One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(58)

Indeed, most human beings in the developed world already carry a device that can instantaneously access essentially all of the recorded information in history, and the average price of such devices recently hit an all-time low (see Regular News). Nobody knows what happens after death (see Opinions).





Never Fall in Love





The day she started as a secret agent, her boss told her one very important rule.

“Never fall in love.”

But she did fall in love, almost immediately. Within a month, she was hopelessly and endlessly in love with another secret agent, a kind, warm man named Bob. He had big hands and a lot of brothers and sisters, and there was no falling out of love with Bob.

She went to her boss’s office and handed him a letter of resignation.

“Why?” he asked.

“I met someone,” she said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Bob.”

“I love Bob!” he said, lighting up. “Oh, what a great guy. That’s a perfect match, you and Bob! I’m so happy for you.”

He then remembered the issue at hand.

“But why are you resigning?”

“I broke the one and only rule you told me,” she said. “ ‘Never fall in love.’ I fell in love.”

“Oh, honey,” he laughed. “That’s not a real rule! I just knew you’d never find love if you were looking for it.”





The World’s Biggest Rip-Off





Here’s a story with a happy ending.

I am a thirty-eight-year-old married father of two. A couple of summers ago, I took our family on our first-ever family vacation.

The plan was to drive from our home in New Hampshire to my wife’s parents’ lake house in Canada. On the way there, we would stop for a night at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Then a week at the lake house. Then on the drive back we would spend a couple of days at Niagara Falls.

The Baseball Hall of Fame was a disaster. My son hated it, and we had stopped there only for him. Basically, he spent the whole time asking if his favorite players would ever end up in the Hall of Fame, and I told him the truth, which was no, because of steroids. Maybe I should have lied.

The lake house was a disaster, too. My kids somehow got it in their heads that they wanted to watch the movie The Hangover. Of course I wasn’t going to let them watch The Hangover—they were eight and ten years old—but they decided to make the whole week a fight about whether or not they could watch it. My wife’s parents thought this whole thing was my fault, because they didn’t know what The Hangover was and they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let two young children watch it.

Niagara Falls was a disaster. My eight-year-old daughter was the one who had begged to see it because a couple from a television show she watched got married there. But when I pointed it out to her from the car window on the drive to our hotel—“Look, Niagara Falls!”—she said it looked different than she thought it would and went back to her book. Great, I thought. We have two days here, and that’s all there is to do, and she’s the only one who wanted to see it, and she’s already bored by it. And that was all we did. And it was boring.

As we started the drive back home, we passed a sign on the highway for the Guinness World Records Museum, and my kids said they wanted to go. It was the first thing they had wanted the whole trip that I could conceivably let them have, so even though we were already over our budget for the trip, I said okay, let’s check it out, and pulled off the highway.

But the museum was a disaster, too. The lines were long, and nothing impressed my kids. Not the World’s Largest Watermelon, not the World’s Hairiest Woman, not the World’s Fastest Toilet. Not the fingernails guy. Nothing.

I was about to call it a day when I saw a small hand-drawn sign above a curtain in a corner:

WORLD’S BIGGEST RIP-OFF. $100 PER PERSON.

I waved my wife over.

“No, no. Absolutely not.” She said tickets to the museum had already taken us way over budget for the trip, and we weren’t paying a hundred dollars a person for something else now, especially something that the sign said right there was a ripoff. “No, no, no. No way.”

Something about it really intrigued me, though. I asked the guy in front of the door, who wasn’t wearing official museum gear—just black pants and a black T-shirt—if there was at least a children’s rate.

“One hundred dollars a person. No discounts. No refunds. Cash only.”

This only made me more intrigued. What the hell was in there? I had to know. But the more interested I got, the more skeptical my wife became. “You know what?” she said. “Fine. Just go in yourself and take a look if you need to know what’s in there so bad. We’ll wait.” But this was a family vacation, I said. Whatever I was about to experience, I wanted to experience with my family.

I told my wife to wait with the kids and I ran out to an ATM down the block. It only let me withdraw up to a $200 limit, so then I ran back and begged my wife to let me borrow her card and tell me her PIN so I could withdraw two hundred dollars more.

At this point, my wife was understandably starting to lose her cool a bit. She said I was acting like a fool and a sucker and some other harsher things that I’d rather not make the effort to remember right now. I’m not going to lie: it was a tense moment in our marriage. Finally, she told me that I was no longer the type of person she could trust with her ATM password, but that if it was this important to me, I could wait in the museum with the kids while she went across the street herself to withdraw two hundred dollars from her card, but that she needed me to know she would “never, ever forget what happened today.” I said yes, thank you, it was indeed this important to me.