To be a critical consumer of information I often encourage people to believe nothing people say or write, and only about half of what you see them do. Here’s one reason why.
By Holly A. Bell
One night last week my cat got himself stuck under the front porch. He crawls under the porch regularly, but it’s a tight squeeze. Based on the large clump of fur on the siding he crawls under to get there, I suspected he hurt himself crawling under this time and was afraid to come out. The temperature had been just above freezing most of the day, but was dropping quickly. It also meant the area under the porch was wet and muddy and my poor cat was soaked, dirty, cold, and begging me to get him out.
At first I tried to coax him out with his favorite snack. I spread a tarp over the mud, ice, and snow next to the porch and got down on my belly and tried to lure him out. No luck. I then went to my garage and got my trusty dirt shovel. I cleared the snow from near the gap he used to enter and attempted to dig a hole to enlarge the space. Unfortunately, the ground was still too frozen. I propped the shovel against the house. I then tried to use a drill to unscrew the screws on the decking and remove the boards. They wouldn’t budge.
By this time it was nearing 10 pm and frankly I was ready to go to bed and three hours of coaxing seemed like enough. I was about as desperate to get this over with as the cat. I considered sawing the siding out to enlarge the opening, but I wasn’t sure if the saw would fit under the porch or that I wanted to do the necessary repairs later. I went to the garage, grabbed the saw and was standing with it in my front window looking out at the porch trying to decide if using it to enlarge the space was even possible. It was at this moment that my neighbor arrived home from work. He drove slowly past my house and was staring intently at me. Imagine the scene I had set—porch light on, a tarp spread out, a dirt shovel, and me with an irritated look staring out my front window with a saw. I could see him processing the information and he appeared concerned. It is probably also worth mentioning that no one had seen my husband coming or going for days as he was out of town on business.
Moments later my husband called. I explained to him my dilemma and he suggested I use the impact driver rather than the drill to try to get the screws out of the decking. I popped the bit into the impact driver and headed out to the porch with my iPhone in hand and my husband on the other end. I propped the phone against the house next to the front door and attempted to remove the screws. Fortunately they began to turn, so I started removing screws while at the same time complaining to my husband about my day that was being topped off by this event. I wasn’t in the best of moods. About a third of the way through the job, I heard “Bzzzzzzzz” and looked up to see my neighbor’s garage door going up. I couldn’t really see him, but I saw movement in the shadows. So there I was with my tarp and shovel removing the decking to gain access to the area under the porch all the while obviously irritated and appearing to talk to myself. I felt like I was in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window being spied on by my neighbor and suspected of killing my husband and burying him under the porch. This particular neighbor recently moved in and I don’t know him very well yet, although we did have a discussion once about where it was and was not appropriate for his dog to do his business. I would love to hear the version of this story he told his friends and co-workers the next day. I just hope his dog hasn’t gone missing.
It didn’t help that by the time I removed the boards the cat had become so frightened by the sound of the impact driver he had squeezed himself out from under the porch. In hindsight I should have rapped a bag of potatoes in the tarp and dropped it under the porch before replacing the boards. Of course I would have had to take the whole deck apart again when the Alaska State Troopers arrived and I really just wanted to go to bed.
Is your information accurate?
As stated at the beginning of this article the moral of this story is to be a critical consumer of information. Don’t believe everything you see, hear, or read. Check it out and find out where the statistics come from and whether they’ve been accurately presented. Don’t take things at face value and don’t be a headline reader. If you actually read the article you’ll discover many headlines misrepresent the information detailed deeper in the text. Look at issues from many different perspectives. Doing so will enable you to either see things in new ways or strengthen your existing understanding.
Oh, and sometime people aren’t behaving as oddly as they appear…
Image courtesy of pal2iyawit.
interesting … has anyone seen your husband to verify this isn’t a cover story? … sometime people are behaving as oddly as they appear …