I do not wish to sound like a cruel taskmaster, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to do something about Burt.
I'm talking here about my new personal assistant. To put it mildly, Burt could not be more useless. He basically just sits there, day after day, staring at me with those lifeless eyes of his, grinning that idiot grin, never moving, never offering anything in the way of a meaningful contribution.
Granted, he's pretty darn good looking. In fact, we call him Burt because he's the spitting image of legendary actor Burt Reynolds. They even have the same impressive crop of chest hair and cheesy moustache.
The only reliable way to tell them apart is that my Burt is an inflatable doll and therefore made entirely of plastic, although when you think about the quality of the acting in some of the "classic" movies starring the "real" Burt Reynolds, this does not seem like such a big difference after all.
I would like to stress at this point that I personally did not hire inflatable Burt. He was a gift from some dear friends who decided -- and I believe this came from the heart -- that they really didn't want to have an inflatable doll in their homes anymore.
Blowup Burt travelled a long and winding road before he became my PIA (Personal Inflatable Assistant). He began life as a heart-felt 40th birthday gift for my good friend and colleague Charlene.
But, owing to the fact that she already has a perfectly good, non-inflatable husband named Kevin to do odd jobs around the house, Charlene decided the only decent thing to do was to find another home for Blowup Burt, whom, out of a sense of decency, she dressed up in one of her real husband's bathing suits and Budweiser T-shirts.
The opportunity to find Burt an adoptive family arrived a few weeks ago at an elegant soir ©e -- this soir ©e was so elegant it featured no less than TWO state-of-the-art margarita machines -- for our friend Scott.
In an effort to show Scott how much we, as guys, cared for him, my buddy Bob and I decided to give him a special gift, by which I mean The Green Velvet Chair From Hell. Regular readers will recall that this chair ($14.99 at Value Village) was the centrepiece of the "room" I "designed" as part of a contest at this year's Home Expressions Show. This is a chair that emits Visible Ugliness Rays (VURs) and would cause you to go blind or clinically insane if you were to look at it directly.
"We are going to give this chair to Scott," we told Charlene.
"Hmmm," Charlene said, "Burt would look very nice in that chair."
So Scott was happy. And Burt was happy. But Tammy, Scott's beloved, was NOT happy. The Green Velvet Chair From Hell did not fit with her other lovely home furnishings. And Burt was, well, creepy in the way that only an inflatable doll with a martini glass taped to its hand can be creepy.
The final straw came when Tammy went outside one day and discovered her young children in the front yard having a lovely tea party with Blowup Burt as the guest of honour, while Tammy's curious next-door neighbours looked on with gaping mouths and wondered whether this was an experiment in "modern inflatable parenting."
Fortunately for our friends Tammy and Scott, I once again sustained a crippling injury. I tore my Achilles tendon, the same tendon I tore eight months earlier, and was ordered to spend six weeks lying on the couch at home all by myself.
"Doug will be very lonely," Scott said to Tammy.
"Yes," Tammy said to Scott, "Let's bring Blowup Burt to Doug's House so that he will not be lonely anymore."
Which explains how Burt became my PIA. We have a system: I sit at the computer waiting for professionally humorous thoughts to form in my brain, while Burt relaxes in a chair, glares out the window at passers-by, and causes my wiener dog to shriek in terror and hide under my bed after first having an accident on the living-room carpet.
On the upside, my wife and Burt have formed a special bond. She delights in hiding Burt in unusual places -- behind the shower curtain, in my daughter's bed, in my son's closet -- then waiting for the kids to find him and scream in the same manner as the wiener dog.
But the relationship between Burt and I has become strained. As I write this, I can feel him looking at me. I know what he's thinking. He's thinking: "I may be made of plastic, but I am a much better writer than you, gimpy!"
And that may be true. But from where I sit, I'd say Burt is just full of hot air.
doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca
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