One of my favorite pet peeves about people is the way in which friendly offers- "Let me know if I can help"- become can't-miss obligations- "but you promised you'd help me." It's a habit we all share to some degree, but Janet raises it to the level of performance art.

This sordid tale picks up whence the wench asked me about getting cable TV hooked up in her room. I explained that there's a cable outlet on the wall, and she could just plug into that. "Are you paying for an extra hookup?" I don't know, I explained, I just know that the guy who was in there a month earlier used it and it worked fine. "Because you're supposed to pay for each room that has a hookup." So now she's the patron saint of the cable company? I suppose AT&T will be blaming our failure to pay full price for their poor performance in their next quarterly report, which will lead to a general dive in the markets, which will cause several stockbrokers to go for walks on ledges, and now I'm a murderer. Right.

Anyway, she comes home a day or two later with a cable box, and meets me at the door with a pleading look that I now know means trouble. "How do I hook this up, do I need to call the cable company?" No, you just need some cable, two lines, one each for the A and B channels. You screw one end into the wall and the other into the box, and the box into the TV. I was going to say, 'easier than tying your shoes,' but then I noticed she was wearing slip-ons.

"That sounds confusing." You sound like a fucking vegetable. "Where do I get the cable," she asks. Easy, I say, Radio Shack or any AV store. She looks at me and begins her passive-aggressive wind-up. "Well, you think you might be able, you know if it's not too much of a problem, maybe if sometime..." "Sure," I say, I'll go to Radio Shack, I'll pick up some cable, and I'll plug in your goddam TV set so that after you get home from work, and finish watching TV while you eat your dinner, you can go upstairs to your room and watch more TV before you go to sleep, just to make sure you don't need to spend more than five minutes of your day using your fucking brain.

What I should have said, was, "why don't you call the cable company and pay them to do it, I don't know how." Why didn't I? Because I'm not that kind of guy. Why? Because I've never had to deal with a Janet before. To all you girls out there complaining constantly about good-for-nothing men, I say, your real enemies are the Janets of this world, who grab hold of us and wring us dry of our naturally-beneficent natures. They, not we, are your real problem. It's not our fault, it's just the environment.

Anyway, for approximately a week I received a daily email exhorting me to remember to stop by radio shack and buy some cable. Luckily I gave Janet one of my lesser-used addresses, so I didn't get any of these until day 5, after I actually bought the cable. And people ask why I have so many addresses.

Which brings us to a fine Sunday morning maybe two weeks ago, when I got around to helping her hook it all up. Now, what I did was rather than buy say a pair of 25-foot cables which would leave big coils of cable laying around Janet's otherwise Martha Stewart-friendly bedroom, I bought a 50-foot spool and some connectors so we could cut a cable right to the exact length, real professional-like. All I asked her to do the day before was to run the cable the way she wanted it and measure the length she wanted it cut to. I had to explain this several times to her.

So I go up to her room, and lo and behold, she ran the cable from the wall to the TV, but managed somehow to get the cable itself tangled into a knot of Gordian proportions. All in the space of 24 hours. I spend the next ten minutes untangling it, and proceed to with the cutting and measuring and splicing of the cable with far greater care and precision than the layabouts from AT&T can even imagine, not to mention saving her some money.

This of course is lost on Janet who, twenty minutes in, asks, "Are you sure you know how to do this?"

At this point, I have to take a little detour and explain to my female readers a matehmatically-perfect method for achieving complete connubial bliss with men in their lives. It's all a matter of questions, some of which you ask us that are merely ignorable or annoying, i.e. "would you prefer the room in corsican pale yellow or pearly mauve," versus those that actually provoke the lizard part of our brain to secrete pure venom into our bloodstream. I present below a brief list of such questions for your study, along with the unspoken but thought response they provoke:

• Q: Are you actually going to eat that? A: Why not, it doesn't taste any worse than your cooking does fresh.
  
• Q: Do you know where you're going? A: Yes, I'm looking for a nice sheer cliff I can drive this car off of just to make the questions stop!
  
• Q: Are you going out with your guy friends again? A: Apparently you don't realize that the only reason you see me at all is I'm not gay.
  
• You're not going out wearing those dirty clothes, are you? A: Shit, you're right, I do have a clean pair of sweatpnts and a wifebeater.
  
• Q: Do you know what you're doing? A: No, I'm sitting here under the sink with water pouring all over me/under the car/on the roof on a Sunday afternoon TO FUCKING ENTERTAIN MYSELF!
  

So, back to Janet asking me if I knew what I was doing. At the time I was holding a large knife to cut the cables with, and for a brief moment I pondered whether the charge would be Murder One or negligent manslaughter, and what my odds would be of getting a sympathetic jury (high). But, I breathed deeply and continued my work. If you spend your whole life being a supremely annoying person, you msut consider that there is always a probability, however slight, that you will become a statistic. Sadly, this fact does not seem to deter anyone.

So, once I had the cable hooked up, Janet began to ask about why she couldn't get the same channels on her set that we got on the one downstairs. I explained that some two years prior, when the cable guy originally came, we tipped him a case of beer and a bottle of good scotch, and he tipped us back a box which didn't care whether we paid for HBO or not.

"So you mean you have illegal cable?" I prefer the term "discounted," since it was all installed by a legitimate agent of AT&T and we do pay $40 per month for cable, which seems like an awful lot to me because it's more than we pay for gas and electricity combined. "Actually that's really cheap, you should be paying a lot more." Says who? Anyway, this would explain why her box (non-hacked) would not get HBO while the downstairs box would. "Listen," I said, "if you want to get those stations, all we need to do is go legal and pay for it. It would just take a phone call and I don't care, I'll pay my share."

So, just to recap, what I just said was, 'if you want to get TV in your bedroom, I will need to spend more money for which I will get nothing, but I'll do that because I'm a giving person."

What she said in response was, "well, I don't know, I mean, I don't want to screw up a deal, but I want to get those stations, but I don't want to blah blah blah blah..."

Suffice it to sya that I simply turned around and walked away. I've offered to let you spend my money, but I'm not going to sit here and have a debate about it. Make up your fucking mind and call the damn cable company and take care of it yourself.

Coming up next week: Crank Yankers, or, The Telephone Game  ¶ 6:13 PM 0 Comments