As I get older I have started to notice that sometimes I will go downstairs from my office and when I get there I wonder why I have just made the trip. I wonder if it is Alzheimer’s or my brain is just so full of stuff after all of the years that there is not much more room in my memory bank.
The other day I complained to my wife that my electric razor was really getting dull because it was taking so long to shave.
My wife calmly replied, “Warren, your razor would work faster and better if you turned it on.”
I turned it on and it only took a minute or so to get a good shave out of it.
The name “Doofus” is starting to be my real name instead of a nickname.
How many times over the years has this type of thing happened to me? I lost count years ago.
Last year, my memory really failed me when we were going through customs in Canada. While my wife was handling the paperwork, I was standing on the dock talking to four of our guests and one customs officer. I took a step to the right instead of the left and walked right off of the dock into ice-cold water. Fortunately our close friend, a doctor, was with us and no stitches were needed for the cuts and bruises where I had hit the dock.
Today almost everyone I know has a BlackBerry to store all of his or her important information. Knowing my ability to be a Doofus I carry around a “Whiteberry.” It is a spiralbound, 3-by-5 inch notepad and a pen. That way it has to be important or I don’t write it down. Often when I get to my desk I remember that I left my “Whiteberry” in my other pants that I had already thrown in the laundry basket. My wife is smart enough to check my pockets before she throws my pants in the washing machine so all of (what I think are) my valuable notes are preserved until I can get to them.
Then I keep my memory sharp by trying to remember what “frimp@glock” means. Or be sure and call “Ghsut” whoever “Ghsut” is. It would be easier if people spoke slower or I could learn to live my life with my two thumbs and a BlackBerry instead of a sharpie and a piece of white paper with notes on it – notes that have been scribbled while riding with my wife while she was driving on a bumpy road.
If I could see a copy somewhere of a list of all of the mess-ups that I have been involved in during my life it would probably be longer than the autobiography that I am currently writing.
I find that the entire world likes it when someone messes up because it gives the rest of us a sense of superiority to that poor Doofus.
I have more than my share of Doofus moments every time I play a round of golf. I found that it is way too frustrating to bother to keep score because many of the holes that I try to get the ball into take a double digit number of hits to get it there. I don’t need that kind of scorecard to take home. Instead I just keep track of how many golf balls I lose and how many hits that I felt good about. When the number of good hits occasionally outscores the number of golf balls that I lose, it has been a good day. I ride in a cart, no cell phone allowed and soak up the Northwestern sunshine (when that occasionally happens) and life could not be any better. On top of that, it has not hit 80 degrees all summer where we live, while the rest of America is either in a rainstorm, a dust storm, a heat wave, a drought, or all of the above. An occasional Doofus moment is a small price to pay for all the good that is happening.