Driving me crazy

Not the best of ways to end the work day:

1. Despite being ready to leave early, I realized that I needed to do my out-of-office messages for tomorrow, which meant that I actually was packing up late.
2. The phone rang. I saw it was a local call, and guessed it was Margie. I was wrong. It was a body shop. Bleah.

3. Got to the car, and saw, by the froggy I’d put in the steering column, I needed to stop and get gas.

4. Got to the only convenient station, which is wildly overpriced. Inadvertently popped the trunk instead of the gas cap cover.

5. Closed the trunk. Unfortunately, the strap of my brief case had fallen over the bottom of the latch, which, with my Saturn, means that closing it threw the whole latch mechanism out of alignment, meaning I couldn’t close it.

6. Muttering madly, I started pumping gas.

7. Struggling with the trunk latch, my cell phone rang. It was someone calling me about something I had forgotten to do before I left the office. If there’s one thing I hate more than business calls after hours, it’s business calls that I’m ultimately responsible for receiving.

8. Finished pumping gas, still unable to close the trunk latch. Lowered it as best I could and got in the car to pull over to some empty curb in the gas station lot to struggle with it some more.

9. A giant tank trunk, there to refill the gas supply, pulled up past me, not only blocking the curb I wanted to pull over to, but any forward progress I could have made.

10. Had to back up across the gas station lot, past the entrance and its incoming cars, with the trunk door slowly creeping upward and preventing me from seeing where I was going.

11. Pulled into a free stall in front of the station mini-mart, and managed to close the door after a couple of tries.

12. Triumphantly hitting the road, I turned on the radio, to discover it’s pledge week on Colorado Public Radio. Listened to twenty minutes of pledge drive huckstering.

13. Couldn’t listen to the CD player because I needed to charge my cell phone (I noticed when I was on it at the gas station). Flip through AM channels to get away from the pledge drive. Discover that conservative talk show blather in the late afternoon is almost as objectionable, but less informative.

On the bright side, I managed to patch the holes in the sprinkler up by the top flower bed. And Margie managed to work out a schedule for us to see X2 on Thursday night.

So life isn’t all that bad.