The Junk Drawer

If you follow celebrity cats on the Internet, you know about Maru, the Japanese round raccoon-faced cat who loves boxes.

Last week, Maru hired an Assistant Cat, Hana.

But first she had to make it through the interview:

Maru: So you want to be my Assistant Cat, do ya?

Hana: Every cat I know does!

Maru: Why do you want to be my assistant?

Hana: I want to be your assistant because you have your paws full with too much work and too many boxes for one cat.

Maru: This is true. Let’s talk about the boxes. Can you sit in boxes? Jump in them? Boxes that are too small for you, oddly-shaped, too tall or too thin?

Hana: Yes, I can handle all kinds of boxes. I fits where I sits.

Maru: Excellent. This position isn’t all about boxes, though. I’d like to discuss your media relations skills. On occasion you might be asked to appear on TV or go on press junkets with me. Have you done any commercials?

Hana: You mean like for insurance?

Maru: No. For cat things.

Hana: Oh,  yes. Well, sort of.

Maru: Sort of?

Hana: Yes, I was an extra once for a kitty litter commercial, but I didn’t make the final cut because I kicked litter out of the box. It was a mistake, I admit. I usually don’t do that. I assure you, I am fastidious in The Box and mindful to cover completely.

Maru: Good, because you have to be very clean at all times. No hairballs, no fur in the food, and certainly no stinky things left outside The Box, understood?

Hana: Yes.

Maru: I want to talk about your education. It says here on your resume you studied at NY Mew and majored in Napping and Playing, and minored in Personal Grooming. Tell me about the programs.

Hana: Well, Napping and Playing is a rigorous program. You would think Napping would be a cake walk, but not true. We often had in-class lab work where we had to nap the whole period. Proctors would come around and poke us, but we were instructed never to stir.

And for our course assignments, we had to nap some more. And when we finished napping, we had to nap again. It was harder than it sounds because sometimes you don’t want to nap. Sometimes you want to play with milk jug caps, but you’re not allowed. You have to keep sleeping.

Maru: How did you cope with the stress of all that napping?

Hana: I played after class for like ten minutes, really hard. And then I could nap again. Sometimes for seven hours straight. You find a way, you know?

Maru: What were your Playing courses like?

Hana: Well, our classes were pretty standard. String, chasing the red dot, cat nip mousie. That sort of thing. I aced all those courses. But I like to think I’ve advanced beyond regular play.

Maru: How so?

Hana: Well, for my Independent Research Project, I demonstrated that it’s possible to run down the stairs at the feet of your owner and not make them fall and break a leg. My research showed that nipping at heels can still be fun if you simply remain behind the subject at all times.

All the current literature shows that most cats insist on getting in front of the subjects, which causes a hazard and leads to injury. My research is currently under review for publication in the International Journal of Feline Leisure and Play.

Maru: I’m very impressed with your scholarly work. Now tell me about your Personal Grooming program.

Hana: Personal Grooming was all about presentation. We were graded on technique, duration and percent of cleanliness. I excelled at technique, if I may say so. Paw-to-face cleaning is my specialty.

Maru: What were your exams like?

Hana: Most of them involved the purrfessor mussing up our fur and then we’d have to spend the entire class period grooming ourselves back to normal. One of my classmates failed a course because he kept leaving a mohawk on his head. For some cats, it’s very difficult to groom that area.

Maru: True, true. Now I’d like to ask you some behavioral questions. Can you give an example of how you used logic to solve a problem?

Hana: Yes. Many times my food bowl gets empty. Well, not quite empty. You still have plenty of food, but you can see the bottom of the bowl. You know and I know this is unacceptable. I realized if you dump the entire bowl over, the mom will come around and clean it up and refill the bowl to a heaping mound. This tactic has never failed me.

Maru: Fantastic. Did you ever postpone making a decision and why?

Hana: Yes, many times I think I want to get up off the couch, stretch, yawn and walk in a circle a bit. But then I decide to instead just roll over and sleep longer. Then I get up later and do it. Waiting longer ensures I have met my daily requirement of doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time.

Maru: OK, so I’m feeling pretty good about your qualifications, Hana. If I give you this job, the pay rate is one blankie, full meals with occasional treats, twelve assorted toys, plus a signing bonus of one medium-sized box. Do you think you have what it takes to be my assistant?

Hana: I do! I do! Can I start right away?

Maru: You may. Welcome to the family!

* Photos courtesy Maru.

It’s a rare day I forget to apply deodorant before work. Yesterday was one of those rare days.

But not to worry!

I keep deodorant in my desk drawer for just such emergencies.

Except I keep it hidden because it’s just too weird if someone’s standing near me and I open a drawer. Nobody needs to see my stash of toiletries at work.

So where do I hide it?

Inside here. In a near-empty Mickey Mouse Chocolate Fudge coffee container. Why am I even saving that? Because it’s Mickey, silly!

The only problem is that sticking the deodorant inside a coffee tin makes the coffee smell like deodorant and the deodorant smell like coffee.

Hey, at least I smelled chocolaty fresh!

So I just finished eating my scrambled egg and cheese breakfast at my desk at work and go looking to reattach the lid on the container I brought it in.

Yeah, no.

It’s not anywhere, but I know it didn’t just get up and leave. I mean, it’s somewhere, right? Did I file it in a drawer? Did I put it in my purse? Did I eat it?

Half an hour later I find it in the garbage, where I put it, because clearly a garbage can is where you put things that are important and that you need again.

This is probably one of the reasons I never have enough matching lids for containers. Many times I’ve gone to work with containers and lids that have no business being together because I couldn’t find a single matched set.

I’ve used poorly constructed makeshift lids, because I love living on the edge. I’ve wrapped them in foil, despite the risk of content oozage. I’ve put on a close-enough lid and then dug for a rubber band to secure it.  If you have to rubberband a lid to a container, you’re lidding all wrong.

If you throw out lids you need again, you really don’t know what you’re doing and shouldn’t even drive a car or have a job or be responsible for anything.

And now I have to go teach a class on blogging.

That’s right. Students getting their advice from me.

Go ahead. Just let that sink in.

I think I was just in the Twilight Zone. But I made it back home OK. I’m fine. Not a scratch on me.

I went to my local grocery store and picked up about a dozen things. Put ‘em in a hand-held basket, a big heaping mountain.

I lumbered past the courtesy counter on my way to self-checkout.

A woman at the counter called out “Is that all you have?”

“Who, me?”

“Yes, you.”

“You can’t mean me. This is too much stuff.”

“No, it’s not. Come over here. I’ll ring you up.”

“But you only take a few things here.”

“But if I can keep you from using the new stupid self-checkouts, all the better.”

“You must hate those. Customers must bug you all the time about them.”

“I hate them because it frustrates customers. I don’t mind helping. You shouldn’t have to deal with things that don’t work well. We want you to be happy.”

“Are you for real?”

“Yes, I am for real.”

“Well, you just made my whole day.”

“It’s what I do. Here’s your receipt. Now you have a good night, OK?”

This is not how things normally work in my world. Most of the time I’m the one solving problems, fighting to get people to help or just do their jobs. It’s maddening and exhausting.

I want more of the Twilight Zone, where people go out of their way to assist and tell you it’s not a bother. It’s delightful and refreshing.

Do you have a great customer service story to share? Let’s hear it. I’m so jaded about customer service, I need to know that it lives and breathes in places outside the Twilight Zone.

Thanks to my friend Sharron, I now have a name for the monkey on my back that’s been strangling me the last few weeks.

That monkey is Candy Crush, or Facebook meth, as Sharron so bluntly and accurately referred to it. I’m happy to report I’m off it. Blocked. No more. Fin.

For all the articles I’ve read about how to beat the game levels, I think I’ve read just as many about how people kicked the habit and blocked it from their lives. So now this makes another one for the pile. Writing this post is the most productive thing I’ve done in a month.

So, how did I get here?

The Candy Crushers in my life warned me in earnest not to start. “Just don’t,” they said. “Learn from my mistake,” they said. And for a while I was fine without it, had little interest. But then.

Like a child who’s been warned not to touch a hot stove and burns themselves doing it anyway, I added it to my apps and was instantly hooked. Here is how that first hit got me to where I am today.

Candy Crush Your Hopes and Dreams lets you bank only 5 lives, with an automatic one life renewal every 30 minutes.

I remember emailing my sister and saying “That’s ludicrous. Who would wait 30 min. for a life renewal? I can’t play this thing. I’m out.”

But I wasn’t out because I’d already had a taste of the candy. And the candy was good. “Delicious! Sweet! Divine!”

You can get more lives by requesting them of other players, but how fast you get them is dependent on their availability and willingness to give lives.

No problem. I’ll just request them of my husband’s Facebook account. Log out of mine, into his, send the life, go back to my account, retrieve it and request another. Do this five times as fast as possible. Play those games, go get more.

I played morning, noon and night this way. It disgusts and embarrasses me to admit that I played Candy Crush Your Spirit for four hours a day, at least. All the while, professing that I wanted to get back to blogging. All the while saying I needed to stop. All the while, ignoring everything productive, save for my day job.

When I played during prime time hours, renewing lives was easier because many other Crushers were also playing. But as soon as I’d request and receive lives from them, I’d ask for more. And I thought “OMG. These people. These people know how bad I have it. I’m mortified. I need to stop. But can I have another life first?”

One person did start messaging me during my early morning sessions. He’s in a later time zone than me, so sometimes when I’d be playing at 4AM my time, he’d pop up and say “Morning. My, you’re playing early today.” In my head, that sounded like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Shame washed over me. He’s watching, knowing I have a problem, but enabling me by dutifully sending me lives as soon as I request them. I didn’t want him knowing I’d become such a slave to this beast, but he had the power to feed me lives. Lives that kept the hamster wheel turning.

As the weeks went on, things got worse. My husband Dave asked if I could work on his current maddening level. Now I’m playing my lives and his lives, requesting more from and to each account. Log in, log out, round and round we go.

I mention to my sister that I passed levels for Dave and now she asks if I can work her tough level, too. And so I do. I get her account information so I can log in and out to request and retrieve lives. I’m doing this for three accounts now. Mine, my husband’s and my sister’s.

I am in a very bad place.

It sickens me that I played three people’s games today for almost 12 hours. Yes, 12 hours. I only stopped to eat and vacuum a little. I see two cats roaming around the house and remember Oh, I have cats, don’t I? Hi, Lucky. Hi, Shadow. How’ve you been? Long time, no see.

Even though I was cross-eyed and catatonic at Hour 10, I pressed on. See, I’d been stuck at level 182, blowing through a couple hundred lives with no payoff. The addition of boosts would certainly help my game, but you have to pay for them.“Don’t ever pay for boosts,” they said. “Don’t give them real money. Just don’t.”

I considered myself “not that bad off,” as long as I didn’t pay for anything.

But.

But.

But.

Somehow I managed to achieve a near-win on Level 182. Only a single jelly remained on the board. Crush it and I win the level. I couldn’t clear it with the existing candy alignment, but I could if I had a lollipop boost to smash it with.

Ignoring all warning and reason, I opened my wallet, clicked Purchase Boosts, filled in my credit card information and bought $10.62 worth of lollipops to finish a level that had just robbed me of most of my Saturday.

After I paid, I clicked the shiny new lollipop and smashed that last jelly to smithereens. I felt euphoric! Eat it, Level 182!

But my euphoria instantly turned to regret and depression. I had just wasted perfectly good disposable income on something that had taken over my life, something so useless, something that kept me from blogging, kept me from having a normal routine, a normal life.

I puttered around the kitchen a while, wringing my hands, knowing what I had to do.

I scooted up to the laptop again, clicked Account Settings, Blocking, Block Apps, and entered Candy Crush into the box.

Die Facebook Meth, die!

I wish I could get all those hours back, wish I’d put it toward blogging, wish I’d put it toward anything else. But I can’t. It’s gone.

A new day starts in 3, 2, 1……