I normally don’t do much travelling for work, but I was once lucky enough to be sent to Maui for a couple days. After boarding the plane for the flight back, we were told that the plane had developed engine trouble and a mechanic had to be flown in from the Big Island to fix it (Maui is a relatively small airport). Bottom line, we were all stuck until the next day.
As I sat in the terminal imagining how bad this was going to sound when I called in to miss work the next day, I overheard three business colleagues from my flight flipping coins. The loser got the job of calling their boss and explaining that they were stranded on Maui.
I have had to call in sick on Christmas Day twice.
I was once late because my cat ran out the front door while I had my hands full getting my bike out, and I lost my keys while I was chasing her. I couldn’t leave without them because I didn’t have a spare to lock the door.
I’ve had a couple of these. Once, when I was in maybe first grade, I did my homework and left it on the floor. During the night, my dog didn’t eat it… No, he took a great big dump on it. Mom wrote the teacher a note.
And just a year or so ago, I got a call from a gal I’d met at a party and traded numbers with, inviting me to go to a baseball game that evening. I told her matter-of-factly that I had to do laundry that night, expecting that she would totally understand. She got very cold and didn’t call me again.
What I should have told her, in retrospect, is that I’d been out doing one thing or another every night for the previous two weeks, and I was out of underwear, and more than that I was just plumb exhausted and needed a night to relax at home. C’est la vie.
I was once assaulted when I was just sitting, minding my own business, quietly reading poetry. Those police-station holding cells are tiny when you have to stay in them for a few days, but at least no one made me his bitch.
Then there was the time I totaled my car. It was raining, I went under an underpass, and a car was sitting there, stopped at the bottom of the underpass. Because of the dip in the road, I couldn’t have seen him until I was practically on top of him. So I rear-ended him, my glasses got knocked off in the collision, and by the time I found my glasses and put them on he had disappeared.
Insurance company: “Are you going to tell the police that?”
Me: “Yes, of course.”