Nobody Steals The French Lieutenant's Woman
In which the author is robbed, by idiots
When, exactly, did Labor Day become such a cruel joke? Every restaurant, fast-food joint, home-improvement store, gas station — they’re all fully staffed on the Monday in question. You hear so much about how organized labor got us the 40 hour week, paid holidays, weekends off, but our Glorious Transition from manufacturing economy to service economy has hasn’t just wiped those advances off the maps, it’s burned their corpse and urinated on it. In the cruelest and oddest of ironies, Labor Day is now a holiday for all the people who don’t work particularly hard. It’s a day in which we celebrate the inhabitants of government jobs, corporate management, FIRE stalwarts. All the actual laborers? They’re out there laboring on Labor Day.
As are the Amish, who built me 320 feet of perfectly aligned treated-wood privacy fence over rolling ground in seven hours without so much as a single pre-constructed panel or laser guide. This, in turn, freed me up to re-use the T-post-and-galvanized-mesh wire fence that my son and I had previously installed along that line somewhere else. It was a few hours of labor in which I didn’t check my phone or think about the outside world; in other words, a blessing. So by the time I did get my electronic leash back out, it was too late to respond to the voicemail left me by Public Storage, which went something like,
uh, this is Public Storage… you need to come put a lock on your storage unit, it doesn’t have one, okay? Call me back at…
That’s an awfully funny way to say that someone broke into your storage unit between last night and this morning, stole all your stuff, without us noticing, and for some reason they chose not to lock it back up when they were done. I wandered around my property until I found Danger Girl. “I need to get down to one of the storage units, apparently someone broke into it.”
“Which unit?”
“I don’t know.” But then I saw that I had an email from Public Storage as well, sent an hour before, chiding me for not locking my unit, and it had the unit number involved. “Oh, great news. It’s not the one with the old BMX ramps in it… not the one with the race wheels and tires… not the one with the shelving from the basement and all my shoes… yup, it’s the indoor one. The one with fifty-plus guitars and a dozen amps and all my home stereo equipment.”
“Well, don’t get killed racing down there.” As I nodded, I thought of what Foxy says to Piet in Couples, regarding the virtues of unprotected sex during pregnancy: “You can’t kill the dead.”