• No matter how carefully you load the groceries into the car or van, the bags inevitably fall over and spill out on the way home.
• Why is it that all vitamins are found in foods like spinach and cauliflower, but never in ice cream or potato chips?
• You hang the bikes up in the garage all winter. When you take them down in the spring, they don’t work properly. How can that be? They’ve been hanging lifeless for six months. Have the gears been plotting against you all that time?
• How can people say there’s not enough time to do a job right, when there’s always time to do it over?
• One of the great mysteries of life is how a teenager who never reads a book can amass so many library fines.
• The new language is confusing. It used to be that “software” was a comfortable undergarment, and “time-sharing” was romantic togetherness.
• If you take the icescraper and emergency snow-shovel out of the car when the weather warms up in March, it will definitely snow a ton in April. But if you leave them in there, it never snows again and they lie around annoyingly all summer. It’s the same syndrome if you pack the snowblower into the back corner of the garage in March. Don’t do it!
• You’re from the old school — sometimes known as the dark ages — but to your credit, you finally gave in and got a computer. You put all the household files in there, but still can’t find them. It’s simply an up-to-date way of misplacing things in order.
• You try to teach your kids about eating properly, but they still think that the five basic food groups are McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Dairy Queen and Pizza Hut.
• You figure you must be getting old because you feel crummy in the morning without having had any fun the night before.
• You want to replace a tap washer. In the store, they only sell an “assortment” package of washers — 99 per cent of which you will never need. Does anyone have taps that use those “other” sizes?
• You’ve reached the stage of life where everything you own is paid for. You can now afford all those things you don’t want anymore.
• Have you ever studied the laugh-track on TV situation comedies? The dumbest lines get the biggest electronically-enhanced laughs. The weaker the writing on the show, the louder the forced laughter.
• As a father, you can’t figure out why your daughters think you dress like a “nerd.” Yet, they want to borrow your oversized sweaters. Go figure.
• Isn’t it odd how unimportant your job is when you ask for a raise, but how important it suddenly becomes when you want to take a day off?
• You can’t win. If you kept all those resolutions you made at New Year’s Eve, you’d end up healthy, slim, rich, smart and boring.
• You’re getting on in years and you don’t understand “natural” foods. You figure that at your age, you need all the preservatives you can possibly get.
• Why is it that so many automatic car washes always leave one small section of your car dirty? Everything looks great, except that one little area where it didn’t do the job properly.
• Everyone in the family likes a different brand of toothpaste. It would be so much simpler, if they could all agree on one brand. And then there’s shampoo, deodorant and ...
• You want to hang a picture, so you drive a nail into the wall where you think there’s a stud. Nope, not there. You try several other places nearby. It must be just there. Nope. Eventually, you have five holes in the wall and an architectural mystery — no studs in that wall. Can you say, “stud finder?”
• Your water heater will die at the worst possible moment, just before Christmas as three relatives are arriving for a week long stay.
• What is it with golf? You can’t win. If you’re driving the ball well, you’re putting horrendously. If you’re putting like a magician, you’re driving like a moron. The only time the two ever come together consistently is when you’re doing both poorly.
• It’s a hot summer night. You’re lying in bed, just dozing off to sleep and one mosquito starts buzzing around your head. You turn on the light and conduct a search, but it’s gone. You try to go back to sleep. The mosquito returns every 15 minutes. It’s a long night.
• You turn on the TV for your favourite program. It’s start is delayed by a basketball game going overtime. You hate basketball, but you don’t want to miss your show when it finally comes on, so you keep watching and watching and watching. When the game finally ends and they switch to your show, it immediately goes to a commercial break.
•You go to buy an item advertised “on sale” at a great price. You’re very excited until the store says the item didn’t come in. They say it will be in “tomorrow.” They always say that. You say you’re there now and you can’t come back tomorrow. They don’t care. You are now excited in a different way. Isn’t shopping fun?