Not quite three months ago I had hernia surgery. It was an inguinal hernia on my right side and the surgery was performed laparoscopically, using a robot. I didn’t get to meet the robot prior to the procedure, but my surgeon assured me that he would be the one controlling the robot, and the chances of the machine going haywire during the surgery and trying to take over the world were practically zero. That was very reassuring.
My surgery went well, and I was sent home with nifty painkillers and told to
take it easy for the next four to six weeks. The first week after the surgery
was particularly challenging as I had difficulty with even the simplest of
tasks. Open a jar? Not gonna happen. Put on socks? No dice, Chicago. Carry my
laptop to a different location? Uh-uh. Fortunately, my wife and kids were very
helpful during this time, but I felt guilty having them do everything for me.
Slowly but surely, I was able to start doing things for myself again, but the
one activity that remained challenging as the weeks wore on was bending down to
pick something up off the floor. Basically, if I dropped something and I
happened to be home alone, I was screwed. I tried to enlist the help of our
cats, but despite my explaining what they had to do as logically as possible,
they would generally just sniff the object I wanted them to pick up and slowly
walk away. Jerks!
As my frustration with my unbendability increased, it occurred to me that I
could greatly benefit from owning a grabber. Decades ago, when I worked at MAD,
the publisher, Bill Gaines, had one of these devices near his desk and he would
often employ it to pick something up out of the chaos of his office. Bill was a
millionaire genius, so I figured he must have known what he was doing, so I
jumped onto Amazon to find one of these handy devices.
I was unsure if there was a more technical term for the tool I sought, so I
just typed “grabber” into the search engine to see what I would find. Sure enough,
when I hit enter, the exact tool I was looking for appeared on my screen;
indeed, hundreds of them did. At first, I was thrilled that I managed to find
what I was looking for so easily, but then I started clicking on my options and
got annoyed. Almost every one of the products displayed was listed as either
“Grabbers for Elderly” or “Pickup Stick for Seniors.” Clearly, at 54 I’m no
spring chicken, but I’m surely not “elderly” or a “senior;” at least not yet.
As I scrolled through my various grabber options I wondered if there were some
that were somehow specifically for the elderly and others that were meant for
younger individuals. But there was nothing in the descriptions that led me to
believe that might be the case. A grabber is a grabber is a grabber, no matter
the age of the user. Eventually I got past the misguided description that
implied you had to be old to use this particular product, and I settled on a
grabber that seemed just right for me. I put it on my Amazon wish list and got
it from my wife on the first night of Hanukkah.
When I received my grabber, I was not quite a month out from my surgery and
picking things up off the floor was still a definite challenge. But with the
grabber in hand, my life transformed. Accidentally dropping a tissue on the
ground no longer led to an hour-long depression. I was now able to confidently
retrieve my snot-rag and deposit it in the trash without bending an inch. For
the first few weeks after getting this miracle tool, I used it frequently. In
fact, I came to enjoy dropping things, because it gave me a chance to flex my
grabber.
But here’s the fascinating part…three months after my surgery, now almost
completely healed and more or less able to bend without pain, I still use my
grabber to pick things up. Why shouldn’t I? The convenience of not having to
bend is amazing! It makes me wonder why everyone isn’t walking around with one
of these things. I think the marketers of this product who call it a “grabber
for the elderly” are missing a golden opportunity here. Who wants to bend down
to pick things up when the grabber can do the work for you? I say, just like mailing checks, using a
phonebook, and writing in cursive, in 2024, bending down to pick something up
should become obsolete. Take it from me, a guy who uses his grabber more than his
cellphone. Just don’t call me elderly.
