“It started with the oven,” the wife told ODD. “There was a really loud whirring sound.  Then on the breakfast table, there was a creepy ticking. From across the kitchen came this intermittent humming. And I don’t know, I think the floorboards were super loud.”

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“I didn’t hear anything,” said the husband.

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ODD sent a reporter to investigate.  He said that the whirring was the oven’s convection bake setting, never used before, that the wife had mistakenly turned on to heat their quiche. (This news sent the husband on an eager dive into the Freestanding Gas Range User Manual to find all the uses for the convection bake setting.) The ticking was from a loose metal bottle top, the humming from the refrigerator, and absolutely nothing was wrong with the floorboards.

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“I think the wife might be losing it,” the reporter reported. 
 

As with many couples, this couple is fond of mangos. But recently, the husband returned from a shopping trip with what the wife insisted were “the wrong mangos.” 

 

Though feeling unjustly accused, the husband had to admit he didn’t know much about mangoes.  So once again, he cleared his schedule and plunged into the worldwide web.  “Tell them I used the search terms “mangos” and “variety,”  he instructed ODD.

 

“The first websites that popped up said that there were anywhere from seven (but they only listed six) to over 400 mango varieties,” the husband reported.  “The other thing I found out,” he continued with great enthusiasm, “is that there is an Angie mango and a Glenn mango!” Learning that the Glenn mango originated in Italy and the Angie in Florida, the wife was really mad.  "That just doesn’t seem right,” she said.

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The husband was able to identify the wife’s fav as the “Honey aka Adaulfo, aka Adolfo, aka Champagne mango.”  It hails from Mexico (and Brazil and Peru and Ecuador).  At about 100 calories a cup, a mango is not bad for a fruit that, when fully ripe, peeled, and wolfed down by a man (the husband) bathing in it at the kitchen sink, “tastes like ice cream, only better.” 

First, the camera on his laptop stopped working, reports Claude in Manhattan.  Then he bought an external camera that only worked once.  The shuffle command on his laptop’s Google play music stopped shuffling.  His phone started to go—he could barely hear people talking—which sent him to Virgin mobile which sent him to Boost which sent him to Apple, which blamed “gunk” in the hearing mechanism and removed said gunk. 

 

Then his phone wouldn’t charge, and he found out that his friend Walter’s phone wouldn‘t charge either. But Walter had a foolproof plan for failure to charge; use a safety pin to get the lint, tissue parts, whatever else was in your pocket next to your phone out of the hole in the phone where the charging cord goes. Done.

 

Anonymous, from Hell’s Kitchen, reported that her laptop camera crapped out too, which led her to buy a webcam for her desktop: problem solved. Unfortunately no such quick fix was available for anonymous’ dishwasher, which crashed and died in March, just in time for the pandemic.  She found an online store that offered only curbside delivery of a new one, with no installation.  “We live in an apartment building with no elevator, and nobody here studied electronics,” she told ODD.

 

But apparently, she quickly adjusted. “I love washing dishes!” she said. “It’s the most meditative thing there is!  Water running, peace and quiet, you don’t have to think about anything, and the key thing is, at the end you feel that you have accomplished something!”  

 

The wife—who reports that her desktop gave up the ghost and their dehumidifier won’t stop beeping--thinks maybe “we should all just wash some more dishes.”