I am the Master of My Irrigational Domain! (also entitled "Myself")

Now that just about the entire modern world has transferred from VHS to DVD, have you ever wondered what became of those sociatial miscreants who devised the VHS clock mechanisms? You know, the ones you have to thank for 6 1/2 years of staring at a VCR that blinked "12:00" - "12:00" - "12:00" because the darn thing was too hard to program?

Well I have located them. They are now designing THESE:

Great googly-moogly.

While staying at a friend's house a couple of weeks ago, he off-handidly asked me to run the sprinklers while he was gone as a power outage had scrambled the sprinkler timer.

I went out back, opened the timer box and stared in confusion. I had never actually seen a sprinkler timer before and I could not figure out how to turn the water on. I searched in vain for what had to be the obvious fail-safe - the iron rod that you jam on the metal thingy in the grass and give a twist - alas, the system was fully digitized.

I cracked open the instruction manual and spent the next 45 minutes trying to figure out how to TURN ON THE WATER.

When the crew told me they were going to put all my sprinklers on a timer I was both excited and apprehensive. Imagine my relief when this guy let me know last Thursday, before he hopped a plane home to Seattle, that he had programmed my sprinklers for me to come on at 6am.

I got up the next morning at 5:30, poured a cup of coffee, and waited in the front yard. The whole system worked without a hitch! First the front yard powered up, then the planter boxes, then the back yard. It was a marvel! I got up the next morning to watch the show again for good measure.

Nothing.

The system - she was kaput. I figured "It's no wonder. These things are so hard to figure out, I bet my friend thought he had it programmed to water daily but had actually only set it up to water the one time . . ." I headed to the timer with the instruction book in hand and pressed "reset".

I could not figure out how to set the clock.

After 30 min or so I gave up and have been getting up at 5am every morning since then to water the yard. Yesterday afternoon, after 7 days of hand watering, I decided to give it another try.

I pulled out the instruction manual and the heavens opened and a choir of angels descended singing "Glory to God in the highest!" I had figured out how to set the clock! It was like finding the Rosetta Stone.

I imagined myself being introduced at a cocktail party, "This is so-and-so, she is a brain surgeon. This is so-and-so, he is studying quantum-physics. And THIS is Matt, he knows how to program his own sprinkler timer!"

"Ooooooohhhh", the crowd exhales as they all lean in to get a closer look . . .

After figuring out how to set the clock, it was fairly straight-forward.

I decided on program "B" which would only water the yard every-other day and started clicking through the settings. . . "What's this? Someone has already set up my yard to water every-other day?"

It was as if Neil Armstrong were to set foot on the moon only to discover "Ziggy was here" scrawled in the moon dust . . .

Then it hit me.

The reason the sprinklers didn't come on the second day was because they were programmed to come on every other day. If only I hadn't monkeyed with the whole thing I could have avoided a week's worth of early-morning hand watering. I scrolled through all the settings just in case and locked up the box.

A few years ago, friends came down with their 3-year-old son. As the father hoisted the son out of his car seat, the child began repeating "myself - myself - myself" over and over. When his father set him down on the pavement, the little boy wailed "Myyyyyseeeeeelllllllf" and dramatically flung himself down.

The father growled, "Allright!" and heaved the boy back into his car seat whereupon the boy happily scrambled down to the pavement on his own. I looked at the father and he shrugged, "He wants to do things himself."

This morning I grabbed my cup of coffee and headed to the yard in anticipation. Sure enough, the sprinklers sprang to life right on cue (just as they would have been doing all along).

Sure, they were programmed correctly the first time. But I figured it out - I cracked the code - I programmed the confounded sprinkler timer.

And I did it myself.