No, it could have been a lot worse. And I spent the whole day watching with a sort of detached amusement and urge to tempt fate to see just how bad the day could get.
It started off good, for me at least. Got some things done before work, went in, had a good day at work, ate some good food. Then I went to pick up a friend and his girlfriend, and things started going downhill from there. For my friend, it had been a bad day from the start. Band practice got screwed up, he had to walk all over the place because people that he was supposed to be meeting weren’t where they said they were, and just general crappiness. My friend was cursed that day.
So, I meet him (Ben) and Angie over at Zach’s house, who was 1) supposed to throw me some gas money for giving him rides and 2) had some last minute family thing to do with his girlfriend. No gas money. Ditching us for dinner with his girlfriend’s grandmother. We have nothing to do, no gas, and no one to hang out with. And the whole time, Ben keeps saying things to the effect that, “Well, it can’t get any worse than this,” right before things did, in fact, get worse than this. Like every time he touched his girlfriend’s phone, it stopped working, so during parts of our saga we had no access to necessary phone numbers.
So we’re driving to Ben’s house to sit and do nothing until, perhaps, the people we’re supposed to be hanging out with get their heads out of their asses. He had just made a stupid “can’t get any worse” statement, and as I come to a stop at a redlight I hear tires screeching behind me. Then thud-bang! I look in the rearview to see a motorcycle and its rider tumbling through the street behind me.
Awesome! I just killed somebody! No, wait he’s getting up. OK, so he’s not dead. And my car isn’t too bad, a broken tail light, a dented bumper, and a nice big dent on the trunk where he slammed his head into the car. Thank Og he was wearing a helmet.
Then it starts to pour. And we’re stuck in the car for 2 hours as the cops take witnesses’ statements and harrass the idiot kid, who didn’t have his driver’s license with him, and didn’t even have a tag on the bike. Luckily, it turns out it was in no way my fault, the witnesses all said this kid was hauling ass and totally misjudged the necessary stopping distance. Dumbass. It also seems like he was running from the cops, based on some of the questions the officers asked me. And from the fact that he eventually ended up in the back of the cop car. That made me feel a little better.
Until the cops came over to send me on my way, with $225 in non-moving violations (like my driver’s license, which I just replaced last year, that expired a couple months ago. Because that totally makes sense).
By the time we finish with the accident bullshit, we figured Zach should be done with his last-minute dinner plans. We have no way of being sure, though, because this is one of those points when Ben touched the phone and broke it. We drive over to his house, ring the doorbell, and nothing. No one home.
At this point we can’t do anything. It’s pouring, I’m freaked out from the recent accident and don’t want to drive in the shitty weather, and I don’t have any gas anyway. So we sit on the porch and wait, expecting him to come home shortly. When the phone is working again, we try to call him, but his phone is dead.
So it’s just a lot of sitting and marvelling at the way that Ben ruins everything. Oh, at least the rain is letting up, you say? It just started raining harder. Hey, look, the phone is working! Oh no, it stopped again. Zach should be back in 20 minutes, tops. 3 hours later, there he is. It got so bad I suggested going over to our incredibly superstitious friend’s house for an emergency bad ju-ju extraction.
I gotta call him and see if he’s shaken the bad ju-ju.