I've Been a Bad Bad Boy

A couple weeks ago, I had an appointment to get new tires put on my vehicle. It is an AWD and I have learned, it really chews through tires, the price I pay for being able to drive on the horrible slick river bluffs all winter long around here. From experience, I knew it would be a fairly lengthy wait and also based on past experiences, an unpleasant one. Let me explain.

The waiting room at the local dealership is a small room with 8 or so chairs arranged around two walls, a television on a faux fireplace on the third and the fourth side being open to the restrooms across the hallway. The television is forever blaring and people in the waiting room are always making lots of noise which means for me the book reader, I have a hard time concentrating. This wait started off as no exception. The television was tuned to some loud program excitedly talking about sharks who apparently ate someone who had been trying to record their night adventures. They would excitedly talk about some discovery, hype up a potentially deadly situation and then cut to commercial every five minutes. Five minutes later, you would cut back to the shark program, realize that nothing serious happened due to the previous cliffhanger and go back to discussing something for five more minutes before the next cliff hanger, commercial interruption, rinse and repeat ad nauseum.  

There was only one person other than myself in the waiting room and he wasn't paying attention to the program either. He was instead placing phone call after phone call on his cellphone and then shouting gossip and curse words into it so the person on the other end could hear him over the shark and commercial programming. I wasn't getting a lot of reading accomplished but eyed the remote hungrily which was sitting inches away from the loud talking man on a corner end table. 

Fortunately, ten minutes into my wait, his vehicle was apparently done and he was called back to the service desk in a room nearby to pay and collect his vehicle. I didn't even wait for the door to close before I was up and quickly grabbing the remote and returning to my seat in the other corner. On my way I found the MUTE button and clicked it putting an end to the incessant noise. I tucked the remote into a tent advertisement perched on my corner end table and began to read my book in peaceful silence. 

After five minutes of bliss, it hit me that other people may eventually come in and see the working television with no sound and start looking for the remote or even worse, find a way to increase the volume by pressing some button on the thin bezel of the television itself. So I pulled the remote out from the hiding spot, turned the television completely off and tucked it back into the hiding spot. I hoped people would see the television not on and assume it just wasn't working and not spend much of an effort looking for the remote.

For an hour, I enjoyed the silence of the room and my book before the first waiting customer, after my entrance, joined me in the room. She was a generation older than me and had a book which gladdened my heart. Maybe ten minutes later a young 20 something man came in but seemed more concerned with his texting/gaming on his cellphone than the television. And so the television remained turned off and the room silent, well except for the faint Christmas carols being blasted out on the showroom floor down the hall.

Perhaps at the 1:45 mark in my wait, a woman from the office area came out, crossed the hall and bought something from the vending machines in the corner. She then asked if we wanted the television on. Both the older lady and I immediately said no and the young man added that he was fine. But the woman kept looking around pondering out loud where the remote was insisting it had been right on the corner table (where I had found it earlier) earlier that morning when she had turned on a shark program. She poked around here and there and even came within a couple feet of my chair near the other corner table where the remote was hidden in the tent advertisement but I made no move to shift my feet to allow her closer access and kept my eyes trained down at my book. Finally she muttered that someone must have taken "her" remote, looked in the garbage can and went back down the hall towards the office area.

Bullet dodged.

I got in another 45 minutes of reading before 2 hours and 20 minutes after I first turned off the television, the service desk guy informed me that my vehicle was done. The other book lady had already gone and the young man was still focused on his texting/gaming on his cellphone so I just left the remote hidden in the tent. I'm sure somebody will find it eventually and turn the television back on to shark and commercial programming at a loud volume.