Parking - March 2010 - 14

Marketing Minute Jeff Pinyot Take the Bucket and Run! I am writing this while flying back from a delightful planning meeting in preparation for NPA’s Show of Shows coming to Boston in October. I enjoyed a hilarious dinner last night swapping stories with fellow NPA members. I always have to be careful of what stories I tell because so often, I’ve told them in previous Marketing Minute columns. After hearing a new one, Andrea Bryan of the NPA staff suggested that I share this one. My children, now 14, 12, 10 and 7 years old, are so deprived. They don’t have any pets. I’ve told them repeatedly—as soon as they can learn to get along with each other, keep their hands to themselves and clean up after themselves, we can get a pet. Obviously I’m safe and secure because the challenge before them is virtually impossible. I can’t even live by those rules! Actually, it is not completely accurate for me to say that we don’t have pets or haven’t had any pets. There were the goldfish, complete with names, that we “won” at a Halloween Harvest Party (what are people thinking when they give goldfish out to children without their parents’ permission?). When they died, we had eulogies around the porcelain grave, flushing these “pets” to their eternal destiny. There were tadpoles that we watched turn into frogs and then die the next day—every one of them. We do have a cool lizard that lives in a hole near our garage door. He’s kind of like a pet (maybe it’s a she). We once had an angry raccoon living under our deck. He was NOT kind of like a pet. That odd smell from the basement turned out to be a deceased pet of sorts—a shrew. Lest we forget the snakeskin that showed up in our garage recently; he might be a cousin of the actual, living snake that slithered across my wife’s hand when she reached behind the cabinet. Actually, I recall that one losing its head, literally, by the end of a spade, courtesy of yours truly. We have two humane traps that we use to catch the endless chipmunks in our yard. The Pinyot house must be advertised as an “all-inclusive” resort in some global chipmunk travel magazine or relocation guide, because I swear, they come by the busload. We catch and release and they come back. Truth is, daddy is conveniently “allergic” to real pets. In a weak moment, we agreed, already assuming the outcome, to become parents to two hamsters. Can you imagine actually paying for and inviting rodents into our house to live with us? As you might imagine, joy and excitement filled the home—finally, “real” pets! I must admit, it was kind of fun and cute when they arrived. They chewed on everything, including my fingers. They made little sleeping areas and ate the food we offered them. They ate their “salads” faster than the children ate theirs. Here is something I should have known. What goes in smelling nice comes out quickly smelling not so nice. Almost overnight, the cage started getting filthy and smelly. Just the thought of it brings the ammonia odor to my mind. In a matter of days, the cage was filthy and it was time for a good cleaning. Somehow, the children forgot that they agreed to be in charge and take responsibility to do the cleaning. Of course, it was the first time, so I helped. It turned out that no one except daddy could actually smell the little rats. It also turned out that no one but mommy and daddy realized that they needed food and water to survive. Adding fuel to the fire, turns out our two “male” hamsters had a fondness for one another, if you know what I mean, in the biblical kind of way. Now we were having impromptu and unscheduled biology lessons. We had to change the name of one of the hamsters. In what seemed like just days, out came a dozen, brand new little rodents. You get the point—they had to go and go quickly! When the time came that the hamsters could leave their mommy without dying, my oldest son Christopher and I took an old bucket and put all the hamsters together. What a reunion it was for mommy and daddy hamster! We had to keep daddy away from mommy since birth, so he wouldn’t eat his own kids. I’m not joking. We jumped in the car and headed back to the store where we bought them, remembering the clerk saying that they were both males, and remembering her saying, “if you have any trouble, let us know.” We walked into the store and a nice peppy high school girl asked if she could help us. I said, well, not really, but I guess she could get us the “hamster salesperson.” When she stepped Continued on page 15. National Parking Association PARKING March 2010

Parking - March 2010

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