Again? OR Stuff You Never Expected to Have Happen Twice

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not talking about things like “I now pronounce you husband and wife” or “Congratulations, it’s quintuplets!” or “I sentence you to death by electrocution, may God have mercy on your soul.” I mean stuff so bizarre, so out-of-left-field that you figured the odds against it happening once were so small that there was no way in hell it would ever happen twice. To you, yet. I’ll start.

Ten years or so ago, I was working on the desk at a library in South Carolina. A lady pulled up to the no-parking zone right in front of the building, hopped out, grabbed her infant child from the back seat, ran in, deposited the baby on the desk, and turned to leave saying, “I’ll be right back.”

“Whoa!” I bellowed. “You need to keep your child with you, ma’am.”

“I’m just gonna park the car and grab my books, then I’ll be right back.”

“No, ma’am. I’ll come get your books out of the car. You keep your child with you, park your car, then y’all come back in together, please.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, as if the idea of doing it this way had never even occurred to her. She had, I’m guessing, gone through the various options in her head and stopped when she got to the one that left her child in the hands of a complete stranger and decided that was good enough. :rolleyes:

And this morning, I kid you not: it happened again. This time, the car was already parked and she wanted to go get the stroller. How she could not manage this without placing the fruit of her womb in the care of a total stranger is beyond me, but like above, she must have reviewed her options and decided that one was good enough.

Great googly moogly.

2

Is ‘Fruit of the Womb’ a new BVD or something?

To bring the tone down for about 20 minutes I’d have bet everything I own that a second plane wouldn’t hit the other tower.

3

:: observes 20 minutes of revered silence in observance of JC’s post ::

Not nearly as wacky, but about a year and a half ago I was running a video store. I usually parked in my regular spot, but this day there was already someone there, so I had to park somewhere else. Around noon a woman comes into the store saying she’d just backed into someone’s car. As mine was the only other car in the lot I knew immediately it was mine. I grumbled as I went to go check out the damage. On the way out, the lady mumbled under her breath that it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t see my car, and why couldn’t I have parked somewhere else?

Let me state for the record that my car was parked in a spot that had always existed in our parking lot, was nowhere near the main thoroughfares, and was parked well within the regulated confines of the space. How this woman had managed to back up into the only other car in the entire lot was beyond me.

I noticed that there was no real damage, a little scratch on the bumper, but nothing I couldn’t fix with a little nail polish. I sent her on her way.

2 Hours later, another woman comes in the door. Yup, you guessed it. Being a slow day, there was only one other car in the lot besides mine, yet she managed to single mine out for destruction. This time, though, the offender actually had the audacity to tell me that my car was in her way! What was she trying to do? Drive through my car and over the median to get to the highway? Jeezus!

Luckily, there wasn’t any damage this time either. I must have a resilient car.

4

I got academically orphaned by PhD advisors getting jobs at other places twice (transfer schools, abandon, repeat). Boy, that sucked.