lurking about in the depths of the pantry. I was, mirabile dictu, out of salt. For that one meal I made do with Lawry's Seasoned Salt despite the palette-twisting cacophony of flavors that resulted.
My vacuum cleaner needs to have its bag changed from time to time, so the discovery that it's bag-changing time again is simply business as usual. I keep a hefty supply of bags in the pantry, being the sort of householder who tends to stock up on stuff like that—just in case I get this urge to vacuum at 2:00 AM and the old bag is nearly full and the vacuum cleaner has lost all of its suck as a result. But a broken belt: that's a different matter altogether. All of a sudden the vacuum isn't picking up stuff from the carpet worth a damn. No fluffed-up brush tracks as you stroke the thing hither and yon. It's time to change the belt. But how many of us keep one handy? And how many of us can change it without rummaging through appliance manuals—provided we've kept them—and figuring out how to do it? The last time I had to change my vacuum cleaner belt, it took a week before the replacement arrived from Amazon followed by about an hour of hard labor to get the new one installed. Someday the belt will break again. I do not look forward to that day.
Light bulbs make up an entire subset of annoyances on their own. Why is it that the bulb always goes flash-pop-off when you turn on a lamp when you're in a hurry and need to find something?
I could go on. We all have our particular bugaboos regarding daily irritations. Software that updates itself incessantly and requires a restart to finish the update dang near every time you launch the program. Faucets that seem to be built specifically for the purpose of becoming clogged with accumulations of lime & calcium. Three-pronged grounded electric plugs. Compact discs and DVDs dang near fused into their containers. Removing the booklet from a CD jewel box without bending the front cover of the booklet on the raised edge of the jewel box lid. Advertising and subscription inserts in magazines. Molded plastic bubble containers. Paper grocery bags with carelessly glued handles. Wonky desk drawers that fall off when you try to open them.
At least they're only petty annoyances. I suppose they serve to harden and condition us for the big enchilada items that are sure to arise from time to time. All in all, however, I yearn for a more gracious world in which I could pass off such trivia to the butler or the house staff. O Chester, I would say languidly, the pull ring on this Miller Lite just broke off without opening the can. Fix it, there's a good chap, or go get me another one.
Right away, sir, replies Chester—and then forgets until it's too late about the loose shelf in the refrigerator.