Having exhaused every possibility of getting my car wheel unstuck, I decide that I’m going to have to pay to have it towed in and fixed by a professional. So, yesterday at work, I tell Mullet Man and Pete that I’m going to be late to get the car repaired.
This morning, I sleep a little later than usual, get up and walk down to the tire place just down the road from me. I walk in, and explain my predicament to the woman behind the counter. She seems a bit surprised that I would be wanting my tire changed by a tire place, and is kind of confused by what I might be doing there. I repeat myself and she seems to understand.
“Do you have a service?” she asks.
“A service?” Thinking perhaps she might mean some kind of package deal or something similar.
“A towing service.” She replies. “We don’t tow cars. You have to have someone else do that for you.”
“Oh.” I say.
“Have you ever heard of XYZ?”
“No. . . .”
“They’re the towing service we use. Let me write down their number and you can call them, and they’ll tow your car here for you and then we can fix the tire for you.” She hands me a post it note with the company’s phone number on it.
So I take the post it note and head back out the door, figuring (correctly) that I’ll need to be at my car when the tow driver arrives. I’m almost out of air time on my cell phone, and it’s my only phone, so I don’t want to waste minutes calling the towing company when I figure I’ll have to spend a lot of time on hold, explaining where the car is, what I need done with it, etc. I figure I’ll use the pay phone at the Stop-N-Rob in front of the trailer park to call. When I get there, I discover that it is, of course, out of order.
Hoping that I don’t have to wait a long time on hold, and that the person on the other end isn’t particularly dense, I take out my cell and call. Much to my surprise, they answer right away and in no time understand what it is I want. They tell me that it’ll be a little while, but they’ll have the tow driver call when he’s on his way. I go home to wait.
Three hours later he calls and asks about the car. I tell him and it turns out he’s right outside, so I go out as he’s walking up to look at the car.
“Man, that looks bad.” he says with a thick Southern accent that sounds like a gurgling garbage disposal.
“Yeah,” I say, and I explain to him everything I’ve done to try and get the tire off and how I just couldn’t get it to come off.
“I ain’t never seen nuthin’ like that.” He gets down on all fours to examine the wheel closely.
He stands up and looks at me and says, “I’d be afraid to drag that out of there.”
“Hey, man,” I say. “I’ll back the car out. I’ve got to get this wheel off. I don’t care if the rim get’s torn up or not.”
“I tell you what. Let me go back to the shop and get the rollback, that way you won’t have drive it out.”
He heads back to his truck and I go back inside and sit down to wait. A few minutes later, my cell phone rings. I have, just a few, precious moments of air time left (no exagerration, I’m down to less than 4 minutes), so I don’t want to waste it talking to anyone unless it’s important. It’s the number of the towing company on the display, so I answer it, figuring they’ll tell me that it’s going to be a lot later that they can get the car.
“Hi. This is XYZ towing company and we’re not going to be able to haul your car.”
“What?” I figure that she means they won’t be able to get it today or something.
“Yeah, we just don’t think that it’d be safe for us to pick up the car, so we’re not going to do it.”
Fucking great! I take half a day off of work, that I can’t really afford, to get my car fixed, which I can’t really afford either, and now, it’s not going to get done at all! Shit.
I get up and figure that if I’m this late, I might as well grab the perscription for my antibiotics and get that filled at Wal-Mart, while I buy more air time for my phone. Wal-Mart’s about a half mile down the road from where I work, so I won’t loose that much time by going there and I can get something to eat as well, since food stores in the Tucker household are running a bit thin by this point.
I start digging around in the assorted papers, looking for the perscription and I can’t find it. And I don’t have any air time left on my phone, so I can’t call the doc and have her phone the perscription into Wallyworld (which would have been really nice, since it no doubt would be ready by the time I got there). I dig around in the house some more, but finally give up and start walking.
I’m still going to go to Wallyworld since I need the airtime and some lunch, but the perscription will have to wait until tomorrow. Of course, you know, it has to get worse. I mean, we are talking about me after all, and my life can’t be easy. No, that wouldn’t be any fun, now, would it? :rolleyes:
When I get to the halfway point between my place and Wallyworld it starts raining. Not one of those hard, pouring rains that quickly passes, no, this is one of those that’s just above a drizzles that goes on and on and on. And, of course, there’s no sidewalks in this part of town, so I’m walking along, trying not stumble (steel toed boots do not an agile goat one make) over the rocks, mud, broken booze bottles, used condoms, and other bits of trash that decorate the roadsides in this town.
I drip my way through Wallyworld, pick up an airtime card, unsuccessfully try to find the umbrellas, get some lunch and a “Fuck You!” Pepsi, and head on to work. I am now, six hours late to work. Richer souls might have just said the hell with it, stopped into the liquor store, bought a fifth and gone on home, but not I. I, you see, am poor, therefore I must be at work whenever possible, and if I can only get two hours in today, so be it.
I wander in and look for Mullet Man to let him know that I’ve arrived. Not finding him, I look for Tats, the assistant supervisor. He should be at work. They sent him home for three days last Friday, since he takes at least one day off a week, but he should be back today, assuming he didn’t decide to say, “Fuck it!” and go work someplace else.
I find him and ask where Mullet Man is.
“He didn’t come in today.” Oh. Fuck. That means that no one probably knows that I was going to be late today and that I had informed him of this fact yesterday. So, I could go be eligible for firing, since the Owner’s been acting flaky and firing people left and right lately. Yes, I did tell Pete, but that really doesn’t count, since Pete’s short term memory is signifcantly less than a pot head’s with a good buzz going.
I relate the saga of my day to Tats who finds it amusing and tells me that I need to do what his father did, and drive my car down the road at about 40 MPH until the wheel falls off. Uh, yeah. I don’t think so. Knowing my luck, either the wheel or my car would promptly go careening into a bus loaded with school children on their way to greet returning war wounded, thus causing all of them to die in a firery bus crash, while I emerge miraculously unscathed. That is, until my picture appeared on the front page of the paper underneath the Deadbeat War Protestor Kills Busload of Patriotic Children headline. At which point, my life expectancy could measured in miliseconds.
As I make my wake back to the shop, Elmo spots me and promptly shouts, “Hey, Tuck, you made it!” Then goes running into the shop to shout, “Pete! Tuck’s gonna be a little late!”
I explain everything to Pete, who also finds it amusing. (Great, I’m fucked, and people find it funny.) He then mutters something about figuring out a job and wanders off. I look around the shop and notice that there’s no Honda parts to be run. In fact, I can’t find anything to do, since all the machines are set up for Honda parts and there’s no Honda parts to be found.
I talk to the Mold Maker who’s been out for the past couple of days because his mother had a heart attack (she’s doing fine and is supposed to come home from the hospital in a day or two). He’s busy working on a slide whistle for his kid, and we catch up on what’s been happening at work (which other than a coworker losing his wife and being diagnosed with leukemia wasn’t much). We basically gab for the next half hour, until Pete faps over and tells me to tear down the set up on one of the machines.
I do that, follow Pete’s instructions on how to set the machine up for the next job, and then wait for him to figure out what to do next. Normally, I’d be inclined to insert some snarky comments about Pete being stupid and all and that he should know what the fuck he’s trying to do, but to be fair, it’s been so long since any of us have done anything but Honda parts that it’s a wonder any of us remember how to do anything else. Eventually, Pete remembers and tells me. So I start machining the job, only to dump the container of coolant on the floor.
I clean the mess up, refill the coolant (and gee, it’d be nice to clean the gunk out of it, since that’s probably what’s causing my sinus infection, but we’re of course late on these parts, and have only a short time to machine them before we get more Honda parts in the shop, so I can’t take the time to clean the gunk out) and begin machining the job again. Only to dump the coolant, again. I clean it up, refill it, and then strap the tank down to the mill so it won’t happen again.
Quitting time rolls around and Pete offers me a ride home. I offer this next bit as evidence as to how pathetic my life is: I accepted his offer! Now, of course, I’m not a complete idiot, I had Pete drop me off at the entrance to my trailer park so he wouldn’t know exactly which one is mine. Things are going to get worse, I just know it.