I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Page A

to get between two places on opposite sides of the same street.
    There are two hundred million cars in the United States— 40 percent of the world’s total, for about 5 percent of its population—and an additional two million new ones hit the roads each month (though obviously many are also retired). Even so, there are about twice as many cars in America as there were twenty years ago, driving on twice as many roads, racking up about twice as many miles.
    So, because Americans have a lot of cars and spend a lot of time in them, they like a lot of comforts. However, there is a limit to how many different features you can fit into a car interior. What better, then, than to festoon it with a range of nifty cupholders, particularly when people seem to go for them in a big way? That’s my theory.
    What is certainly true is that not putting cupholders in a car is a serious mistake. I read a couple of years ago that Volvo had to redesign all its cars for the American market for this very reason. Volvo’s engineers had foolishly thought that what buyers were looking for was a reliable engine, side-impact bars, and heated seats, when in fact what they craved was little trays into which they could insert their Slurpees. So a bunch of guys named Nils Nilsson and Lars Larsson were put to work designing cupholders into the system, and Volvo was thus saved from beverage ignominy, if not actual financial ruin.
    Now from all the foregoing we can draw one important conclusion—that no matter how hard you try, it is not quite possible to fill a column space with a discussion just of cupholders.
    So let me tell you how I happen to know that those fellows at Volvo were called Nils Nilsson and Lars Larsson.
    Some years ago when I was in Stockholm and had nothing better to do one evening (it was after 8 P.M., long after all the locals had turned in for the night), I passed the hours before bedtime thumbing through the local phone directory and tallying various names. I had heard that there were only a handful of surnames in Sweden, and this was essentially so. I counted over two thousand each for Eriksson, Svensson, Nilsson, and Larsson. Most of the rest of the book was taken up with Jonssons, Johanssens, and other similar variants. Indeed, there were so few names (or perhaps the Swedes were so cosmically dull) that many people used the same name twice. There were 212 people in Stockholm named Erik Eriksson, 117 named Sven Svensson, 126 named Nils Nilsson, and 259 named Lars Larsson. I wrote these figures down on a piece of paper and have been wondering all these years when I would ever find a use for it.
    From this, I believe, we can draw two further conclusions. Save all scraps of paper bearing useless information, for one day you may be glad you did, and if you go to Stockholm, take drink. Now if you will excuse me, I am off for a Slurpee.

The other day I had an experience so startling and unexpected that it made me spill a soft drink down my shirt. (Though, having said that, I don’t actually need an unexpected event to achieve this. All I need is a soft drink.) What caused this fizzy outburst was that I called a government office—specifically, the U.S. Social Security Administration— and someone answered the phone.
    There I was all poised to have a recorded voice tell me: “All our agents are busy, so please hold while we play you some irritating music interrupted at fifteen-second intervals by a recorded voice telling you all our agents are busy so please hold while we play you some irritating music” and so on until suppertime.
    So imagine my surprise when, after just 270 rings, a real person came on the line. He asked some of my personal details and then said, “Excuse me, Bill. I have to put you on hold a minute.”
    Did you catch that? He called me Bill. Not Mr. Bryson. Not Sir. Not O Mighty Taxpayer. But Bill. Two years ago, I would have regarded this as a small impertinence, but now I find I’ve grown to like it.
    There