The Burden of the Ring

I was covering a class this morning-- an 84-minute class-- and I was bored and checking my phone and at 8:30 AM I got a notification from my Ring Doorbell cam that there was some motion on my front porch, so I activated the live view and I saw a sketchy guy, holding a can of something (which I assumed to be alcoholic) and he was sort of stumbling around, pushing against our new porch railings and posts, careening from one railing to the other and I was like WHAT THE FUCK? . . . there's a random guy fucking around on our porch and I'm watching this-- and then Lola started barking and I activated the intercom and said, "Can I help you?" and then he wandered off and I was really annoyed-- because we had two bikes stolen a few months ago (the reason why we installed the Ring Doorbell) and so I told lots of people about this sketchy guy-- including my neighbors, when I got home from soccer practice, but when I came in and told my wife the news, she said, "Are you sure you didn't see John the handyman? He was over this morning to install some lattice," and then it all made sense-- he was going to do our porch railings, but we hired a friend to do that job-- so he was testing out the other guy's handiwork-- going from one railing to the next, checking the sturdiness of the corner posts-- but if you don't have context, then that looks like a drunk guy, reeling around, using the railings for support-- and maybe he was drinking Diet Coke?-- so I went back across the street and told our neighbors the truth of the matter and I canceled the whole "keep an eye on our front porch" dictum and we all had a good laugh (but I still decided to pay the three bucks a month to have the Ring record all activity because I was really annoyed that I couldn't rewatch the video and reassess my inference).

2 comments:

zman said...

So are you Frodo or Gollum? Probably Sam.

Dave said...

whichever one jumps to conclusions and misinterprets stuff.

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