Out of Kilter presents:
Shortcuts to Drive You Crazy
By Ken Carpenter
July 13, 2003
It is the right indeed it is the obligation, of every human male driver to attempt to find a shortcut from Point A to Point B. Those shortcuts invariably involve a lot of zigzagging, backtracking, circling around, honking, speeding and cursing.
One thing they do not involve is any form of an apology to the passengers for turning a simple twenty-minute drive into two hours of misery. It is never a pretty sight watching a confident man becoming a twitching ball of apprehension.
Marco Polo invented the shortcut in 1271 when he went to the market for a jar of picked pigs snouts and did not make it home for 24 years. That 15,000-mile shortcut, combined with the subsequent best seller Shortcuts to Fame and Fortune, made Marco the standard bearer for aspiring shortcut artist for the next two centuries.
Christopher Colombus brought a novel approach to the shortcut in 1492, which had never been tried before. He actually took one and made it work! Of course, when he got where he was going, he thought he was somewhere else, so the end result was the same.
That did not change the fact that he actually took the shortest route from where he was to where he was not going, even though where he went was not where he actually wanted to be. He was, in fact, as lost as anyone in history. That confusion probably helped him to become as famous as the wayward Mr. Polo
One phrase my kids never wanted to hear escape my lips when we were in the car, was the dreaded “Ah, I think this is a shortcut”. They feared it like the plague. I swear I did not threaten to take one more than five or six times on every trip out of town.
Like every red-blooded American man, I have been compelled to try my share of shortcuts. Unfortunately, a typical shortcut guarantees that you end up late and disheveled looking for whatever or whoever awaits you at the end of the journey.
This is not acceptable to the non-voters of any family. They are young and dumb enough to believe that the world is an orderly place where sensible people don’t go out of their way to become lost.
I always tried to tell them that I was not really lost, just a tad bit disoriented, but in a kid’s simple book lost is defined as follows: “To be lost is when one person resembling a witless oaf bringing himself and innocent others to a place where there is doubt about how they got there or how to get safely and quickly away from there to a location the oaf recognizes. Did we forget to mention how stupid this moron is for attempting a shortcut and getting LOST?”
According to my sons, if a shortcut takers Hall of Fame is ever built, there will be a statue of their grandpa erected in front of it. They fervently believe that in his heyday he could have added an hour to a five-minute drive across the street. Even though he no longer drives, the boys suspect that he even takes short cut when he walks around town, entering doors in search of that elusive step saver and not finding the exit to the building until closing time.
The youngest of a species always think they can avoid the mistakes of their ancestors, and my kids are no different. What they don’t know is, they are males and males must take shortcuts or die.
Maybe they’ll luck out like Marco or Chris and turn it into a career.