Droning, Another Thing I Am Not Allowed to Do

When I was born, the doctor lifted me upside down by the ankles and repeatedly slapped me on the bottom. Since that moment I have had an unnatural fear of piñatas.

Marketing ploys, you know, on Facebook where they seem to know exactly what you like. Every fifth post is an ad enticing you to buy it. Eventually they wear your ability to resist down to the point where it seems the only sensible thing to do is to buy the item. And so, I bought it — a drone. Why? Because I flew airplanes, helicopters, and floatplanes. Surely I could fly a drone!

Well, come to find out that this drone is not actually made or warehoused in the United States. It is Chinese and travel to the state of Washington requires a 28-day journey by junk, which by the look of the box also shipped various varieties of poultry.

The excitement of having my own drone took a daily toll on me as I did not know exactly when it would arrive. I would sit in my chair with granddog Milton Barry, and with our noses stuck to the window, we would sing “The Wells Fargo Wagon” while watching for the white FedEx van to drive up the street. Milton is terrible with harmony but perhaps he doesn’t like my voice either. Finally it arrived.

Now the first thing that I found out about those wily marketeers at the drone company, is they like to embellish their ads. The video showed a drone the size of a lawn mower. My shipping box was so small it could barely hold baby shoes. The drone, when removed, was roughly the size of an electric razor with four sets of blades which I found could shave my face quite nicely. The controls had buttons which did nothing. It also had pretend antennas. The instructions on one side of the paperwork were written in Chinese. On the other side they were written in English by a Chinese speaker who didn’t understand English. Therefore, everything I learned about flying a drone was watched on YouTube.

Giddy to try out my new toy…er remote control aircraft, I went into the back yard, which is quite sizable, to master the flying of my drone. My wife, daughter, and Milton Barry went with me to witness my aviating skills.

“Ok, watch this!” I said with way too much confidence.

Setting the drone on a flat surface and syncing it to the controller I pushed the button which starts the blades and brings it to a hover. The drone immediately climbed ten feet and got stuck in a cedar tree.

“Dang it!”

In the course of that first day, the drone also crashed onto the roof of the house, did a better job of mowing the tall grass than my weed eater, chased me across the yard, and landed multiple times in the cow field to which I would give Milton a dog treat to retrieve it for me. This worked about five times before he got sick of the game and made me climb over the fence myself.

I believe it was the unfortunate pass over my daughter’s head, where the drone’s blades became wrapped in her hair, that my audience decided I was not going to master the drone and went back into the house.

There is a reason I don’t golf anymore. The clubs that I didn’t throw out in the woods all have bent shafts from my slight anger issues. I don’t have a lot of patience and I don’t control my mouth too well. During the last frustrating flight of the $120.00 drone, the craft once again left the back yard, flew out over the cow field, and settled in the center of a one-acre blackberry patch. This was followed by me shouting something children shouldn’t hear and throwing the controller deep into the center of the blackberries.

“There, I’m done with drones,” I fumed. And as one final insult to my injury, the drone rose up out of the blackberries, climbed to 50 feet, got caught in a breeze, and flew over my head never to be seen again.

In life there are things that come naturally. If we have more abilities that come naturally than abilities that don’t, we get unrealistic expectations of what we are capable of. I have learned never to challenge my grandkids in video games. Never to laugh at my eight-year-old niece and tell her that she looks cute in her brown-belt Taekwondo outfit, but she could never take me to the ground. Also, never go out on the dance floor with my wife when other people are watching.

I have though been enticed by YouTube videos of guys riding unicycles. How hard could that be?

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