A telephone conversation, as I heard it … almost word-for-word: Phone rings. I see it’s my mother on the other line and I pick up. Mentally, I buckle myself in and say a prayer. Me: Hello. Mom: Brian? Me: Yeah, mom. Mom: I’m calling to see what you want me to bring to the Mother’s Day picnic. You know, the one you’re having on Sunday.

Letter to the dumb people who make stuff that breaks: Hey you! You know who you are. I’m talking to you, the designers and builders and head honcho-ponchos of companies who make stuff. Stuff that we, the ordinary stiffs with credit cards, buy. Remember us dopes? Well, we’re not happy with you right now. Why? Because all that stuff you sold us keeps breaking. Yeah, that’s right — it broke. All of it. At the same time. Everything. Kaputski! Why, you ask? That’s what we’d like to know! We’re suspecting it has something to do with the fact that it’s all crap. Yeah, that’s right. We think you sold us a bunch of crap. All of it. And we ain’t happy. We’re thinking about coming to your house and busting some of your stuff.

So, here’s the thing: You go through life thinking teaching is so easy. That harks back to grade school, I think. Back when your sense of appreciation for the people up by the chalkboard was none too high. Why would it be? They always took offense to you sailing paper airplanes across the room, and they never found funny a spitball lodged so deep in a buddy’s ear that it required surgical tweezers. I mean, come on — that’s funny! At some point, most of us gained a bit of fondness for our teachers, but I can’t say we ever stopped thinking what they did was easy. That anyone with the right amount of chalk or a pair of reading glasses dipped low along their nose could do it. Because it’s teaching, right? I mean, you get up there, you say some stuff, you write it on the chalkboard for emphasis, you snap at a couple of kids — “I’m warning you. I once bit the ears off an alligator! — and then you write on reports, “Your prepositional phrases don’t cohabitate with your conjunctivitis.” Easy peasy. Anyone can do it. Your whole life you think this, and your whole life you would continue thinking it … right up until the moment you walk into the classroom yourself, stand up by the board and think, “Holy fish sticks! What in the heck am I supposed to say?”

It’s unfortunate really, because I had been feeling so good about work. So lucky. So content. So, well, happy just to have a job. But it was more than that. I was feeling fulfilled. Part of that is I get to work with college students — as a student newspaper adviser and now also as a teacher thanks to my opinion writing class. There are few things better than being able to help mold and meld partially-solidified minds. It’s rewarding. And it doesn’t hurt that you can occasionally call them names like “meatball” and “mullet head.” (When I’m really on my game I’ll string them together like: “You mullet-headed meatball!” So I had been pretty happy on the work front. That is, until I read that Wall Street Journal article. Why am I always looking to newspapers for personal enrichment? It was a front-page piece that — tragically — forced me to look at my job in a whole new light. Frankly, work will never be the same again. I thought I had it good, but turns out it was just a mirage. I’m being duped. What was the story about, you ask? The headline read: “Drinking on the job comes to a head at Carlsberg.”

I guess it was bound to happen. For eons now, the music of my youth — 80s music — has been considered retro. Ultra hip. Totally cool. Able to transcend generations and stay relevant even though it was more than 20 years old. (Or that it sounded like a Casio keyboard having a seizure.) But I got a shock to the system the other day. I was in the car listening to National Public Radio when someone said that 80s music is no longer retro. The “new retro,” they said, is now 90s music. Nineties! I was floored. Flabbergasted. I nearly crashed into a telephone pole. How could 80s music be out of fashion? It was always ABOUT fashion (bad fashion, but fashion all the same.) How could this be? Was there a vote? Had anyone consulted with us, the children of MTV.

When last we heard from our intrepid traveler, he had concocted an unbelievable plan to run a 15 kilometer race at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday and then make a 12:50 flight for a conference in New York. Too little potassium as a child left him with no understanding of time. To him, it sounded “doable.” He figured he could accomplish this through several time-saving techniques, like only putting on one sock before the race. He also figured that cursing ferociously during the drive to the airport could rip a hole in the space-time continuum letting him leap into the future. (He watches too many movies.) Surprisingly, all went according to plan for the young lad. His bags packed themselves. Traffic parted as he approached. Not even the stench of a port-o-let threw him off his game. He ran his race, and ran it fast. It was a great race — more than a minute faster than his last 15K. And there was even time for a visit to the beer tent after the race. Don’t hold that against our young protagonist.