special request

Allie has a dubious superpower. If she were a character on Heroes, she'd be the mild housewife with the mysterious ability to call you when you're reading "Entertainment Weekly" in the bathroom.

It took me forever to answer the phone, and when I did, I explained that I'd just painted, and that had required that I remove the doorknob, and I was locked behind a knobless door, which required some effort to get past.

"So you're alone in the house, and you locked yourself in the bathroom behind a door with a locking mechanism but no knob?"

It sounds so stupid when she says it.

"I can neither confirm nor deny that," I replied.

"How come you never blog about this sort of stuff?"

• • •

In that spirit, here's another lesson I learned after it was too late.

If you're walking on a treadmill, and for the first time you notice that its control panel has numbers 1 through 10 around its periphery, and you wonder "Are those buttons?"...well, don't find out by pressing "10."