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Home Sweet -- Ouch!

There's Always a Period of Readjustment

By Rick Horowitz

"So let me get this straight -- you were only away for a week."

"Ten days, counting the weekends."

"And you'd been back for..."

"Ten minutes, tops."

"Ten minutes. And nobody had been in the house while you were gone?"

"Nobody."

"So nobody had moved anything out of its normal position or anything like that?"

"Nope."

"And it was daylight, right? It wasn't like you were wandering around in the dark."

"Middle of the afternoon. And I turned the lights on."

"OK."

"And you still managed to slam your nose into a bookshelf?"

"I can explain."

"I don't think so. You said you were checking your messages."

"Right."

"You'd been away for a week -- "

"Ten days."

"You'd been away for ten days, and now you were back and you were checking your messages."

"Right."

"Because you hadn't been able to check your messages while you were gone."

"No, I was checking them every day while I was gone."

"Even though you were on vacation."

"I was calling in once or twice a day, just in case."

"So it wasn't like there were a ton of messages piled up for a week or anything when you got back."

"Not at all."

"And the phone machine is on your desk."

"Right."

"Which is right under the bookshelf."

"Right."

"OK, so even though there weren't a pile of messages, the message light was blinking when you got home, so you figured you'd better listen right away."

"Actually, it wasn't blinking."

"And you know that because..."

"Because I looked -- I could see it wasn't blinking without even leaning over the desk."

"So that's not when you slammed your nose into the bookshelf?"

"Not the first time I looked, no."

"You looked again?!"

"Exactly."

"Just in case it suddenly started blinking anyway?"

"Something like that."

"Like if you looked at it really hard, it would suddenly say, 'Oh yeah, I forgot -- here's a message'?"

"I guess."

"So this time you did lean over the desk."