i've been thinking about my doorbell, and when you're going to ring it

Last night my friend Allison came over for dinner, and over the course of a couple hours we fed our 7 children and they ran and screamed and build haunted houses and battled each other with swords and maces. During that time, the doorbell rang. It was a hippie from Ohio Citizen Action. They want me to sign their petition and give them money and sometimes they ask me to write letters for them, so I knew I needed to nip this interaction in the bud.

"It's not a good time," I told the hippie.

"Okay, cool, I can keep it under 37 seconds," she boasted. I bid her go ahead while I signed her dumb petition that I imagine accomplishes nothing except making these particular hippies feel useful, this far from Wall Street. Then she shamed me into giving her a dollar by telling me her smallest contribution had been a quarter from a 3rd grader. I should have asked her how many dependents that 3rd grader has.

And hour or so later, the doorbell rang again. By this time it was quite dark, and we'd just put the kids to bed. It was 8:40. Jason answered the door, and I heard a different hippie begin on the same spiel. Jason hadn't been home for the first visit, so I joined him at the door.

"Someone's already been here," I said. "And it's late to be ringing our doorbell."

"Okay, it's not late, it's just dark," she corrected me. "And we do this from 4 to 9--"

Okay. Let's take a moment for me to analyze this situation.

First, WTF? If you come to my door and I tell you it's late? The correct response is, "Okay, sorry." You don't tell me it's not late when you're trying to get me to do something for you.

Second, your "work" hours are irrelevant to me. Ohio will still have mountaintop drilling and coal emissions or something at a more reasonable time. It's like if I worked at Wendy's, and I called your house bothering you about why you aren't at Wendy's, and when you said, "I don't eat dinner at 10 p.m.," I responded with outrage, "Well, I work until midnight!!" It doesn't matter.

"It is late for us, because we have little kids," I said. "And someone has already been here."

"Okay, cool," she told me, her laid back hippie demeanor ruffled by my pissed off tone. She gave us the "rock on" hand gesture as she took her clipboard to the next house.

Thank you, hippie activist. I will rock on, but I will do it before 7:30 or nightfall, after which I expect my doorbell to remain unrung until at least 9:30 the following morning.