Grampy Lash

Claudia and I take daily walks together with rare exceptions. One such variance from this daily norm occurred just recently. Brian was building a new storage shed in his back yard and we both wanted to see the early stages of construction. Claudia however, had a few errands to run, so we split our routine; I would walk to Brian’s house and she would run her errands and walk over to meet me later that morning. At about the time I had expected her to arrive, my phone jangles; guess who?

“I’m on my way over, walking down Winton Avenue now, ” she says somewhat breathlessly, “and I’m having some problems – I need some help…”

I leapt from my observation chair in a mild adrenalin rush, thinking something bad was happening, prepared to rush to her aid.

“There’s something wrong with my iPhone music!” Her tone of voice sounded as if her ankles might have been under attack by an untethered shih tzu. “It won’t play a song without skipping to the next one.”

“Uhh,” as I retreated back to my observation post, “I’ll check it out when you get here and see what the problem might be.”

“No, I want to fix it now so I can listen to my music without interruption!” she demanded.

“What seems to be the problem?” I asked in conditioned submission.

“Well, it was playing a Barbara Streisand song, then boodle-ee-oop and it jumped to Alan Jackson.”

Doesn’t sound like a problem to me, I think to myself. “Okay, kill the iTunes app, start it fresh and see if that solves the problem.” This was clearly a delay tactic that would keep her busy until she arrived. The carpenter was about to raise a wall section and I did not want to miss anything while trying to trouble shoot iTunes problems over the iPhone.

“It didn’t work! The first song I tried went boodle-ee-oop and jumped to the next song. I’m almost there anyway, so you can look at it when I get there,” she frustratingly reported.

A few minutes later the iPhone is in my face. “Here! See if you can fix it!”

So, I fired up iTunes on her iPhone and suffered through an uninterrupted Barbara Striesand song, then Liza Minnelli followed by some more Barbara; nary a  boodle-ee-oop. I shrugged my shoulders and sheepishly returned the device to my wife.

“I supposed it worked for you…”

“Yes.”

And here it comes, the rhetorical question of the day. “How come it worked for you, but not for me?”

Trying to keep my sometimes sarcastic self reined in, I respond with a series of IT type trouble-shooting questions to at least try to come up with an answer:

“Did you maybe drop it this morning?” “No!”

“Did you perhaps drop something on it?” “NO!”

“How were you carrying your phone when you first noticed the problem?”

Her frustration was beginning to flow like a slowly rising tide. “I carried it in my pocket, and when it boodle-ee-ooped, I took it out and held it by the edges like this!” And she kind of shook it at me.

Ahh, finally making some headway. “Were you carrying it in your hip pocket by any chance?”

“Yes, and that’s when it first boodle-ee-ooped.”

And then my epiphany. I had a vision of my sweet little girlfriend, briskly strutting down Winton Avenue, listening to the peppy beats of Barbara, picking up the pace, shaking those hips just enough to – BOODLE-EE-OOP! Next it’s Alan Jackson – BOODLE-EE-OOP! Next comes Brad Paisley and she yanks her iPhone out of her hip pocket and gives it a little inquisitive what’s-wrong-with-you shake. BOODLE-EE-OOP, back to Barbara.

“Let me see your phone, I think I know the cause of your problem.”

Let’s see now. Settings. Music. Shake to Shuffle. Green. On. EUREKA! I change it to off. Problem solved.

“Fixed your iPhone!” I declared, in the same manner as Clark Griswold had proclaimed that he had fixed the newel post.

Claudia is naive, to say the least, when dealing with any electronic device (other than her sewing machine), and she was so grateful I think I might have been able to have my way with her right then and there in Brian’s storage shed; if it had been finished and no one else was around.

“Oh, thank you so much! How did you fix it?” she cooed.

“It was easy,” I smugly replied. “I just went to your iPhone settings and set the shake-your-ass-to-shuffle to off.”

“Huh?”

“Now you can shake that little bum as much as you like and boodle-ee-oop no more!”

By then the carpenter was raising the second wall section.