Inspector Gadget

Of all our devices, the one Dubsie finds most relaxing is the pager. When she gets her mitts on it she’ll kick back on the bedroom rug like she’s reading a trashy novel in goddamn Ft. Lauderdale.

The other gadgets aren’t for relaxing but for the pushing of buttons. (Tactile buttons and her parents’ buttons.) If you’re in the bathroom without a visual on her and from the bedroom hear a click-click click-click click-click, that’s her turning the stereo power on and off. She gets our ceiling fan to spin like mad in the middle of February.

(Once we were surprised to see the bedroom lights drop from full strength to an intimate glow; we didn’t even know they could do that. It was Dubsie who discovered how, by pressing her tubby index finger against the On button and keeping it held.)

If you hear a burst of beep tones and my mother saying “Hello? David? Is anyone there?” she has infallibly found the redial on the cordless, and there is nothing more irresistible than the red Panic button on the back of the key fob to the car, and the amusing look on Daddy’s face when the horn starts blaring outside.

And the iPhone. Catnip for little fingers. She hasn’t figured out my password but presses numerals until the security system locks me down. She stabs at the screen as fast as possible until I yell at her, and then hands it over with a bashful look. Is it her first guilty pleasure?

But really none are as satisfying as that indispensable tool of the 1990s, the pager. Watching the old phone numbers scroll by like an episode of The freakin’ X-Files.