The Digital Tipping Point

A long time ago I realized that I had reached what I called the digital tipping point – when I decided that if I had to choose, I would much rather lose my wallet than my phone. I think a lot of us would agree with that.

I know Son Number Two probably would. He’s off in Idaho at his first year of college and taking advantage of all the exciting activities Boise State has to offer – one of the main ones being floating the Boise River.

The river makes up the entire northern border of the campus, and it’s perfect for floating in an innertube, as long as you don’t mind sitting in freezing cold water while the rest of you fries like an egg in a high-altitude skillet.

He called me after he had finished the Labor Day float this weekend. Of course, I had no idea he was calling me, because it was some random number showing up on my phone.

“Bad news, Dad…”

Life360 is still showing us the exact spot in the middle of the Boise River where his phone finally died. It’s presumably still there on the bottom, because the second he dropped it out of his tube he went straight down after it, but it was never to be seen again.

Now, to be an eighteen-year-old off at college without a phone is one thing, but this was an iPhone, and iPhones have that magnetic ring thing on the back. And there are countless companies that sell accessories that will magnetize to the back of your phone. One of the most popular of those accessories is a wallet that holds things like your credit card and ATM card and driver’s license.

He had one of those.

He also HAD a credit card, an ATM card, and a driver’s license.

I never gave any thought to the dreaded third option of the digital tipping point – losing BOTH your wallet and your phone in one tragic river tubing accident. But then, I don’t have my wallet attached to my phone, and I also don’t take either of them with me when I get into an innertube in a river. But I also have a fully developed frontal lobe that controls risk/reward, so I have an advantage there.

When you ship your kids off to college, you are really hoping they receive an education. One of the many things you hope they’ll learn in 2024 is how to better use email. That’s been a nice side benefit of having a son without a phone. His mom and I have Samsung phones, so he can’t just text us from his iPad, because the folks who brought you the “Genius Bar” still think SMS is just a fad and won’t catch on. So, he’s having to manage this with us through email, which has been instructional for him. He hasn’t really mastered Subjects yet, but baby steps.

He's also needing to problem solve. He found out the DMV won’t send your California driver’s license to another state, so he had to find someone here in the Golden State willing to mail it to him. I might charge him for my labor AND the postage.

And he currently has absolutely no way to purchase any goods or services. Kids these days are not big on having cash, so he’s in a bit of a pickle. (Although, if he had any cash, I guess it would be at the bottom of the Boise River too.)

Sixteen-year-old Son Number Three had it all figured out the other night. “Well, he doesn’t need the actual cards! He can just use ApplePay.”

“That might just work…”

“Yep.”

“…if he had a phone.”

“Oh, right…”

He could ask his roommates to front him some cash and Venmo them. But does Venmo even have a desktop-based version? Can you Venmo from an iPad? No one knows, because everyone else’s phones are not at the bottom of the Boise River.

Well, actually, there probably are a few others down there. My wife found a retired guy who runs a Facebook page for the Boise River Float Lost and Found. Apparently, he’s spending his retired years diving below the rapids and collecting the college kids’ lost treasures and selling them back to the kids/parents for a $100 flat fee.

Not in a million years would I pay him even $1.00 to retrieve my son’s phone and wallet for him. This extracurricular college lesson is far too valuable.

I mean, I could give this guy the Life360 exact location of where my son’s phone gave up the ghost, but I wouldn’t. If he randomly found it and contacted me, I’d be tempted to pay him $100 just to keep his mouth shut.

You can’t buy this kind of education. Your college freshman can, though!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Hit SEND Before it’s Too Late - Repost

When we sent Son Number One off to his first year of college last year, we attended a one-day parent orientation. It was an informative day on a number of levels, the most striking of which was just how bad incoming college freshman are at using email.

Apparently, the first year of college doesn’t completely fix the problem, as evidenced by Son Number One’s new sophomore year apartment complex and their insane information spamming program. I’m a co-signer of the lease, so I’m on the mailing list, and between June 1^st and today – roughly 82 days – the Greenleaf Republic apartments sent me 64 emails. I don’t even talk to my wife that much.

One email a week would have been 12, and that still would have been major overkill for the amount of actual information they conveyed to us. Why did they send me 39 of the EXACT SAME EMAILS about move-in schedules and action items? Because their student clientele obviously still sucks at email.

Well, I’m here to tell you, parents of younger kids, it might be too late for my kids, but yours might still have hope, if you act quickly. Last year after the orientation day, I was kind enough to devise a plan to help all you younger parents out there who want their kids to someday be able to hold down a real job. Best of luck!

There’s a funny thing about kids these days. They have embraced digital technology like no other generation before them. It is interwoven into their lives and they probably would not be able to function without it.

Except for email.

For whatever reason, email – once the very pinnacle of sophisticated digital communications – is like a rotary phone to them. They don’t know how to use it.

Way back when the boys were little, I set all three of them up with Gmail accounts. Best dad move ever, I thought at the time. I would have been less enthusiastic had I known how little and how poorly they would use them.

If you email them something, you have to text them to tell them that you emailed them. If you do that, you have increased the chances from 0% to 11% that they will see your email. Unfortunately, even if they do see it, the chances are still 0% that they will actually read it.

I foolishly thought that high school would get them in the habit of using email effectively. I mean, after all, they were given school email addresses in order to communicate with their teachers. Once again, I was wrong. Ask any high school teacher how well the kids use email. They will just laugh and laugh.

Once again, I foolishly thought things would change with my eighteen-year-old when it was time to register for college. And once again, I was wrong.

He is going to University of Nevada, Reno in the fall, and yesterday was his orientation day. About two weeks ago we received an email about Orientation Step One. I saw that he and I had both received it, and I even mentioned it to him at the time.

When I inquired about it Monday night – the night before orientation – he said, and I quote, “Huh?”

When I sat down with him at his computer and had him look for the email, he immediately claimed that he had no idea where it was, and probably never got it. As I stared slack-jawed at his 999 unopened emails in his inbox, I suggested that he might try a search for the word “orientation.”

Miraculously, we found the email, which contained a detailed list of lots of things he needed to take care of about a week ago. He had a busy night.

The next day at UNR, one of the presentations for the parents was from the head of the student advisory department. They are in charge of helping the kids get all the classes they need in order to stay on track. She talked with us for twenty minutes, and about nineteen of those minutes consisted of begging us to somehow make our children check their emails.

Hmm…

So, parents of young children, this is your Immature Societal Email Nonfunction Disorder (I-SEND) Public Service Announcement. It’s obviously too late for our college freshmen, but you might still be able to salvage your children.

You need to get your kids in the habit of checking (and actually reading) their emails on a daily basis. It won’t be easy, but it can be done if you focus on the things they really want and need.

For instance, kids need food. Put a lock on the refrigerator and the pantry and email them the combination. Change the combination each day.

Kids love Wi-Fi. Change the code daily and have them send you an email each day to request their chore list. When they have replied with a list of fully completed chores, they can then send a separate email formally requesting the Wi-Fi code. If their email has no subject line, delete it without reading it.

Kids enjoy getting an allowance. Each month they must email you an allowance request. They can find their money after they complete a series of back-and-forth informational emails as you lead them through a scavenger hunt. Make it complicated. If you have more than one child and they use Reply All incorrectly, no allowance that month.

If you have teenagers that drive, the location of their car keys should be available only by email. Every once in a while, send them an email from you, but with poor grammar and spelling errors, starting with, “Dearist beloved Child.” Include an attachment that is a “pdf of the locality of you keys.”

The pdf should read: “You don’t get to drive today because in the real world you just downloaded a virus. Stay home and learn which emails to flag as spam.”

Good luck out there, parents!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Universitas Interruptus

This week’s column has been interrupted by college.

I’m currently at the Boise, Idaho International Airport and Ag Equipment Emporium, waiting for my flight back to California. I spent the morning moving Son Number Two’s things into his dorm room at Boise State – home of the Smurf Turf, and now, quite a bit of our money.

I spent a harrowing eleven hours in Number Two’s 1999 Toyota 4Runner yesterday, with its questionable suspension and iffy second gear, mostly praying that Toyota and the good Lord would deliver us all the way to Boise and not just part way. Because any part of the way once you’re between Reno, NV and Boise, ID is the exact center of the middle of nowhere.

By the grace of both Manufacturers, we made it all the way, and happily with 99% of the things we were transporting. We only lost the lid off one of the storage tubs on the roof rack. Mind you, everything was secured down on top with a bungee cargo net, and the cargo net remains perfectly intact. The entire cargo net also remained perfectly in place. All the cargo remained perfectly in place. But somehow, some way, with a mighty gust of wind from a passing eighteen-wheeler on 95-North, a two-foot by three-foot plastic Rubbermaid tub lid escaped the net through one of the five-inch by four inch holes in the webbing.

Everything that was in the tub was still in the tub when we pulled over. I’ve been thinking about it for thirty hours and I still have no idea how or what happened.

Anyway, minor poltergeist, shapeshifting tub lid loss aside, we made it to the dorms. It’s when I saw his dorm that I became so overcome with feelings that I abandoned all hope of being emotionally able to produce today’s regularly scheduled column.

His dorm window is about twenty feet away from one of the entrances to the ExtraMile Arena, where the Boise State Bronco Basketball Team plays their home games. And just on the other side of that, rising majestically above campus, clearly visible from that window and hittable with a well-thrown frisbee is Albertson’s Stadium, home of Bronco Football and the legendary blue turf.

This is so unfair.

What? Did you think I became overwhelmed with sad feelings about our second child leaving the nest?

Hardly! Get out.

I was overcome with jealousy. Jealousy and nostalgia for my own college dorm experience.

But mostly jealousy that my own college dorm wasn’t smack in the middle of two powerhouse sports arenas.

I like this airport. I think I might have to see more of this place and that dorm on game days.

So unfair.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Major Financial Issues

Son Number Two has beaten the odds and graduated from high school without being expelled for selling knives on campus or for getting caught transporting knives internationally for school administrators. Long story, but suffice to say, we’re breathing a sigh of relief.

Had he been caught in either of those activities, we undoubtedly would have incurred heavy legal fees, but I doubt it would have added up to the bill we’re facing for his next four years, so I’m a little conflicted. All things considered, I guess higher education is a better path than incarceration, so I’ll let it go.

He is off to Boise State in the fall. Boise is in Idaho, and seems to be the capital of the state, based on the domed, capitol-shaped building we saw in the middle of town. We visited this past weekend for his orientation days, and the locals insist that the correct pronunciation of Boise is not “boy-zee” like everyone I’ve ever met says it, but rather, “boy-see.”

We heard our share of orientation speakers saying “boy-see,” but I remain convinced this is a masterful long con to make the transplanting Californians look and sound stupid. I’m sticking with the “zee” sound.

The two-day orientation program was well run overall, and informative and productive for the incoming freshmen. They ended with a great idea of what campus life will be like and fully registered for their fall semester classes. Some of the orientation content, however, was a little less than stellar. I am, of course, talking about the current Boise State junior who was tasked with speaking to all of the parents and students in one of our joint sessions about her college experience.

She was actually a fairly decent public speaker, holding her own in front of hundreds of her peers and her parents’ peers. That’s not the easiest thing to do, so I give her full credit for that, but I can’t abide her message at all.

Somehow, Boise State made the decision to put a junior up in front of us that probably has three to four more years of college to get through before she receives her bachelor’s degree in a likely yet undetermined major.

Her message was this: It’s OK to come here not having any clue what you want to major in, and it’s just fine – even great – to change your major as often and as many times as you need to to figure out your life path. I believe she was on her third major, and confessed that she was again having some doubts about whether she was going to stick with it.

I’m guessing if you were behind her in the buffet line, you’d still be there.

Now, like I said, the program was largely well-run and obviously thoroughly planned out, so I’m not sure how the orientation coordinators let the Typhoid Mary of educational planning slip past them onto the stage. But there she was.

And there we were, along with a vast majority of the parents in the room, staring down their child and telling them, NOPE. Sorry, pal. I don’t know who’s paying the bill for this young lady’s tuition, but I do know they aren’t at all like your parents.

I would rather you go get a job and take the next ten years to figure out what you want to do before starting college, than show up here thinking Mary’s Extended Idaho Vacation Plan is an option for you.

You get 120 credits and four years to complete them. That’s the deal. College, while almost assuredly being some of the best years of your life, was never meant to be a vocation. This is a problem that has evolved in two main areas – higher education and government. Neither were meant to be a career, and the folks that treat them that way are largely scared to produce results that they might be judged on.

Those aren’t the people we’re looking for out here. Don’t be them.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re not too worried about you, Son Number Two. You’ve always been focused, and that’s putting it mildly. We just needed to make it clear.

Now, all that being said, extending your college experience a few more years isn’t the end of the world, and would probably be pretty fun, especially in Boise with a “zee.” So, I guess you can feel free to change your major as often as you’d like. You’ll just need to find someone besides you or us to pay for it.

Maybe talk to Mary’s parents. They seem generous.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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The Hot Seat

I had the opportunity to travel to Reno, Nevada this week to present a Positive Coaching Alliance workshop to the amazing people from all the Boys & Girls Clubs in the area. My wife came with me and we made a little mini getaway out of it.

It was a great trip, but I had little bit of a fatherly crisis after we had dinner, which was a tad disconcerting so close to Father’s Day.

If you’ve never been, Reno has an idyllic little cutsie river walk in the middle of the biggest little city in the world. The Truckee river burbles and bounces through the heart of old downtown Reno, with shops, hotels, and restaurants lining its sides. Unfortunately, there are quite a few homeless folks lining its sides as well.

My wife and I were walking off an amazing Italian dinner at Marcolini’s Italia – a small little place that comes with my largest recommendation. My wife said that the owner told us the chef was from Hell’s Kitchen, but I distinctly heard him say she was from Helsinki with my sub-par hearing in the room full of background noise.

We’ll never know which one of us is correct, because there’s just no way to check. But it’s a moot point if she’s from Hell’s Kitchen the cooking show, Hell’s Kitchen the actual New York neighborhood, or the capital of Finland. Who cares, because the lady can flat out cook Italian food!

We wandered across a little wooden foot bridge adorned on both sides with beautiful hanging baskets of flowers, out onto an island in the middle of the river with a little park. We sat down on the large smoothed-out granite rocks on the bank across the river from the West Street Plaza, which has wide concrete park steps that come right down to the water. Mallard ducks were paddling in the current near the steps, patiently waiting for tourist snacks.

We were enjoying the scenery when, from the top of the plaza up by the street, we saw him. He had the classic dirty tan, smudged clothing, and overstuffed backpack of the standard Reno homeless meth guy. But this guy had something else going for him. He had a very expensive office swivel desk chair.

It was the kind with the tight black mesh breathable seat and back, and sixty-seven levers to control all your lumbar/height/swivel/tilt/arm angle needs. He rolled it through the plaza and to the top of the river steps, smiling proudly and swiveling it back and forth, swiveling his head along with it, looking for someone to share his joy.

No one shared his joy.

He was clearly not happy that no one liked his new chair as much as he did – or at all – and his demeanor soon changed. His smile went from “proud dad” to more of a Jack Nicholson vibe, and down the steps he came, dragging his prize possession behind him – much less carefully than before.

It’s an ungainly thing to manhandle an office chair, and he made it look even more ungainly than it is. He lost five of the six wheels on the flight of concrete steps down to the water, so rolling the chair became more difficult when he finally got to the last wide step at the water’s edge.

My wife and I sat on the rocks on the other side of the happy little river, making bets on what he was planning next. I won the bet when he picked it up over his head and threw it into the river.

Our theory at the time was that he was just a jerk.

It was more downward trajectory than outward, and the chair was submerged only a foot or so from the step. As he crouched down to touch the chair, our theory changed to maybe the chair was on fire in his meth-induced hallucination.

Then, in a move no one saw coming, he produced a ten-inch fillet knife with a bright orange handle from his belt under his shirt, and stabbed the bottom of the chair a couple times. That was the cue for the two guys sitting on the steps six feet to his left to call it a night and head home.

Our theory then changed to a possibly flaming chair, but definitely covered with either snakes or baby dragons. When our hero was confident that the chair had been properly extinguished and/or rinsed, and either rid of vermin or just generally perforated, he grabbed the wheel-deficient base and hauled his prized possession back onto dry land.

He carried it back up to the top of the stairs and lovingly slammed it a few times onto the top of one of the four-foot-high concrete pillars that marked the top of the stair flight. This effectively disabled one of the chair arms completely, although it remains unclear if that was an objective or a side effect. There might have just been one more snake or baby dragon hanging on. Who knows?

He left the chair atop the pillar to drain while he went back down the steps and collected all five of the dislodged wheels, returning to the chair to reattach each one to its original position, more or less.

He then righted his swivel chair back to the ground on its newly replaced casters, and rolled it away from us to the side of the plaza area, where he again picked it up above his head and hurled it up into a planter area under a tall pine tree. He then crawled up over the concrete planter wall and joined his swiveling buddy under the tree, where they both melted further back into the undergrowth until we lost sight of them for the evening.

Now, normally, I’d be happy with a great dinner and an unexpected free show. So, why the Father’s Day crisis, you might ask?

Well, last year we sent our oldest son off to college in Reno. For a minute or two on those rocks by the river, I was seriously rethinking the intelligence of that decision.

On the one hand, Son Number One is a big dude, and could probably pick chair guy up over his head and hurl him further out into the Truckee River than the swivel chair made it. On the other hand, the probable hallucinations and the definite fillet knife had me a bit concerned.

But then I remembered two things that put my mind at ease. First, they keep the college in a magic protective bubble that can only be entered by students and staff. (I don’t know how they do it, but they do.)

And second, we released him into the wild already, and he was well prepared for the adventure. Every town has meth swivel chair guy. Reno just seems to have a few more than the national average, but we raised a young man who’s smart enough to steer clear of him, so we’ve done all we can.

A month or so after this Father’s Day, we’re going to release the second young man from the nest. Boise, Idaho probably has a few less chair stabbers than Reno, but that point is also moot. I’m really not worried about these boys, and that’s the best Father’s Day gift I could ever get.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Apply Now for Your Mandatory Heart Attack

I recently filled out the FAFSA form online for Son Number Two. If you are unfamiliar, the FAFSA is a form that high school seniors used to fill out if they were interested in going to college and looking for financial aid. “FAFSA” stands for “you won’t ever see any oF this money if one of your parents has A job, even iF that job iS burger flipper at mcdonAld’s.” (Usually the federal government is a little better with acronyms, but apparently not in this case.)

I said high school seniors used to fill it out because now they have to fill it out. Last year it became mandatory for all California high school seniors, regardless of their after-high school plans, to fill out the FAFSA. The reasoning was said to be that not enough kids and their families understood how much free federal grant money was available for college, so they should all fill out the FAFSA so that the government could tell each of them in person that they didn’t qualify for any of it.

I happen to believe they have another, far more sinister motive behind the move to make it mandatory. I’m convinced they are trying to thin the population in the Golden State by killing us parents off. I know this because they nearly got me this year.

I know damned well that we won’t qualify for any grants, and I am not interested in any of those student loans unless we’re back to not having to pay them off, then I’m very interested! I lost track of the student loan ping-pong match the government was having, so I just stopped paying attention. Therefore, I had no reason to fill out the FAFSA for Son Number Two, but we had to anyway.

I begrudgingly logged into the FAFSA website and went through the motions. The main way the FAFSA people decide that you won’t get any free money is with your federal tax return. Instead of having to manually enter all the information, there is a button that says, “Get my information directly from the IRS.” When you hit that button, it takes you through a few steps to verify that you are who you say you are, but when you’re done, it just pulls all the information into the form. It really beats hand-entering everything. Once the tax return data is in, the FAFSA supercomputer goes to work on the complex formula of: IF Form 1040 Line 15 (Taxable Income) is greater than $0.00, THEN Grant Eligibility equals NO.

The formula is woefully flawed, because it does not take into account number of teenage boys at home, total calories consumed by those teenage boys per week, number of teenage drivers in the household and the impact that has on the auto insurance bill, gas prices, food prices in dollars per calorie, the ridiculous cost of high school sports equipment, etc.

Since I already knew what the flawed formula was going to return, once I finished with the form and the FAFSA website told me I was all done, I promptly forgot about the whole thing and went about my life.

There I am, blissfully enjoying my life a week later when I get a letter in the mail from the IRS. As you know, getting an unsolicited letter from the IRS is never a good thing. When you get an email or a text from the “IRS,” it’s just an annoying spammy part of modern life that we all have to deal with. But the IRS actually communicates with you via the snail mail, and when you are holding a letter that was actually sent from the IRS, you know good and well that it’s legitimate.

So, there I am, no longer blissfully enjoying my life, standing on the sidewalk staring at this letter with a whirlwind of possible worst-case scenarios going through my mind. Am I being audited? Did they decide I owe them more money? How much time and money out of my life is this one envelope going to cost me? I don’t have enough of either.

I bit the bullet and the rising bile, trying my best to ignore my medically-concerning heart rhythm and rate, and opened the envelope.

Our records indicate that your tax return information was accessed by the FAFSA system… If this information sharing was authorized by you, no action is required…

OH MY GOD, the FAFSA! I forgot all about that!

Yes, I guess no action is required by me except to find a defibrillator and try to restart my heart.

I’m telling you, this whole mandatory FAFSA thing is a deliberate plot by California to weed out the high school parents with weak hearts. They know the power of the IRS, and they are exploiting it to kill us off. I haven’t figured out why yet… Maybe something to do with the rising cost of health care? I guess that remains to be seen. I’m just glad I lived through it this time.

Be careful out there, folks! If you have a high school senior, best to let them retrieve and open all the mail between October and June. They still have strong hearts.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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The Difference in College, Part II

As I found out recently when Son Number One went off to his freshman year of college, the university experience has changed a tad in the last thirty years. He’s got co-ed dorms, real restaurant chains on campus that accept his meal plan card, a new iPad included with tuition, and food trucks at the football games. It’s insane.

I was already jealous enough, but then he joined the Winter Sports Club. Do you know who didn’t have access to a Winter Sports Club in college? Me, that’s who! Now granted, he’s going to college at the base of the Sierra Nevadas and I went to college at the beach in central California, but still, it’s obviously unfair.

His two younger brothers and I upgraded our season passes this year, since our budget opened up a bit when our fourth snowboarder went off to college. We were feeling pretty smug, thinking we’d be ripping it up at the fabulous Sugar Bowl while he was relegated to the slightly lesser Mt. Rose in Nevada.

But then he went and joined the Winter Sports Club, and do you know what they did? They figured out how to wrangle a discounted price on the IKON pass. The IKON pass, people!

For those of you non-winter sports club kinda folks, the IKON pass is one of a few relatively newish passes that gives you access to a bunch of different ski resorts instead of just one.

The IKON pass gives you unlimited access to fourteen different resorts across the U.S. and Canada, and up to five days access to a bunch more. Even a handful of way-more-international-than-Canada resorts.

So, while his brothers and I will be forced to go to one place all winter, he will have unlimited access to: (Sorry in advance about the all caps. I copied the list off the IKON website and I’m far too lazy to re-type it all.)

WINTER PARK, CO

COPPER MOUNTAIN RESORT, CO

ELDORA MOUNTAIN RESORT, CO

PALISADES TAHOE, CA

MAMMOTH MOUNTAIN, CA

JUNE MOUNTAIN, CA

BIG BEAR MOUNTAIN RESORT, CA

SNOW VALLEY, CA

STRATTON, VT

SUGARBUSH RESORT, VT

SNOWSHOE, WV

TREMBLANT, QC

BLUE MOUNTAIN, ON

SOLITUDE MOUNTAIN RESORT, UT

Now, I doubt he’s going to make a road trip to Sugarbush or Tremblant, but the Colorado Rockies aren’t 100% out of the question for some motivated college kids who are willing to skip a lot of classes.

But all that is irrelevant when you read the one on the list that really matters – Palisades Tahoe. They changed the name to Palisades a while back, but you might know it better by its old name - Squaw Valley. He gets to go to Squaw Valley. Squaw! He’s only about 45 minutes away. They held the Olympic Games there, for goodness sake.

And do you know what really frosts my fanny about this whole thing? The price he paid. The IKON pass is expensive, and for good reason. But they have a young adult discount if you’re under twenty-three. Then on top of that they have a college student discount. And then on top of that, the Winter Sports Club somehow managed to get a major discount on top of those as well.

His IKON pass was less than I paid for his fifteen-year-old brother’s pass at Sugar Bowl!

College is ridiculous!

To make matters even more frosting for me, the pass also entitles him to up to five days at these world-class resorts:

STEAMBOAT, CO

ARAPAHOE BASIN, CO

BIG SKY RESORT, MT

 KILLINGTON-PICO, VT 

WINDHAM MOUNTAIN, NY 

THE HIGHLANDS, MI

BOYNE MOUNTAIN, MI

NEWALYESKA RESORT, AK

CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN, WA

THE SUMMIT AT SNOQUALMIE, WA 

MT. BACHELOR, OR

SCHWEITZER, ID

SKIBIG3, AB 

REVELSTOKE MOUNTAIN RESORT, BC

CYPRESS MOUNTAIN, BC

RED MOUNTAIN, BC

PANORAMA, BC

SUN PEAKS RESORT, BC

SUNDAY RIVER, ME

SUGARLOAF, ME

LOON MOUNTAIN, NH 

BRIGHTON, UT 

SNOWBIRD, UT 

NEWCAMELBACK RESORT, PA

NEWBLUE MOUNTAIN RESORT, PA

CHAMONIX MONT-BLANC VALLEY, FRANCE

DOLOMITI SUPERSKI, ITALY

GRANDVALIRA RESORTS, ANDORRA

KITZBÜHEL, AUSTRIA

ZERMATT MATTERHORN, SWITZERLAND

THREDBO, AUSTRALIA

MT BULLER, AUSTRALIA

CORONET PEAK, THE REMARKABLES & MT HUTT, NEW ZEALAND

NISEKO UNITED, JAPAN

LOTTE ARAI RESORT, JAPAN

VALLE NEVADO, CHILE

I mean, I don’t know anything about it, but how fun does Dolomiti Superski in Italy sound? Am I right? And I don't even know where Andorra is, but I know I want to shred the Grandvalira! If I was him, I’d take my second semester of college off and hitchhike with my snowboard. Just sayin’.

His mom might be a little upset, but I’d high five him. Privately, away from his mother, of course.

But here’s the part about all of this that really, REALLY frosts me: When I called the people at IKON, no one there had heard of our new UNR Winter Sports Club’s Parents Club, and they flatly refused to honor our 85% discount.

The nerve.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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The Difference in College

We moved Son Number One into the dorms at the University of Nevada, Reno this past weekend, and I have to tell you, college is much different than I remember. Here’s my top ten.

1.  They have Starbucks, Panda Express, Panera, and other national chains on campus. In the student union! Do you know what we had at our student union? A vending machine, and it didn’t even have sandwiches.

2.  They can use their meal plan to get food at Panda Express, Panera, etc. Do you know where I could use my meal plan? The cafeteria, and the “fancy place” next to the dorms, that looking back on it, served the exact same food as the cafeteria.

3.  The dorms are co-ed. Ours were too, but the building was divided in half, with doors and a lounge between the men’s side and the woman’s side. My son has female neighbors one door down. Dad me is a little concerned about that. College me is a little jealous about that.

4.  The on-campus parking in my day was one low price and every spot, no matter where it was, was first come, first served. His parking passes are color-coded with tiered pricing. The lowest cost one, which he has, allows him to only park his car at the far corners of campus, which appear to be in a different time zone than his dorm. We could have purchased a pass that would allow him to park in the nice parking garage twenty feet from his dorm, but then he wouldn’t be able to have a meal plan. Or tuition.

5.  They gave him an iPad. They gave every single student an iPad! Do you know what they did not give us? Our books. We had to buy those, and they were incredibly overpriced. And heavy. As far as computers went, we had floppy disks that were actually floppy, and we had to buy them ourselves. The only computers were at the library, and they were NOT portable.

6.  They had a welcome event at the football stadium and it had food trucks. Food trucks! On campus! Do you know when we had food trucks on campus? Never, because they hadn’t been invented yet.

7.  The dorm move-in was well scheduled and organized with day and time slots by floor and room number. Our dorms didn’t have a move-in schedule. They just told us to be there before classes started. I’m not even sure they told us where the dorms were. I think we just had to figure it out.

8.  They are actually teaching them things during orientation week, like good money management principles and study habits. Our “week of welcome” consisted of playing tag and capture the flag.

9.  Did I mention the delicious chain restaurants included in the meal plan and the co-ed dorms?

10.  The biggest difference between college then and college now, however, is that I’m paying for it this time! Yowza.

Have a great time, kid. I know I did.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Who Needs a Doctor?

It’s that time of year again at Casa de Smidge, when we get new health insurance cards along with a warm, heartfelt letter from Sutter Health, welcoming us into their community of doctors, nurses, and happy patients, as if we haven’t been with Sutter Health for the past twenty years.

All three of our kids were born at Sutter, yet somehow, they see fit to welcome us in every year. Son Number One is going off to college in a month, for goodness sake. We’ve been with you for a while now!

Anyhow, my wife and I share (or shared) a PCP, which is insider medical lingo for Pretty Cool Physician, if I’m not mistaken. I say “shared” because we just found out she is retiring, or just leaving Sutter, or possibly both. I don’t remember.

So, along with our annual welcome letter, we need to find a new doctor (or doctors if we can’t agree again). I was happy to see that the boys’ pediatrician was still the same. Dr. Wong is the best! However, sitting at my desk, seeing his name on their health insurance cards got me thinking.

Not only is Son Number One eighteen years old now, but he’s also heading off to Nevada for college. Eighteen seems like the logical age to stop seeing a pediatrician, because “pediatrician” is literally Latin for “pediatric physician.” Also, I don’t think Dr. Wong makes house or dorm calls in other states.

That got me thinking, how do I go about finding a new doctor for my son in another state? And that got me thinking about when I went off to college, hundreds of miles away from my former pediatrician. Who was my doctor? I couldn’t remember.

And then it finally dawned on me why I couldn’t remember. Because I went off to college and never went to another doctor for an annual physical until I was thirty-five. Sure, I went to the hospital emergency room a few times, but who didn’t, am I right? But I never had an actual doctor.

Generally, men ages eighteen to thirty-ish never even think about the doctor. Or checkups. Or health. Or much of anything, actually. We’re just sort of there, participating in the moment’s current activity and otherwise not having a whole ton of deep thoughts or planning.

When I finally realized that, I relaxed a little and decided I didn’t need to worry about Son Number One. I stood up from my desk and stretched, and was immediately reminded of my real priority.

The stretch reminded me that I tweaked my back a little last night.

Coughing.

I’m fifty-one and I literally hurt my back coughing. So, yeah, I’m worrying about the wrong Schmatjen male here. Son Number One will be just fine, but I need to find a new doctor, stat.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Second Open Letter to the Student Loan Department

Dear whomever is in charge of the student loan forgiveness program,

I wrote to you a little under a year ago regarding getting the ball rolling on forgiving our past and existing student loans. Since Son Number One was still in high school at the time, we were mainly discussing you guys paying back all of our costs to date, with the housing, food, and transportation of our three students, from preschool through twelfth grade.

I haven’t heard from you guys yet on all of that. Those costs are still piling up over here with his younger brothers, so the sooner the better!

In addition to following up on that enormous bill, I’m writing today about forgiveness of a new student loan I just received. I realize the whole forgiveness program has been in a bit of a start/stop turmoil lately, but I’m confident that when you hear my tale of woe, you’ll be persuaded to do the right thing.

Here’s the situation: Son Number One is starting his freshman year at the University of Nevada, Reno this fall, and his first tuition installment was due this week. I logged into his school account last night to figure out how to make that happen. Imagine my surprise when I was presented with two options to pay – via electronic check, or with my credit card.

“You can pay for college with a credit card?” I asked out loud to no one in particular. Again, imagine my surprise when I investigated further and discovered that not only could I pay with a credit card, but there were no service fees, or convenience fees, or fees of any kind attached to that option.

“You can pay for college with a credit card!” I exclaimed out loud, again to no one in particular, although at that point I actually wished more people were around to share in my happy discovery.

So, guess what I did last night, student loan folks? Yep, I racked up a butt-ton of credit card rewards points when I paid my son’s first college tuition payment with my credit card. Boo-yah!

So, here’s where you guys come in. I now have a relatively small student loan, by national standards, but with an enormously large interest rate. Come next month, those credit card vultures are going to be coming after me for as much as 30.90% APR. Now, I’m not completely up to date on the student loan rules and regulations, but that interest rate seems like it should be criminal.

You can now see my obvious and immediate need for swift student loan forgiveness before this predatory compounding interest, being perpetrated on our nation’s poor, defenseless youth, gets out of hand.

You will be saving this great nation more than 30% per year (compounding!) by jumping on this right away, before my next billing cycle. I know you’ll do the right thing.

And remember, UNR is on the semester system, so we’re going to need swift credit card student loan forgiveness a minimum of twice a year for the next four years.

Thanks in advance!

Yours in forgiveness,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Hit SEND Before it's Too Late

There’s a funny thing about kids these days. They have embraced digital technology like no other generation before them. It is interwoven into their lives and they probably would not be able to function without it.

Except for email.

For whatever reason, email – once the very pinnacle of sophisticated digital communications – is like a rotary phone to them. They don’t know how to use it.

Way back when the boys were little, I set all three of them up with Gmail accounts. Best dad move ever, I thought at the time. I would have been less enthusiastic had I known how little and how poorly they would use them.

If you email them something, you have to text them to tell them that you emailed them. If you do that, you have increased the chances from 0% to 11% that they will see your email. Unfortunately, even if they do see it, the chances are still 0% that they will actually read it.

I foolishly thought that high school would get them in the habit of using email effectively. I mean, after all, they were given school email addresses in order to communicate with their teachers. Once again, I was wrong. Ask any high school teacher how well the kids use email. They will just laugh and laugh.

Once again, I foolishly thought things would change with my eighteen-year-old when it was time to register for college. And once again, I was wrong.

He is going to University of Nevada, Reno in the fall, and yesterday was his orientation day. About two weeks ago we received an email about Orientation Step One. I saw that he and I had both received it, and I even mentioned it to him at the time.

When I inquired about it Monday night – the night before orientation – he said, and I quote, “Huh?”

When I sat down with him at his computer and had him look for the email, he immediately claimed that he had no idea where it was, and probably never got it. As I stared slack-jawed at his 999 unopened emails in his inbox, I suggested that he might try a search for the word “orientation.”

Miraculously, we found the email, which contained a detailed list of lots of things he needed to take care of about a week ago. He had a busy night.

The next day at UNR, one of the presentations for the parents was from the head of the student advisory department. They are in charge of helping the kids get all the classes they need in order to stay on track. She talked with us for twenty minutes, and about nineteen of those minutes consisted of begging us to somehow make our children check their emails.

Hmm…

So, parents of young children, this is your Immature Societal Email Nonfunction Disorder (I-SEND) Public Service Announcement. It’s obviously too late for our college freshmen, but you might still be able to salvage your children.

You need to get your kids in the habit of checking (and actually reading) their emails on a daily basis. It won’t be easy, but it can be done if you focus on the things they really want and need.

For instance, kids need food. Put a lock on the refrigerator and the pantry and email them the combination. Change the combination each day.

Kids love Wi-Fi. Change the code daily and have them send you an email each day to request their chore list. When they have replied with a list of fully completed chores, they can then send a separate email formally requesting the Wi-Fi code. If their email has no subject line, delete it without reading it.

Kids enjoy getting an allowance. Each month they must email you an allowance request. They can find their money after they complete a series of back-and-forth informational emails as you lead them through a scavenger hunt. Make it complicated. If you have more than one child and they use Reply All incorrectly, no allowance that month.

If you have teenagers that drive, the location of their car keys should be available only by email. Every once in a while, send them an email from you, but with poor grammar and spelling errors, starting with, “Dearist beloved Child.” Include an attachment that is a “pdf of the locality of you keys.”

The pdf should consist of the following one line of text: “You don’t get to drive today because you obviously need to stay home and learn which emails to flag as spam.”

Good luck out there, parents!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Cinco de Ulysses Patrick’s Day - Repost

Friday was St. Patrick’s Day, a generally festive time for American humans, but a stressful time for the fish of the Chicago area. Can you imagine if your entire neighborhood got painted green overnight? Freaky. Anyway, us humans got “lucky” this year with the “holiday” landing on a Friday, which is certainly better than Thursday last year or Wednesday the year before, but still not ideal.

That’s because St. Patrick’s Day is the Cinco de Mayo of March. Both are on a fixed calendar date, which makes no sense, and we don’t get work off for either of them, which makes even less sense. Both have some amount of green added to the beer, and no one from the holidays’ countries of origin celebrates them. Here in the good ol’ USA, however, we embrace them like they were the Fourth of July or New Years. And much like New Years, no one knows what we’re celebrating or why. But we’re all Irish for one day in March, and we’re all Mexican for uno dia en Mayo.

The overwhelming problem is that the only people who get to celebrate these two “holidays” with any regularity are students. Specifically, college kids and elementary schoolers. The college kids use the days as excuses to party, and the elementary schools use them as excuses to make leprechaun traps, Mexican flags, and most importantly, eat cookies.

Meanwhile, we adults have to wait until March 17th or May 5th land on a weekend before we get to party anymore. Why should the students get to have all the fun? Why shouldn’t the parents get to participate?

We used to have fun on St. Patrick’s Day. We used to drink green beer and actively look for other college kids of the opposite sex who weren’t wearing green so we could pinch them, as is the standard custom.

We used to have fun on Cinco de Mayo. We used to drink Corona with lime and eat discounted tacos by the truckload while wearing giant sombreros, and actively look for other college kids of the opposite sex who weren’t wearing green so we could pinch them, as is the standard custom.

Did we know why we did any of this? Of course not. Did we care that we didn’t know? Of course not. We cared about doing our part to uphold centuries of fake traditions. We cared about beer with the appropriate green holiday additive. We cared about pinching cute members of the opposite sex. We cared.

I’m tired of being left out. I’m tired of not caring. I want to care again. We should get to party, too. It’s only right, since we’re the ones paying for all of this anyway. Why shouldn’t we get these days off work?

Why? I’ll tell you why. Probably because someone still needs to pay for all this, that’s why. But are we going to let that stop us? Heck no! There are plenty of other days during the year we can work. Although, we do already have a lot of holidays…

OK, let’s compromise. We could combine St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo into one holiday to minimize the work stoppage but still have some fun. What do you say?

I knew you’d be on board!

Ladies and gentlemen, I officially propose a new national holiday.

We will compromise on the month and have the new holiday in April, since it has always been a travesty that we don’t get April 27th off for President Ulysses S. Grant’s birthday either. We will anchor it around that date but it will need to float, of course, to always fall on a Friday so this party is a three-day weekend. It’s only fitting to include Grant, since he really should be the patron saint of these two holidays anyway. You may not know this, but in addition to being a war hero and a Roman god, Ulysses was a prolific inventor and is actually responsible for creating, among many other things, the taco, green beer, the piñata, and Ireland.

We shall call the new holiday either Dia de St. Mayo Patrick de Grant, or Cinco de Ulysses Patrick’s Day. We can vote on that later.

As far as logistics go, we will simply combine all the current fake holiday traditions into one big three-day weekend of awesome.

The holiday uniforms can remain mostly undefined, but should include the required holiday colors; green, white and red, with an obvious emphasis on green and large sombreros.

Mariachi bands will need to shift their focus a little and include bagpipes and plaid. Irish heel-clicking salsa dancing with be a natural follower to the new groove.

The main holiday beverage will obviously be green Corona with yellow lemon wedges instead of limes to signify lucky gold. Cuervo gold tequila will remain unchanged, since it satisfies both holiday motifs. As an alternative to Mexican tequila, Irish mojitos will be made out of crushed clover and Jameson Irish Whiskey.

Red, white, and green tortilla chips will be served with cabbage salsa, and children across the land will spend the new holiday smacking leprechaun-shaped piñatas filled with gold coin chocolates and corned beef taquitos.

We can work out the rest of the details later. I’m not really sure who’s in charge of new holiday creation over in D.C., so if one of you could forward this on to them, that’d be great.

I’m going to get back to my green Corona.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Band Together to Lose

With the college and pro football seasons in full swing, and Thanksgiving right around the corner, it’s time to look back on a historic gridiron moment and give thanks that we weren’t part of the band.

November 20, 2022 will be the 40th anniversary of The Play at the end of The Big Game.

If you are unfamiliar, I’m not being generic or randomly capitalizing words like I normally do. The Big Game is one of the oldest college rivalries in the United States, which began in 1892 right here in the Golden State, when Stanford University played Cal Berkeley for the first time.

No one wore helmets or shoes, and the ball was not just pigskin – it was a live pig. The final score was Cal at a half pence and Stanford at a quarter shilling. It was a jolly-good contest!

The rules and scoring have been refined over the years, but The Big Game lives on. The 125^th Big Game is this Saturday, November 19^th. Home field swaps each year, and it’s an even year, so the game will be at Cal, as it was on that fateful day in 1982.

The Cal Bears led 19-17 in the final minutes of the 85^th Big Game, but at the end of the fourth quarter, the Stanford Cardinal (named after a pine tree, of course) mounted an impressive comeback.  

Starting from their own 13-yard-line, on a dismal 4^th and 17, Stanford, led by THE John Elway himself, drove all the way down the field to kick a go-ahead field goal with only four seconds left on the clock.

I’m not sure why Cal had been ahead at all, because having John Elway was a clear advantage for the Cardinal since he was already the quarterback for the Denver Broncos at the time. He was just back in town visiting family over the Thanksgiving break.

Be that as it may, with what should have been the final score of Cal 19 – Stanford 20 up on the scoreboard, Stanford kicked off to run out the remaining four seconds on the clock, and so began, The Play.

The Cal Bears recovered the short kick and were immediately swarmed by the Stanford special teams defense. The Stanford special teams marching band was behind them, waiting patiently behind the end zone for the clock to say 0:00.

When the four seconds of regular time had expired, the Stanford special teams marching band proceeded jubilantly onto the field in a very disorderly fashion to celebrate their “win.”

The only problem was that the game was still going because the Bears were busy lateraling the ball backward. Three laterals later, the Cal Bears were inside a protective swarm of Stanford band members, many of whom were providing some of the necessary Cardinal-on-Cardinal blocking for the Bears players to pull off two more miraculous laterals and steamroll into the end zone for a touchdown.

Gary Tyrrell, a Stanford trombone player, was the Cardinal’s last line of defense, but he and his instrument were absolutely leveled in the end zone at the conclusion of the miraculous drive. As KGO radio’s Joe Starkey had an on-air aneurism, the scoreboard was changed to Cal 25 – Stanford 20, and so concluded what Joe hailed as "the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heartrending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football!!" right before he dropped to the ground like Gary Tyrrell and his trombone.

So, as you enjoy The Big Game this Saturday, remember to give thanks. Give thanks that you weren’t one of those band members, or one of those Stanford players that was blocked by a member of their own band.

And also remember the important lesson that Trombone Tyrrell taught us all that day – if you’re going to go out on the field to help, at least learn how to tackle.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Financial Fitness?

People like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman talk about the obvious benefits of “financial fitness” all the time. I’ve noticed, however, that no one ever talks about the literal, physical aspect of that term. The detrimental finances of fitness.

We have three teenage boys, and they are all athletic, so naturally they eat a lot. This didn’t come as a shock to us. We even had a cautionary tale from my mom about my senior year in high school. My two older sisters had left home for college, but my mom reported that year was her highest food bill year ever, with just one of us left in the house.

How can you tell if a teenage boy is sleeping? He’s not eating.

Son Number Two, however, has taken this teenage boy eating thing to another level. To heavily paraphrase a Garfield T-shirt I saw once: He’s into fitness. Fitness whole side of the fridge into his mouth.

Number Two bought himself a gym membership last year, and he pre-paid for an entire year because that was the best deal. It’s a relatively inexpensive gym, but it was still a sizeable chunk of money for a teenager to put down. We talked it over with him, then let him make the decision. I figured at worst it would be a good financial lesson to learn.

It has been a good financial lesson – for the gym. They are learning that if they offer my son a one-year, prepaid membership, he can go to the gym often enough to make it only cost about two cents per visit. Sorry, Crunch Fitness, you blew that one.

It doesn’t seem to matter what his day consisted of, he will end it at the gym. He goes to a two-hour lacrosse conditioning workout, and then heads straight to the gym for at least an hour afterwards. He’s a crazy person.

As you can imagine, he requires quite a bit of food. I did too, at his age, but here’s the difference - I never cared what I ate. I just wanted a lot of it. He’s following weightlifters and fitness instructors on social media and so now I have at least one teenager who wants specific food. Mostly protein.

I’m still lobbying congress for the inclusion of nachos on the healthy eating pyramid, so I tend to kinda zone out when he starts taking about macronutrients and grams of something or other per scoop of protein powder.

Here’s what I do know, though. Protein is expensive!

It was expensive before gas was ten dollars per ounce. Now it’s just insane. Combine that with the sheer amount he’s eating, and not even a 9-1-1 call to Warren Buffett could help us now.

The Costco bag of chocolate protein powder costs more than the set of tires I bought in high school for my Jeep. Add to that the two Costco rotisserie chickens he wanted for “this week,” that will only last him three or four days. And you’ve seen the Costco chickens. They’re the size of adolescent turkeys. They make grocery store rotisserie chickens look like someone oven-roasted a parakeet.

The other night I was cooking dinner on the stove – literally fifteen minutes before dinnertime – and he was standing beside me, frying up six eggs in a pan on the next burner.

“Just a quick pre-dinner snack, Dad.”

Fifteen minutes later, he ate a full dinner, went to the gym, and had a six more eggs and a thirty-seven-dollar protein shake when he got home.

I love my boys and everything, but I’m kinda looking forward to when all three of them are in college at the same time. Even with the skyrocketing cost of tuition, it still has to be cheaper than this.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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An Open Letter to Dixon Ticonderoga

Dear folks over at the Dixon Ticonderoga Company,

I am writing you today to give you a heads up about the end of an era. Specifically, the era of the Number 2 Pencil, of which you are surely the world’s leading manufacturer.

I have been proctoring college advanced placement exams for the last two weeks. “Proctoring” is an old Latin word that means “trying not to fall asleep.” The job involves giving a large number of high school students very specific instructions for about five minutes, then nodding off in a quiet room for two hours.

A majority of the instructions I am required to give have to do with each and every student desperately needing to have in their possession one or more Number 2 Pencils. For this, I have to give you a ton of credit. I don’t know who you had to pay off over the years, or how much it cost, but that whole “Number 2 Pencils are the only thing that works on these little bubbles” nonsense has really stuck around.

So much so, that it’s printed on nearly every page of the lengthy instruction book I have from College Board. Seriously, you guys deserve a ton of credit for that marketing home run. You actually have testing companies putting it in writing that every high school student in America must use your products. I mean, that is a big win. Sure, they don’t actually write “Dixon Ticonderoga” in the instructions, but they may as well.

You guys are the Kleenex of pencils. The Xerox of writing implements. The Q-tips of Scantron bubble tests. When someone says, “you need a yellow Number 2 Pencil,” they may as well be saying your name, even if people don’t know your name. You’re that good.

The majority of folks out there probably think “Number 2” actually means that the pencil is wooden, yellow, and has your name on it. But we know better, don’t we, DT? You and I both know that Number 2 is just another designation for “HB” lead hardness, on the long and weird scale of pencil lead harness/blackness that only artists and us old engineers care about. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to fool us old engineers. (Because our hips hurt if we lay in bed too long, and we needed to pee anyway.)

I mean, I can understand the reasoning behind the whole “pens will not work” instruction on the bubble tests. It’s not because the machine wouldn’t read the pen mark – it’s better than a pencil. It’s because the kid can’t erase it if they need to.

But where your marketing department really came through for you was the “mechanical pencils will not work” instruction. You guys are good! Never mind that I have an old set of wooden pencils with all kinds of different lead hardnesses that are not “Number 2,” but I have plenty of HB lead for my mechanical pencils.

I’m just super impressed with the long game you guys played in the Scantron testing field! But here’s the thing. How long can it really be before the AP tests – all tests, for that matter – go digital. I’m actually amazed it hasn’t happened yet. The SAT is slated to go digital in the next year or so, and colleges might even stop using that one. I can’t imagine the AP tests’ move to digital will be far behind.

And as near as I can tell, bubble tests are your last remaining market on earth. I’m assuming you’ve noticed a slight dip in sales over the last few years, but just in case you’re still all wearing polyester Sansabelt slacks and riding high on those Number 2 Pencil glory years of the ‘60s thru ‘90s, change is a-comin’.

I guess you still have the paper crossword puzzle crowd, but there are fewer and fewer of us around these days, and Wordle is probably putting a major dent in that market, too. (And I use a mechanical pencil. Less pencil shavings, you know.)

Anyway, just wanted to give you a heads up.

Best of luck with everything,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Shotgun Wedding? - Repost

My wife and I celebrated our nineteenth wedding anniversary yesterday as we do most every year – on a long drive in the car with our kids and her mom. Don’t be jealous just because we know how to party!

In honor of another successful year of marriage (and another successful summer road trip), I thought I would once again regale you with the heartwarming tale about the night after the night I met my wife.

Unfortunately, the night I met my wife was fairly uneventful. (Besides the fact that I met the love of my life, of course.)

So instead, I will tell you the shocking, explosive, frightening, and downright weird tale about the following night. It’s a tale of a dive bar, a truck, a barefoot man, a policeman, a bathrobe, and a shotgun.

A guy walks into a bar. It was me. I met my wife in a bar.

That’s not the whole story. It gets better.

It was only my first or second time at this particular bar, but she had been there for thirty-two nights in a row. She and her best friend were going for a combined personal record. It was her initiative and dedication to the endeavor that drew me to her. We were both college students in San Luis Obispo, CA, and she was working at a pizza place that summer. She would get off work at midnight and meet her friend at Bull’s Tavern to shut the place down. We met one evening, talked until closing, and said goodnight.

I thought she was really neat-o, so having heard about their record-breaking attendance goal, I had a good idea of where I might find her again the next evening. After missing her a few times, between the bar and the pizza place, we finally connected, and had another delightful evening of bar-booth conversation. This was the kind of bar where “delightful conversation” means you sat in a red Naugahyde booth, taking turns shouting into each other’s ears, in an attempt to carry on a conversation over the AC/DC blaring out of the jukebox.

After the last-call light came on at two A.M. – this was back when we could stay up until two A.M. – we walked back to the pizza place where my truck was parked, and carried on our conversation in the cab of my Ford F150. By about three A.M. I had convinced her that kissing me wouldn’t be so bad, and just when I was about to plant one on her, a sonic boom came rolling down the street. It would have been much cooler if we had heard the explosion as we kissed, but you just can’t plan for these kinds of things.

She said, and I quote, “That sounded like a twelve-gauge!”

I replied, scoffing-ly, “There is no way that was a twelve-gauge shotgun. It was probably just a car backfiring.” In my head I was thinking, Cool. She knows her shotguns. But that couldn’t have been a shotgun.

Roughly four minutes later a barefoot man in a bathrobe came walking down the street carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Now, if I can paint the scene for you - It is past three o’clock in the morning, and the town has completely shut down. We are the only car parked on the street, directly across from the pizza parlor. The only other car that we can see belongs to a police officer who is parked in a parking lot across the intersection from the pizza place. The police officer is standing outside of his car, chatting with a man on a bicycle. They have apparently not heard the big bang and seem very relaxed. The pizza place is located on the corner of the intersection, and the man in the bathrobe with the heavy artillery is walking past the pizza place, toward the cop, but neither one of them can see the other yet. We are parked across the street and have a clear view of both of them, and a pretty good idea of what is about to happen. Between the five of us, we are the only people still awake in the whole town, and two of us are a whole lot more awake than we were a minute ago.

The bathrobe-clad gentlemen rounded the corner and came into view of the police officer, and they saw each other at about the same time. We were positioned at just the wrong angle, so when the cop drew his weapon, he was pointing it right at us. We both did that thing where you slide down below the dashboard in case the bullets start flying, but foolishly keep your head up high enough to see, because you don’t want to miss the action.

The policeman immediately started asking the nice man to kindly set his shotgun down. By “kindly asking,” I mean he instantly began shouting, “Drop the #$*%&@ gun right now! Drop it, #$@*&%!!!” I thought he was handling himself very well given the surprising circumstance he had just found himself in. The bicyclist he had been talking to before the rude interruption did something that still to this day I cannot believe, even though I saw it with my own two barely-visible-above-the-dashboard eyes. He dropped his bike to the ground and fit himself completely underneath the front bumper of the police cruiser. Next time you see an old 1990s police cruiser, take a look at the ground clearance. I think it might have been Houdini himself in that bike helmet.

Well, the nice man with the twelve-gauge didn’t drop his gun right away. He just sort of stood there, trying to have a conversation with the cop. He was holding the gun at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ground, not exactly pointing it at the cop, but not exactly pointing it away from him, either. As the police officer walked closer and closer to the man, yelling commands louder and louder, I was sure we were about to witness something very unpleasant on what had, otherwise, been a really nice night.

Thankfully, for everyone involved, the man finally decided to set his shotgun gently on the ground, and seconds later, the police officer set his knee not-so-gently on the man’s neck, and the standoff was over. As Captain Bathrobe was led to the police car and Harry Houdini extricated himself from underneath the Caprice Classic, I started the truck and drove my date home in stunned silence.

Fortunately, she didn’t hold the incident against me, and we continued to see each other. We searched the local paper for two weeks straight after that night for some mention of the incident, partially to prove to people that we weren’t making it up, but mostly to find out for ourselves what we had seen. Why was there a man firing a shotgun in sleepy, downtown San Luis Obispo, and why was he then walking the streets with that shotgun, barefoot, in a bathrobe? We never found a single mention of it, and to this day, have no idea what happened.

We graduated, parted ways, and met again six years later at a mutual college friend’s housewarming party. We have been together ever since.

After meeting her father, I finally understood her knowledge of shotguns. And after getting to know my father-in-law, I had a strong suspicion that he and my wife might have known more about that night than they were letting on. He was a great guy, and he may have been accused a time or two of being “slightly overprotective” of his only daughter.

Now, he certainly wasn’t a bathrobe type of guy, but he did own a number of twelve-gauge shotguns, and if he was in town visiting and staying at a hotel, he would have had easy access to a nice terrycloth robe.

Where exactly was he that night? Out looking for his little girl, perhaps?

She still claims it wasn’t him, but she always smiles when she says it. And after questioning, he was never able to produce a good alibi. I remain skeptical.

I also remain very thankful to have lived through that night and been able to celebrate nineteen amazing years of marriage.

Happy anniversary, baby!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Thumb Drive

The thing you have to realize as a parent is that kids – especially teenagers – are genetically programmed to argue with you. It is basically their job, and they will never stop and they will never tire. They will argue with you continuously until you actually die of starvation and they will still be going strong. They are like little arguing robots with an infinite loop nonsense-generating algorithm and a small onboard nuclear reactor for power.

This is tolerable for the seasoned parent when they choose to argue with you about their hair, or their bedtime, or the laughable idea of getting a cat. We can deal with that stuff. The problems arise when they try to defend utterly ridiculous positions on important topics such as professional sports.

These arguments cannot be tolerated by the responsible parent, because we are tasked with eventually sending them out into the world to do good and be smart. If they leave the house with the idiotic notion that playing a football video game and playing an actual football game are even remotely similar to each other, then we have failed them, ourselves, and society at large. We can’t have that.

Case in point – yesterday at the beach. We are on spring break from their rigorous schedule this year of staying home from school, so we decided to pack up and head for the beach to visit their grandma. She was nice enough to get a friend who happens to be a retired professional surfer to give Son Number Two a surf lesson yesterday.

He did really well and spent a couple hours out in the surf, paddling his butt off, missing waves, falling off, getting rolled, choking on salt water, and occasionally catching a wave and standing up to surf it. We were proud of him.

As we were packing up to leave, we watched and laughed as a guy standing on shore near the water was putting on a little show. He had a small motorized remote-controlled surfboard, about a foot long, with a little plastic surfer riding on top. It was zipping around out in the water surfing up and down the waves. When it crashed, it just popped right back up and kept zipping around.

Apparently, there are quite a few folks who have these little things, and they get together and hold surf contests. Son Number One, who had decided not to try surfing and instead sat on the beach for two hours, then amazingly attempted to make the argument that actual surfing and remote-control toy surfing were almost indistinguishable from each other in skill level.

I had been out in the water for a couple hours too, so I was tired and my head was cold, but I still managed to nearly roll my eyes out of my skull. As I began to open my mouth to set him straight, the sheer insanity of his position triggered a repressed memory from three days earlier on the drive down to the beach.

Somewhere on Interstate 5, Son Number One made the ridiculous claim that me watching professional athletes play sports on TV was exactly the same as him watching YouTubers play video games with each other.

“Because it just isn’t and that is just super obvious” was, of course, not a good enough reason for his little, non-functioning teenage brain.

This was not one of those arguments that I could just let go, because as we discussed earlier, I would be failing all of humanity if I produce a working-age human who thinks this way.

He continued spouting his ridiculous, mind-numbing arguments for why being a professional athlete was totally the exact same thing as being something he called a “professional gamer.”

I quickly got to the point of almost not being able to keep the car on the road due to the mental anguish I was experiencing from the conversation, even though I-5 is probably the straightest freeway in America. I needed to stop the conversation, for the safety of the whole family.

I settled on this: “Getting out of bed when everything hurts to go again. That’s the difference.”

“But when you lose at Fortnite for the hundredth time in a row, it’s the same thing to go back and try again!”

“Oh, my God, you’re just using your thumbs! Shut up!”

“You use more than your thumbs, dad.”

“SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!!!”

The conversation on the beach didn’t go much better.

I don’t know what worries me more – the fact that kids these days aren’t making a distinction between actual sports and “e-sports,” the fact that kids actually spend their time watching other kids play video games, or the fact that they probably all think that’s the same thing as watching people play an actual sport.

And Son Number One is only a couple of years from going off to college. We obviously still have a lot of work to do to get him ready to go out into the world.

Speaking of colleges, the situation with this e-sports nonsense is far more dire than you might think. Did you know there are actually colleges that are offering scholarships for e-sports?

And I’m not talking about ITT Tech, either. Formerly respectable institutions like Ohio State University, Hawaii Pacific, University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of California at Irvine all offer some level of scholarship for you to come there and play video games.

Arcadia University in Glenside, PA actually has a $25,000 scholarship for e-sports! Can you believe tha…

Wait, what? Twenty-five grand?

Hey, son, how are you at something called League of Legends? I’ve been hearing great things about Pennsylvania these days…

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite T-shirt is at SmidgeTees

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge