Those I can handle…

Catastrophes, disasters, and calamities, those I can handle; it’s the small stuff that throws me for a loop. Those are my words, but the sentiment is pretty much what our friend expressed, sitting over a shared meal at our local sushi purveyor a while ago. Back in Teaneck, he was a volunteer on the local ambulance corps; now he does his shifts for Magen David Adom. (I’m on call tonight; whatever emergencies you plan to have, have them wait until tomorrow!)

You can imagine – or maybe you can’t – the amount of tzouris that an EMT would witness over the course of decades riding to and from a local hospital with the sirens blaring. But they are trained for that – bones broken, blood flowing, life and death in the balance, that’s what you’re expected to handle on the back of an ambulance. Remain calm, remain focused, and do your job. Even if it’s something well beyond your pay grade – like having 100 terrorists camped outside your apartment – you mustn’t panic, hard as that might be, if you want to have any chance of staying alive.

But the small stuff…. It’s not just our friend having a hard time. Take me for example. Yes, we were forewarned that Iranian missiles were heading our way that Sat. night, but when we heard our air defense system at work exploding their missiles, seemingly not so far away from our bedroom window, and the sirens going off in Jerusalem, Barbara was immediately up and about, getting ready to head down to the safe room in the basement. What was I doing? Lying there in my pj’s with little or no intention of getting up. (Let me die in my bed…) The sirens stopped, and it wasn’t long before I was back safely in The Land of Nod. However – and here’s the point – when the power went out in the middle of the night in our neighborhood a few months earlier, I could not sleep. I kept getting up and checking to see if the lights had come back on. Only then, about an hour later, could I relax. If our internet should go down – as it does every once in a while – I’m beside myself. What am I going to do; I can’t check out YouTube. That’s the kind of minor annoyances our friend was talking about, when our emotional defenses are down, and we succumb to our insecurities, big time.

Wait a minute; something’s missing…

So far, so good. But it occurred to me to take the idea one step further. And here it gets interesting. Let me give you a few examples of small stuff, aggravating in their own right but providing a useful lesson to one and all.

Remember my new Baratza coffee grinder? The one that, with Ezra’s assistance, I was able to ransom from the Israeli post office? The one I was going to wait until Pesach to unwrap and assemble? That one. Well, the time came, and I removed it from the multiple shipping cartons it came in. All the pieces were there and there was an instruction brochure in thirteen languages, one of which was English, one of which was not Hebrew – in case you’re wondering – with a schematic diagram of which piece was which. Let’s get started.

Setup: Here’s what the instructions say:

1. Remove the contents from the packaging and hand-wash the hopper lid, bean hopper, and grounds bin in warm soapy water. Let air dry. (So far, so good.)
2. To install the hopper, align the silver grind setting indicator with the triangle near grind setting 40.

WAIT A MINUTE; SOMETHING’S MISSING. Don’t you have to install the grind mechanism before you can align it with the hopper?

Let’s suppose you’ve just bought a new car, and, for some reason, you decide to read the owner’s manual. You’re told to open the door on the driver’s side, get in, adjust the seat, fasten your seat belt, put the car in gear, and drive away. You may not even notice that they forgot to mention that you have to start the car before you can go anywhere, because that’s obvious. But….. Let’s say you’re an old fart, and you haven’t bought a new car in 20+ years. The guy from the showroom drives the car to your house and hands you the keys. (Or perhaps there are no keys, just an app on your phone or some such.) You want to start your new car, but you don’t know how; it’s not like the cars you knew and loved. What you’re supposed to do in some of these new-fangled cars is create some kind of code, enter it, and hit a button somewhere. (No more, turn the key in the ignition, the way you did all your life.) Now you really need to read the instructions and hope they tell you what to do. Otherwise, you have an expensive piece of metal sitting in your driveway, dwindling in value every week as it starts to collect rust.

Most people (?), without being prompted, would figure out that you need to take the coffee grinder out of the carton if you plan to use it, and the more fastidious out there would want to rinse off the plastic pieces before going on. But then? How do you assemble this thing? When in doubt, ask Siri, or Alexis, or just go to Google, which is what I did. Sure enough, there was a YouTube video in which the fellow from French Press Coffee demonstrated how to assemble the Baratza ESP grinder. Actually very simple. Place the grind mechanism in the chassis, line up a mark on one part with a mark on the other, and press down, so the grinding mechanism will stay where it’s supposed to. Then and only then can you proceed to attach the bean hopper and rotate it to the proper grind setting.  Easy-peasy – once you know how. Otherwise you will have a fancy doodad taking up space on your kitchen counter, you will have wasted your hard-earned money, and you will have to attack your coffee beans with a hammer or something similar.

I watched the YouTube video several times, doing just what the guy was demonstrating, and assembled my Baratza ESP grinder without a problem. I plugged it in, adjusted the grind setting, turned it on, put in some beans, and watched as the bean hopper emptied out and the grounds bin filled up. The aroma of freshly-ground coffee (not just ordinary coffee but Power Coffeeworks special blend) wafted through our kitchen, and I was a happy guy. Well, not completely. Why did I have to go through all this trouble, searching for instructions that made sense? Baratza is not a fly-by-night outfit; they’ve sold as many coffee grinders as anyone in the business for a very long time. Why couldn’t the manufacturer get it right? Isn’t anyone paying attention to what they send out?

That’s more or less what I wrote to the Jerusalem Post. One of their reporters wrote an article in which he talked about the new green line of the light rail and the station at the Bar-Ilan junction as ‘already operational’ – except that this line is at least two years away from completion, which anyone who was paying attention or took the trouble to look could have told him. Would the newspaper correct their obvious mistake in a subsequent issue? (The silence is deafening.) Let’s just leave them to their confusion and move on.

A morass of mindlessness

Then there’s the big health food store on Agrippas St. opposite the shuk. A friend of a friend had been there to put in order for some passiflora leaves (don’t ask!) and paid for it. My assignment was to go there, pick up the package, and bring it back to Ma’ale Adumim. Except that when I showed up at the store, the woman who runs the place told me that there was no such order, and, what’s more, they don’t have the product in question. Get on the phone to our friend and explain the problem. She called her friend, called me back, and I handed the phone to the manager. Suddenly, the package that wasn’t there with the product they didn’t have miraculously showed up under the counter, with our friend’s name on the package, no less. The original transaction had taken place about an hour before I arrived, but it had faded from the manager’s memory like the geometry theorems I had learned back when Euclid was first formulating them. I could have said something to the woman about a lot of things, but, as I keep saying, life’s too short. Let me collect this package of leaves and go about my business, leaving her to her disarray. Maybe they need to stock some magical herbs to improve their powers of concentration.

But if you want to meander through a morass of mindlessness, what better place to go than the Israeli post office, where not paying attention is a way of life? Barbara and I were both being sent new credit cards from the local supermarket. Of course, the cards weren’t being sent to the store; that would be too simple. Unlike my coffee grinder, where there was money to be collected, the credit cards were simply ordinary mail, that if they got lost, no big deal. Or to be precise, for us to be sent on a wild goose chase between the actual post office and a mini-market in one of the neighborhoods – which would require Ezra’s always available shuttle service. Well, the message I received said my card was at the post office, except the post office people said it was at the mini-market, except that when we went there, the store owner was certain it was at the post office.

You don’t want to be hanging out at the post office during chol hamoed, but it didn’t seem that there was any choice. I don’t have an appointment; I’ll be there forever.

No you won’t, said Ezra, you have the super-senior app on your phone; you can go to the head of the line.

Of course! That’s the app that got installed at the NBN event months before, which, on principle, I’ve never used. But now? It’s the post office’s screw up. I shouldn’t be embarrassed to cut the line.

Back to the post office we traveled. I went to the device at the entrance that prints out your appointment number, and, sure enough, if you’re an old fart like me, you’ll get the next available number, no appointment, no muss, no fuss. Then I looked up. There was nobody else in the post office. (An hour and a half later, the place was mobbed.) I walked up to the counter and showed the clerk the message on my phone. He turned around, picked up a stack of envelopes, and within fifteen or twenty seconds, located the envelope with my credit card in it. It was there all the time, right where it should have been for anyone paying attention to notice. I could have said something, but why not quit while you’re ahead? I did get my new credit card, after all.

Please pay attention

There’s only one thing here in The Land bigger and better-not-fail than the doar, and that’s the army. There’s one young lady in our community who had a very special assignment during her military service. Let’s say there was a special operation to neutralize a bunch of terrorists in Jenin. Her job was to keep track of every soldier in the area to make sure that none of them got confused and started shooting at one of their buddies who was in the wrong place at the wrong time – something it’s easy to do when you’re a little raw around the edges. It’s called ‘friendly fire,’ which is one of the more absurd oxymorons in the lexicon. I keep thinking about some recent tragedies in Gaza where the ‘fire’ was so ‘friendly’ that three hostages trying to escape their captors were gunned down by their supposed-to-be rescuers and a clearly marked food convoy was blown to smithereens.  There’s probably a lot more we don’t know about, which may or may not be a good thing. Maybe we could clone our young lady, or at least instill the sense of urgency she represented – as in, please pay attention; the life you save may be somebody important, as in ‘anybody.’

I will readily concede that the annoyances I have chronicled don’t amount to a hill of beans in the big picture, but they seem like dress rehearsals for the kind of real-life catastrophes, disasters, and calamities happening all around us, caused by the same mental lapses. Weren’t you listening, weren’t you paying attention, did you forget what happened an hour ago, did you stop and think before you hit the ‘send’ button?

I have to stop now; there is a complaint from the kitchen that I forgot to put away the tuna fish, and Shekhi is wolfing it down as we speak. And we have to get prepared for tomorrow morning. They’re turning off the water in our building for a few hours in order to fix something. Fill the bathtub, fill every container with water, Barbara, just in case! Who knows what will happen?