| | I like talkin' about you you you you usually
Let's talk about me today, for a change. I did something very
stupid, and I feel that I should share it with the internet as
penance, and also because it makes for a good story.
I was scheduled to teach an ACT class this evening in Katy at
6:00. Since Katy is close to an hour away in the middle of the
night and a solid hour-and-a-half at rush hour, I planned to leave my
apartment at 4:15. When I got down to my car, however, I found
that it wouldn't start. The dashboard lights came on, but the
engine didn't turn over. Marvelous.
I popped the hood and saw nothing obviously wrong, but with my
non-interest and lack of expertise in car guts, the engine would pretty
much have to be on fire before I noticed anything strange. I
called my dad, who suggested I pour water over one of the battery terminals
(which has been corroded to a nice shade of robin's-egg-blue for over a
year). It made a nice robin's-egg-blue goop but did nothing to
get the car started. It wasn't looking good, so I told my dad I'd
have to hang up on him and call the office, because they would need to
figure out something to do with my class ASAP.
Finding a ACT teacher who'll drive to Katy is enough of a chore under
normal circumstances that there was no hope of finding a sub on zero
notice. So my bestbossever Toni, not wanting to reschedule the
class (you have to call all the students, and you miss some of them,
and they get upset...it's not fun), offered me the loan of her truck,
which I graciously accepted. She and Wendy met me outside my
apartment complex and dropped off the truck at around 4:40.
(Hooray for living eight minutes from work.)
It could have ended there and been nothing more than a good story to
tell on the internet. I might have been a few minutes late to
class, but otherwise no harm done (except possibly to my car--I
don't yet know how badly it's broken).
Unfortunately the next sixty seconds had something to say about that.
I should note that my car--a 1995 Nissan Altima--is rather small.
Toni's Silverado crew-cab, on the other hand, is rather large. I
believe it eats cars like mine for breakfast. I should also note
that the entry to my apartment complex is narrow and crowded with
islands, gates, curbs, and parked cars. Since I was in a hurry
and had forgotten my gate card, I decided that instead of driving
through the entry gate, around the complex, and out the exit gate, I
should turn the (massive) truck around in the (tiny) parking lot and
head back out the entrance.
Is this enough foreshadowing, by the way? Can you tell where the story is going?
The geometry of the situation is best explained by diagrams which I
will draw later and share with you (I'm behind on sleep at the moment,
and it's getting late), but it will suffice to say that it was going to
be a delicate maneuver. It would have been a challenge to execute
in my own small car on a good day, but the facts that (1) I was in a
ginormous vehicle, (2) this was my first time behind of the wheel of
said vehicle, and (3) I was in a hurry and already flustered by the
incapacitation of my Tima should have somehow tipped me off that this was a BAD IDEA™.
Long story short (wait for the diagrams), I hit a post. A large
yellow post, on the passenger-side door. It would have been bad
enough if I'd hit the post, scratched the truck, and moved on, but
no. I felt the scrape of body-panel-on-painted-concrete and
freaked out. Oh no. I did NOT just scratch Toni's
truck. Not cool.
At that point I freaked out and apparently forgot everything I ever
knew about physics. I put it in reverse and, instead of backing
out at the same angle I came in, like a sensible person would, I turned
the wheel in the direction that would ram the front of the truck MORE
forcibly against the post. SKREEEEEEE. Surprisingly, the
awful noise did not summon my missing spatial reasoning skills from
whatever other dimension they'd snuck off to. I figured that
putting the truck back in drive and turning the wheel hard the other
way would set me free. (At this point I'm pretty sure I was
criminally insane, or at least severely retarded.) I heard a
CRUNCH as the door panel buckled.
By now cars were backed up into the street waiting to get in, as I was
blocking the entire width of the parking lot with the
now-nearly-sideways truck, and I was all oh good lord how can this be
happening please get me out of here fuck fuck fuck i can't believe i'm
stuck to a post please let it be a terrible dream arrrrrrgh.
I might be there still, slowly repainting half of Toni's truck yellow,
if it weren't for two maintenance guys working nearby who came over and
coached me out of it.
"Okay, which way should I turn it? Should it go this way?"
--"No no no! The other way."
"Ok, and then I go forward...?"
--"NO! Reverse!"
After what seemed like forever but was probably no more than two
minutes, I finally made it the ten feet out to the street. From
there to Katy it was smooth sailing, except that I was FREAKING OUT the
whole time. My insides were churning with guilt. Toni had
trusted me with her nice shiny truck, and
I'd bashed the door in on the way out of the parking lot. If I
could've found a hole to curl up and die in, that would have been
PHENOMENAL.
Somehow, after all that drama, I made it to the hotel at 6:01. I hadn't had time to stop
and inspect the damage until then. I was hoping that, through
some random miracle, all that screeching and scraping had neglected to
leave a mark. But no, it looked just as bad as it had
sounded. I taught the lesson, then FREAKED OUT the whole way
home. I kept hoping someone would T-bone me and cause enough
damage to cover the scrapes and dents. Thinking back on it now, I
realize I must have been fucking nuts because clearly THAT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER.
Toni's reaction to seeing her 'remodeled' passenger side totally blew
me away. I was expecting her to be mad, or at least half-mad, but
she seemed almost *happy* to see the scratches. Well, happy
relative to the disappointed/ass-kicking mood I was expecting.
She was all "it's been dinged up before, coulda been worse," when she
had a perfect right to be mean and crabby about it. It
makes me feel a little guiltier than I did before, because look at what
a wonderful person she is, and now I've gone and banged up her
truck. But I'm not complaining--far from it. Happy is
good. Toni, you rock.
So that's the funny/painful story of truck v. post. I imagine it
will get funnier over time, as stories tend to do. You
need to see the drawings (which currently exist only in my head), but I
need to go to bed, so you'll have to wait. I felt the
story had to go up tonight because...wow. Wow. Gah.
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| | Posted 5/18/2005 2:36 AM - 104 views - 0 comments
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