Nick Things

Perth is the nearest town to the southwest of us, the outskirts are a 20-25 minute drive, and that is where I was heading on Monday morning. My purpose was the pick up Nick after he dropped his car off at the autobody shop.

The reason why is strange.

Nick was about the back out of his garage. However, when he tossed the door-opener aside as he was about to backup, he accidentally activated it, and the door began its descent. It did not register on Nick that the door was closing, so he put the car in reverse and began to exit.

Of course, the sensor spotted the car and the door reversed course and began to rise.

Recall that Nick was totally unaware.  

Unfortunately, Nick's antenna and the door got in each other's way. The door won, the antenna lost, and the both the antenna and roof were damaged.

Poor Nick has been left with a $3000 repair job and will be car-less for, perhaps, two weeks.

I got to Perth, and when Nick was getting into the car, I thought he was flashing his keys at me. In retrospect, he was being funny and pretending to open my door with his garage door opener in order to get in my car. I didn't get this at the time and thought it was his key fob.

Here comes the funny part.

I got him home and was going to join him inside for a coffee. He began to pat himself down. I saw the light extinguish from his eyes, and he said that he had left the keys at the repair shop.

I said, "You couldn't have. I saw your key fob."

But you, boys and girls, know that it had been the door opener and not the key fob.

We had to drive back to Perth immediately and forthwith.

Nick was mortified and apologetic, but I appreciated the comedic aspect of the situation.

When I finally dropped him off he was clinging to his keys as if they were gold. He passed a CD over to me to enjoy when I got home: Barry Gibbs recording country music songs with various musicians, doing each musician's own song. He said that it was excellent.

But I will never know, or at least not in the near future.

Last night, I thought to play it by just popping it into my computer. I have a soundbar connected to the computer, so the sound quality would be decent.

Guess what! This computer does not have a CD player. My previous computer did, and the one before that, and likely a few before that one.

But they don't come standard anymore. I haven't needed on in the year since I have owned this machine, so this omission hadn't completely dawned upon my foggy brain.

There was a time when I had a stack of stereo components: turntable, receiver, tape player, cd player, and big speakers, but those days are long past. At present, I have none of the above: not even a cd player in my computer.

Times have changed.

So those are my three Nick-related occurrences in one short day. The first was freakish. The second was amusing, at least to me. The third brought home to me, the passing of an era – at least as it pertains to this domicile.