I will admit I might, on occasion, visually appraise a man walking out of a room, but it’s been years since I wanted to know what’s in his pants. Until our house guest Tom showed up.
Tom is, among other attributes, a nice guy. And a useful guy. He knows all that stuff I don’t know, like how the electrons are moving around and how to get them to line up and pay attention and make pixels and stuff. You know, the kind of stuff you really, really don’t want to call Tech Support about because you won’t understand it and you’ll never get those hours back again. It must be great to have all that knowledge anchored down in your brain pan and not rattling around loose like mine is. I just hadn’t fully appreciated how much was in his pants.
Until we collaborated on a small task, which was pairing the remote for a power bed with its controller box. Not complicated but it’s helpful to have one person under the bed and the other barking out the instructions. I’m mostly small so I scooched under the bed. And popped right out again.
“Is my cell phone out there? I need the flashlight.”
Instead Tom reaches in a pocket and produces a fine flashlight the size of a doobie. All righty then. I popped back under. Somehow, by process of elimination (it was the only button), I located the reset button on the controller box. Per instructions, I unplugged the bed and plugged it back in, he pressed remote buttons, and I tried to push the reset button with my fingernail. The “beep” that was supposed to indicate success did not occur. I popped out.
“Do you have a pencil or something?”
A pen was produced from another pocket. Apparently, a magic pen that “will write on anything.”
But no beep.
“Are your remote batteries any good?” he asked.
How would I know? I have a limbo box of used batteries that might or might not work because I never seem to actually get rid of batteries that are clearly shot.
No matter. Tom immediately produced a pair of AAA batteries.
“Were those in your pants?”
He just smiled. Well what the hell.
“What else do you have in those pants?” As soon as I said it, I knew I was out of line. But there you are. The batteries were installed. The protocol re-protocolled, followed by the beep of success.
I still don’t know what-all is in those pants. A multi-tool device for sure, and I’d bet the ranch on the little bitty screwdrivers for tightening eyeglasses, a set of Allen wrenches, a garlic press, a decoder ring, a pressure gauge, a space blanket, and spare eye buttons for stuffed animals. As a person who can lose a tool I’m using even though I have not moved more than three feet in any direction, I am in awe of this.
But it’s not like I haven’t run into this sort of thing before. My friend Mary Ann, who also has expansive lore in her head, has everything you might ever need in a pocket somewhere on her person. She even made extra room for tools in her shirt pockets by eliminating her secondary sexual characteristics a while back, although that was probably not her primary rationale at the time, and yes, I don’t even have to check with her to know it’s all right for me to tell you that. Mary Ann is a walking wonder of the first degree.
But I’m afraid if Mary Ann and Tom got in the same room there might be a conflict of polarities. They would either repel each other or fuse into a single amalgam of useful toolage. Either way, it’s not worth the risk.
I do know I’m not going to ask Tom if he knows what planets are in the sky tonight. He probably does, but rather than informing me, he’ll pull a gigantic telescope out of his pants, folded like origami, and float it into space.
Your friend Tom sounds a lot like the Tom Baker version of Doctor Who. He wore a large coat with capacious pockets and always seemed to have whatever tool was called for in them, plus a bag of jelly babies. But usually his sonic screwdriver handled most everything. Your friend MAY be a Time Lord! Does he travel around in a blue police box?
Yes! That would explain everything.
Oh dear. Yet another iconic show I’ve never watched, to go along with Star Wars.
Loved it! Thanks.
Imma get you a rocket for your pocket!
Murr, I think you’d be disappointed in what I have in my pockets. These days it’s mostly my wallet and my phone, though the wallet has had interesting non wallet items in it over the years such as a silver solar face and a pfennig coin. The solar face was lost at some point and the pfennig was put away in the coin drawer.
I used to carry a huge wad of tissues, but haven’t had a need to blow my nose recently. Also I discovered that a folded paper towel was far more useful and durable than a facial tissue.
I always have a Leatherman multi-tool on my belt and have some non-key items in my key ring . Thankfully (I think) my key ring is nowhere near as large as it was during my Rutgers days when I had keys to every door and lock on my floor. I had that clipped to a carabiner until the damned thing unlatched itself and I was without keys for a week during which time I had a threatening visit from an RU official who told me that losing building keys at one time was a firing offense.
After I got them back I replaced the carabiner with a large and very aggressively sprung clip that proceeded to tear holes in my pants. But the keys remained secure so that was the important bit.
The pants need to be secure too. Keep tinkering!