I’ve been a little stressed out lately. I don’t know why. OK,
I’ve been relearning fractions in a doomed effort to help Junior
with his math, but really, that’s not something to stress over, is
it?
I’ve been a little stressed out lately. I don’t know why. OK, I’ve been relearning fractions in a doomed effort to help Junior with his math, but really, that’s not something to stress over, is it? But I’m a little stressed out anyway. So a friend recommended that I buy a fountain. Apparently, you can achieve inner peace and tranquility just by listening to the sounds of a fountain bubbling away in your living room.
Now, the truth is, the sound of water running over stones has never done anything for me except give me an urgent need to use the restroom. But I was getting a wee bit anxious about simplifying fractions, so I decided to give it a try. Plus, I found a fountain for $9.99. Even a math-impaired person such as myself can understand that $9.99 is a small price to pay for peace and tranquility.
Turns out, it’s hard to be tranquil when your inner peace has some assembly required. I pulled the fountain out of the box and found it had approximately two billion pieces. Now, I’m not so good at assembling stuff. Usually I leave that to Harry, who has perfected the art of assembly – and the colorful vocabulary that goes along with it. But Harry wasn’t home and I had purchased my tranquility-in-a-box and darn it, I wanted it assembled NOW.
Unfortunately, the instructions weren’t as much help as they could have been.
Oh sure, the instruction sheet had lots of drawings with very unhelpful arrows all over them. But the directions really consisted of “assembling the main fountain housing, insert the pump into the housing and draw the line out the top while maintaining strength.” OK. What housing? Whose strength? And where the heck was the pump – not to mention the main fountain housing assembly instructions?
Clearly there was only one way to put together this fountain. I just swore like a sailor and kept attaching pieces together until the fountain on my kitchen table looked like the fountain on the box. With that done, I was ready to open my mind to inner peace and multiplication. Unfortunately, you need power to turn on a fountain. And my fountain didn’t come with something the instructions called a “main power transformation device,” known in my world as “the doo-hickey you plug into the wall.” I tore the box apart looking for the doo-hickey.
And that’s when I discovered the extra instructions.
You know, the ones that the manufacturer included because they made a mistake in the first set of instructions. So there I was, waiting for my tranquility with a fully assembled fountain, no power device and a new set of directions that completely contradicted the set of directions I had just tried to use. So I did what any rational person searching for inner peace would do. I screamed at the fountain and picked it up so I could throw it out the window. And that’s when I noticed that the bottom of the fountain said, “if main power transformation device is unreachable, insert 2AA batteries.”
So I put the batteries in, turned the fountain on and sat down with my fountain and my book and my steaming cup of tea and I prepared myself to receive tranquility. But tranquility didn’t come. Instead I heard a buzzing sound. A very loud buzzing sound. In fact, it was a very loud, very not-tranquil buzzing sound. And it was drowning out the bubbling brook sounds from my fountain. So I turned off the fountain. And the buzzing sound disappeared.
Turns out, those revised instructions were kind of important.
Among other things, like letting me know that for $9.99 the power transformation device was not included, the revised directions also said to rinse off all the parts of the fountain prior to assembly or the fountain would produce a very loud buzzing sound.
Well, duh.
So I figured I had two options. I could take apart the entire fountain. I could rinse everything off, reassemble it and then wait for tranquility once again. Or I could just set the stupid thing on the table and take a bath. The bath was nice – I felt peaceful, tranquil and ready for math. Well, maybe not fractions. But I knew for certain that $9.99 and inner peace don’t add up to anything but frustration.
