Remember to Wipe Carefully

(It is the innermost dial on the wiper stalk.)

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, in which, as always, I agree to humiliate myself in return for your personal stories and anecdotes that I will use to humiliate you next week.

Yesterday, Rachel and I had a long drive to make; I was expecting a call on an interview I had to take, so she drove and I manned the phone, with a pen and paper at the ready. We were in my car.

It began to rain lightly, and then more heavily. Rachel reached onto the dashboard for a moment, and suddenly the wipers — set on “intermittent”— remained on intermittent but with a lessened interval of inaction.

“You can’t do that!” I said. I wasn’t reprimanding her. I meant, “Wait, that’s impossible!” I’d had no idea that was a controllable feature. I seldom used “intermittent” because of its constant, maddeningly lazy pace.

Rachel just looked smug.

My car is a 2008 Honda Civic, with 62,000 miles on in, virtually all of which were driven by me. Rachel has been driving it only for a year, only occasionally, and seldom in the rain.

Columnists learn over time that it is unwise to write about one’s weirder foibles because instead of making you more accessible through charming self-deprecation, it can instead make you less accessible because you might seem a hapless feeb or a worrisome creep — such as if you wrote “Hey, you know how sometimes, when you haven’t changed your underpants in a week and a half …. "?

So, in this case, before embarrassing myself publicly here, I decided to check with four of my closest friends. I emailed Pat, Cait, Tom and Dave to ask: Do they know that there’s a thing on the steering column that lets you adjust the length of the “down time” in their intermittent washers? They all answered immediately.

Pat said, “Yes.”

Cait said “Yes!!! I was just making use of it this very day!!”

Tom said, “Yes. But that is primitive. The high-tech cars have wipers that sense if it’s raining and how hard, and adjusts the wiper frequency automatically.”

Dave said. “Yes, there is. But I can never get it exactly right. One day I will drive into a building trying to calibrate it.”

Dave was obviously the most humble of the four so I complimented him on his tech savvy.

He wrote back:

“A lot of cars now also have headlights and radios. You should check! You can drive at night AND listen to music!”

I should have stopped there. But then I added something I hadn’t told the others: That immediately after the wiper ephiphany, I frantically scoured the car I’d been driving for 17 years and discovered two more things of which I had not been aware: 1) You can control the radio remotely, from the steering wheel, and 2) The top of the broad armrest between the front two seats opens up. Inside is storage space big enough to accommodate a six-pack and a snub-nosed revolver. Also, it’s bootlegging a second power outlet!

Dave wrote back:

“It’s an exciting time to be alive!”

Indeed it is. For example, today there is an Internet, which no longer uses MS-DOS, or “bauds,” something I never learned the definition of. And I notice computer paper no longer seems to have tear-off sprocket holes. But today the Internet allows you to control your own “websites,” which others can “access,” so here we are, toasty and warm together, in the Gene Pool, into which I have just peed.

The point is, this is the Weekend Gene Pool, in which I now seek like-minded feebs to confess their lack of savvy. The question for the day is: Discuss an instance, or instances, where you were unaware of some available innovation for far too long. You can define “innovation” broadly. It need not be confined to technology — It can be anything quite obvious of which you were ignorant, to your detriment and/or embarrassment. Please send to this feeb button.

(Remember, if you WANT me to use your name, put it at the END of your message.)

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls follow. In answering the first poll, please note I am not asking about your awareness of intermittent wipers. We all know about that, even me. I am asking about the “speed control” feature for intermittent wipers, the thing controlling how long the “down time” is between wipes, which is what this column is about. I am making this distinction here belatedly because some of the early Comments are from people who misunderstood.

Okay, good.

Here is an important plea.

This is the button you now click on if you read us but are not a paid subscriber, yet you kinda feel the Gene Pool is worth $1 a week:

And this is the button you now click on if you read us but are not a paid subscriber because you think The Gene Pool is not worth $1 a week:

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Good. See you soon,