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Death and Testing

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Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty.

At ease, Civilians!

But while at ease, be sure to stay alert vis-à-vis the signs of an impending heart attack, which everyone should have tattooed on the backs of their eyelids so they don’t forget.

Now that I’ve said that, please also don’t get anything tattooed on the backs of your eyelids! The very idea is gross and dangerous, and you’ll lose sleep, which is unhealthy. I’m not sure why I said it, except that I figured it’s probably something nobody would ever do. My mistake.

I realize there are people who will do anything.

Which is why I’m here. I want to warn you against taking any easy tests that others claim will tell you how long you are going to live.

And yes, that includes the Sitting Rising Test. Especially that one.

If you haven’t seen it, the Sitting Rising Test scores your ability to go from a standing position to fully seated on the floor and then back to standing again. You lose points for using your arms to steady yourself and it also lowers your score if you happen to lose your balance anywhere along the way.

The lower your score, the sooner your toes will likely be permanently pointed skyward.

That’s bad enough! As a rule of thumb, you should never tell people they’re going to die, even though we all are aware that everybody is going to die! There is nothing useful that can come from it.  But when I saw this video of how the test is administered, I was astonished!

As a Bathtub Safety Officer, I must always consider FIRST how dangerous an activity might be IF performed in the bathtub, and I can tell you for certain this one is sure to leave the imprint of a faucet in your forehead.

Do not do the Sitting-Rising test in your tub or shower! There is too much bad footing and too many hard surfaces all around. Plus, the instructions are in Portuguese, which is disorienting. And I believe Rio is a very easy city to get mugged in, which is just another way to fall down and hit your head. In fact, I believe the whole sitting-rising test movement is just an elaborate scheme to get everyone winded and stretched out on the floor so our pockets can be picked.

Anyway, that’s what happened to me when I tried it, minus the pocket-picking part.

Instead, you can take my own trademarked Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty Longevity Test – it’s very accurate and quite simple because you only have to answer one question. Here it is:

Are you the sort of person who will do something because a lot of people are talking about it on the Internet?

If you said “Yes,” I’m fairly confident you’re going to die quite soon!

Yours in Safety,
BSOR

I took the Sitting-Rising test and almost fell down. Then I took the BSOR test and became so concerned, I’m shocked to have lived long enough to even tell you about it! But all of this is quite pointless, since I’m certain I would not want to know the date of my death. I have enough stuff cluttering my calendar as it is – adding a rendezvous with the Grim Reaper would really put a dent in my week. Not to mention the week after!

How do you keep track of your appointments?

76 thoughts on “Death and Testing”

    1. its the only way
      i think my i phone will add to my clendar if i tell it to i just have to remember to tell it to. i add the appts nd meetings and use that as my reference every day.
      i used to carry around a franklin day planner in a leather zipper cover. it weights 10 pounds and was a great place to stick stuff and act as a guy purse. without that i need a sports coat with pockets but the phoen does a great job of keeping trackof everything else.

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    2. Yup.

      Only thing in my entire life that has worked.

      I’m grateful I lived long enough to use the technology 🙂

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    3. Tuesday I switched our phones from Sprint back to Verizon. I forgot to bring in my Sprint account number. The young woman helping me thought maybe by calling sprint I could provide something that would get them to release it. She called Sprint and said she needed the account number for my name. They just gave it to her without any security check. The young woman tried not to show a reaction.

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  2. i won a contest as a kid doing the stand up thinkg in the excersise so i have affection for it.
    and what color was that dress the other day . i saw white and gold….

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  3. I’m my father’s son and used to keep track of things on sticky notes or small slips of scratch paper. The important notes went on the floor between my office chair and the door so I would be reminded to go to the dentist, the barber, etc., before I left the room and after that, the house.

    I’ve finally embraced old technology and use Google Calendar on my desktop to remind myself. Even with an email reminder the day before and the day of the appointment, I’ve forgotten a few, but it’s getting better.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  4. The old-fashioned way, writing them on a dead-tree calendar. Or the even more old-fashioned way, asking a friend “Hey, wasn’t something supposed to happen next Saturday?” Or the hunter-gatherer way, simply forget.

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  5. Like CG – I’m old school. Calendars. I have one at work that travels home w/ me on weekends and then the proverbial calendar on the fridge. I will admit to different colored markers and stickers though.

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  6. I rarely make more appointments than I can keep track of in my head, but just in case, we have a whiteboard in the kitchen on which we post appointments etc. – if we remember. And if we do remember to write them there, there’s the trick of remembering to check the white board.

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  7. I schedule my own appointments with my clients on an electronic scheduler on my work computer.. Sometimes i am too busy to enter appointments at the end of one session and the beginning of another, and I tell myself that I will remember to enter the followup session by the end of the day, but I often don’t, and I often double book my clients as a result. Husband writes down everything in a appointment book. He would be sunk if he lost that. I don’t like using my phone for appointments. I am sort of hopeless in this area.

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      1. Today I had to take a late lunch becasue my morning appointments lasted until 12:45, and got a call at home from the receptionist asking if I had forgotten about my 1:00 client. I had, since I neglected to type it into my calander. I live just a few minutes from work, so I got back and we were able to have a good session. Today is a very busy day for me. I don’t think I forgot anyone else’s appointment.

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  8. Why I use the phone despite my fat and hard to control fingers: I have 14 items listed in my cell phone calendar but only one for me. Sandy has developed the habit of asking me about an appointment for her when we are not home. If she gets it mixed up without being corrected right away, then she gets confused about it permanently. Carrying a pocket calendar–well, I always forgot those. But I always remember the phone.

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  9. In the first chapter of my sequel to my first novel I have Clair smash a cell phone. That was fun to write.
    Fun day all. My cell phone says we are busy today.

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  10. I use Google Calendar on my desktop.

    That works pretty well except I can’t carry the desktop with me when scheduling. As a result, in the rest of March and all of April and all of May I have two appointments. Two. Both are for May 18 at 1 PM.

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    1. I often have calendar items that clump together… I can go a couple of weeks with nothing specific and then there will be four things I want to do and they will all be the same evening or the same weekend!

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    2. this is why I use my phone.

      One of my clients is now keeping a Google calendar for when orders are due, and it imports right into my phone.

      My next project is getting the s&h to use one and have that import as well.

      I don’t adore a lot of technology, but oh do I love this phone!!!

      Someday, my life will probably simplify again and I will be able to just look outside and know that today is the day I will be picking raspberries. I long for that day, but until then, I do love my phone.

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  11. The question presupposes that a person has an abundance of appointments to keep. I have few. The 2AM and 5AM bathroom “appointments” are easily kept and being seated allows me to remember where I need to be later that day. Something about the memory being in ones buttocks (A Bill Cosby reference).

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  12. You all know me – I got a little excited when I saw today’s picture of flip flops. If it really gets into the 50s in the next week, I’ll be dragging my big basket out of the closet and donning mine!

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        1. If you stay Anonymous, you can’t be sharing Too Much Information because we don’t know who you are.

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        3. BiR, don’t believe everything you read on the internet – including this blog. I was kidding.

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  13. I have three calendars – keeping them coordinated is sometimes dicey. I have my work calendar using the Enterprise Approved System of Record. Then I have the one that follows me on my phone (not for work – I tried merging them for awhile and it made me crazy). The third is a dead tree calendar that hangs in the kitchen. Darling Daughter’s school prints a calendar and distributes them at the start of each school year – handy because they list all of the school release days and other stuff I would otherwise lose track of that is school-related. That one is the calendar I transfer appointments to that Darling Husband might need to know about – took about 6 months, but I finally trained him to look at it so he would quit asking me when piano lessons were, when my next opera night was, etc. Still haven’t gotten him to write *his* stuff on there, but getting him to pay attention to it was a win.

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  14. “The Sitting Rising Test.” Seriously? What’s your score if you’re able to rock back and forth enough to propel yourself up off the floor and actually achieve some ‘air’ beneath your feet? Do you get extra points? What if you stick the landing? Will the Romanian judge dock you for not being Romanian? I’m pretty sure that my dad with his replaced knee isn’t supposed to put kneeling pressure on it, so he’d be automatically docked a point right off the bat. My mom, with her replaced hip too.

    This is where I can see this test ending up after a few different iterations by different doctors:

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    2. Seriously, if my longevity were to be determined by that test, I’d already be dead. I haven’t yet fogged a mirror this morning, so perhaps I am.

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      1. Years ago due to repeated heart pain episodes, every possible test done on my heart was done – even an angiogram. They could find nothing wrong. Years later. after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the puzzle was solved: esophageal spasms mimicking heart problems.

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        2. My dad was having those spasms and took 15 nitro pills one night as he thought he was having angina pains. We had never heard of esophageal spasms before that.

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  15. Hmm, I just looked at the video for the Sitting Rising Test. I better schedule an appointment to fill out my will in the next several days. With my arthritis, I couldn’t even attempt the test. The good news is that I won’t possibly live longer than my money lasts.

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  16. Greetings! Officer Rafferty is in rare form today. As others mentioned, that Sitting/Rising Test is merely a test to see whether or not you have arthritis or other diseases that affect your joints. I probably haven’t been able to do that since college.

    The very few appointments I have are usually in my head, but I will write them on the wall calendar at home so we all remember important stuff. The important schedule of karate classes is posted on the fridge — that’s all I need.

    A better test of longevity might be the ability to do Burpees or Up-Downs. Great all-around calisthenic. From a standing position, squat down so hands touch floor. Jump both feet back into a push-up position. Return/jump feet to squat position, and then JUMP UP! Extra points for doing an actual push-up (or 1 or 10) before returning to squat and then jumping up. Actually, I can’t even do them, but my karate instructor loves to include that in our warm-ups. Have a great day and … Live Long and Prosper!

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  17. I have appointments every day with my floss, electric toothbrush, coffee, wine at 4PM, my opinionating on the Strib, classical music on cable, and watching cable news. Every now and then, a human comes here for help, so those are my only “real” appointments.

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  18. I, too, am a triple-calendarer. I don’t own a phone of any intelligence so that’s not an option.
    1. Work Outlook calendar with pop-up reminders. That is the most reliable except for the times I’m not on my work computer. But, having it pop up (and be “snoozed” a number of times during the day or on Friday may help to cement the idea of an appointment.
    2. Stickies on my Mac. They’re sort of like virtual post-it ™ notes on my home desktop. There I have a list by date of appointments and other things. It includes things like ranges of dates for plays/concerts/events that I MAY want to do. Since it’s not on the other two calendars, it doesn’t muddy the works but I can consider it as the time approaches.
    3. Dead-tree small calendar in my purse. It’s rarely up to date but if I schedule something while away from home, I can record it and hope it makes it to at least one of the other two.

    I, too, wondered if the lovely legs belonged to OFL.

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  20. Two dead tree calendars, and like Anna’s post, Husband has lately been putting his stuff on the kitchen one. There is occasionally a mis-step when transferring to or from my portable small one. I don’t know why I’m so resistant to the computer ones, maybe should try it out. My cell is a Trak phone that has never been programmed.. I should hire some teenager to teach me how to do that, I suppose.

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  21. OT – Keystone Override Fails. Since we talked about this quite a bit last month at Blevins Book Club – I have a comment over on the BBC site!

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  22. Something I’d suggest that others might want to do is to write a brief family history. I did this for our family. The document (I call it the “family timeline”) documents when my erstwife and I had our first date, when we took trips, etc. It is minimal, although I have integrated family information with a few public events (Watergate burglary, Reagan elected, etc). If you don’t try too hard to describe things, it would take maybe two or three hours to document the flow of important events in your family.

    I mention this now because our family kept track of appointments and events with notations in those Sierra Club calendars, the ones that are about 5 by 8 inches. We never threw out the calendars. When I decided to do the family timeline it was easy to flip through the old calendar books and copy the data on a computer file. If nothing else, having this timeline has avoided some stupid arguments about when certain events happened in our lives (“It couldn’t have been in 1986 because I had long hair in those pictures, and I cut it in 1985.”).

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        1. Last week when l was obsessively de-cluttering and going through pictures and papers, l found several Xmas letters, but I quit writing them in 1995 for some reason. l sat here and thought, “I really should try to catch up!” And so, l sat down and wrote what’s happened to our family in the last 20 years. Doing this took a while and when l read back over it, it seemed like yesterday. Then, l realized that l’ll be lucky to have 10 more – not long enough to see my youngest grandchild graduate from high school. l will say that summarizing the last 20 years made me aware of how short the time left is.

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        3. I make the assumption that what’s in those Christmas letters is the truth. Not necessarily the whole truth – and surely lots of stuff is left out – but what’s the point in writing them if it’s fiction from beginning to end?

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  23. I try to use google calendar, which i can access from phone and laptop (and probably tablet, if I would bother trying it on there). The trick is to actually add it to the calendar, then pay attention to the reminders, and/or check the calendar. In other words, the failure is always my own, just as when I used a paper calendar. It does no good to check the calendar if I didn’t write it down in the first place, and it does no good to write it down if I don’t check the calendar. At least with my phone, it’s usually close at hand – not so, with a paper calendar.

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  24. My main calendar is on the computer. I’m pretty good about checking it in the morning. Don’t have a phone, so I can’t sync anything portable. A small purse calendar helps, although it’s seldom completely up-to-date. I don’t have the brain capacity to keep it all in my head, though.

    My calendars all agree, though, that it’s Occasional Caroline’s birthday today. Happy birthday, OC!

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  25. I went to walk-in care last Thursday. The dr. Told me to come back Monday so she could check. She and her nurse were wonderful. Went back Monday, but they had been transferred to the other clinic for the day. The nurse and dr. on Monday could not understand why I had come back. The dr. was very rude about it. The nurse was reviewing my meds on computer, which lists 4 aspirin a day. She was confused why I would take 4 aspirin a day for my heart. I explained three times before grasped that I took aspirin for pain. She looked at me like I was out of the dark ages.

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      1. They run three walk-in clinics here in town. I do not think they can notify for that as they are keeping staffing balanced. Not sure why the doctor could not just do a quick check to see if the medicine had worked. I was talking more about a young nurse who thinks aspirin only has one use.

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  27. A note about Xmas letters not being exactly truthful – when l was writing one every year, l amused myself by writing one letter summarizing all the positive family stuff, then – just for myself – l’d write one which described all the negative stuff. Of course, l only mailed the happy one.

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    1. i found no one wants to listen to you complain about the bad stuff but they all want the juicy updates as the crap in your life vs the crap in theirs.
      my main challange with the christmas letter is ballance. happy schmappy who wants to listen to golf vacations and children graduating. my kids a hole basketball coach and the problem with the return policy at ebay are the items i get a kick out of so i pass it on

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