Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It came in the mail today, and it might as well have come with an honorary AARP membership because now, without doubt, I am officially an old white guy.

I opened the package, and immediately started to doink around with it before reading the instructions (oh come on; you do that, too). I scrounged up six AAA batteries to put into its belly, turned it on, and then (finally) looked at the user’s leaflet that came with it.

When I brought it out into the living room, my wife cocked her head and asked, “What is that?”

I told her, and she laughed. She laughed because she knew, too. I am officially an old white guy. There’s no denying it, now.

The completion of my year-long purge and reorganization project did two things.

First, it put a lot of loose paraphernalia into easily accessible storage. This is both good and bad. While it does get all my supplies and materials categorized and into containers (instead of in open piles around my shop), these containers are often quite similar. Drawers in multi-tiered organizers. Old cigar boxes. Mason jars. Various phials and bottles. Most of these are opaque, but even when peering at those made of clear material, the difference in their contents isn’t often apparent. A phial of tiny flat-head screws is hard to differentiate from one filled with round-heads or fillisters. (I just lost you there, didn’t I?) The upshot is that, though everything now has a place, I often don’t know exactly where that place is. I may open six, seven containers before I find what I seek.

Second, the project has instilled in me a near-obsessive need to know where everything is in my New Garage-World Order, and this need has expanded in scope to include the various boxes I have in other areas of the house. Shoeboxes in closets, drawers in filing cabinets, even generic spice jars in my cupboard.

The solution was obvious. I needed a label-maker, so I got one. A DYMO label-maker.

Those of you who are of a certain age will remember—with fondness or revulsion or horror, depending on your experience—the old DYMO labelers of our youth. You’ll remember the stiff coils of colored plastic that wouldn’t go into the damned labeler without a surgeon’s touch. You can hear in your heart’s memory the ratchety creak of the grip-trigger as you impressed each letter into the plastic medium. You’ll feel in your fingertips the phantom pain as you relive the moment when, in trying to separate the backing from the adhesive side of the plastic label, you slipped and it gouged a sharp corner under the bed of your nail. And you will remember turning the air blue when, due to age or heat or cold or just plain cussedness, those bits of plastic with those painstakingly embossed letters curled up, overcame the lame-ass adhesive on their backside, and leapt off shelf/binder/drawer to die in a pile on the floor, never to be of any use again.

Younger readers will wonder what the hell I’m talking about. Label makers have improved dramatically since those days, and now produce print-on labels with multiple fonts, bold and italic styles, several point sizes, and even bar- and QR-codes.

Still, the image of me with a DYMO label maker in my hands was proof-positive that I’d officially joined the ranks of old white guys. I may not have outlines of tools on my peg-board or old peanut-butter jars filled with assorted screws nailed up under a shelf, but I’m on my way.

k