today i will tell you a tale of OG and his friend GOG, two budding cavemen types. og is my son, austin, and gog is his friend, billy. yesterday i set these two out to do what on the surface appeared to have been a simple task. what they did with it makes me wonder about the future of the species.
austin's basketball backboard was laying on its side on the top half of the neighbor's asphalt driveway, where it has been since new year's day. it needed to have water and antifreeze put in the bottom of it so that it wouldn't blow down or turn over(which is why it was on its side to begin with.) this wasn't a task that required a doctorate degree in physics. i have a hose that is hooked up on the other side of my house and runs up and under my porch to the opposite side of the house which is where the backboard was. all the boys had to do was drag the backboard 10 feet to the end of the hose, fill it with water and antifreeze, and roll it back to the top of the asphalt.
they had been outside quite a while and i wasn't hearing the sound of bouncing basketballs, so i looked outside for them and discovered them in my backyard, the backboard flat on the ground and completely dug into the earth. one of the wheels had come off of it, so now they were trying to figure out how to put the wheel back on so they could continue to try and drag it back up the hill to the neighbor's driveway(my house is on a slope, with the neighbor's driveway being at the top of the slope.)
what is wrong with this picture? well, they were in the backyard, almost at the opposite end of the house from where they should have been. i went back out on my deck, stunned to see this monstrosity of a backboard even in this part of the yard. this is what they had done. instead of just moving the backboard to the hose, they went to the other side of the house and pulled the hose down to it. this involved having to get under the porch and retrieve the hose. then they dragged the backboard down the hill to the side of the house where the hose now was and then filled it up. once done, they proceeded to attempt to drag the now extremely heavy and waterfilled backboard up the hill to put it in place. one was pulling from the net end, the other pushing the bottom part of it. the result was the whole thing, being at an angle and being heavy, dug itself into the dirt of the yard and would not move. one of the rolling wheels had come off, and they were trying to push it back with their hands, which hadn't worked the first 623 times they tried it. common sense would have told you that you would need something like a hammer to put it back in place, but they were not there yet. too complicated for them. when i came out they were circling around the whole backboard, sort of like vultures hovering over a roadkill.
after pulling out my hair, i came down off of the deck and showed them how they could get a piece of heavy wood from under the deck and use it to wack the wheel back in place. eventually, (a few smashed fingers later, which almost derailed the whole process) we were able to get the wheel on. but they still were in trouble. i had to show them that pulling it straight in the line they were going wasn't going to work since the whole thing was dug in 3 inches in the earth. again, the female steps in and says, "MOVE IT DOWN AND TO THE LEFT AND START AGAIN!!!" once they saw the wisdom of this plan, i was able to put them to their best use, which was the physical labor of dragging the thing up the hill to the asphalt. yet even then they were a mini-version of dumb and dumber, in that they were trying to drag it straight over ruts and holes . they didn't see that the edge of the asphalt, right in front and to the right of them 6 inches, was smooth and they could easily roll the backboard where they needed it to go once it got on the asphalt's edge.
they were quite proud of themselves once the task was completed. task completion, by the way, involved sending billy back under the house and porch to put the hose back where it had come from. what should have taken 10 minutes took 45. this is the future of america...
and so i am calling them og and gog, two cavemen apprentices. as i told them at high volumes yesterday, if it hadn't been for women, men as a species would have died out. you see, little neanderthals like og and gog could wack a dinosaur on the head and drag it to the cave. however, there it would have stayed IF THERE HADN'T BEEN A WOMAN TO COOK IT FOR THEM. i am convinced they would have starved to death had it been left up to them as to figure out what to do next...
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