Closed Caption THIS

Ok, I know.... I haven't been keeping up the prior schedule of blogging.  I have no idea why. Perhaps because my life is... less interesting(?) lately...

But let me update you.

No post would be complete without News of the Car.  We're proudly riding with our almost brand new (looking) right side.  Yes, a number of thousands of dollars later, we were free of unsightly dents, which went right up the entire right side of the car.  Not to mention our fourth or fifth passenger side mirror.

I was really proud of the end result.  Several of my coworkers came up to me, unsolicited, to let me know how great the car looked.  You know where I'm going with this, right?

Two days later, the wife calls me at work. "I spun 360 degrees because this Philly piece of dung, no doubt without insurance, ran a red light and came withing inches of the car." [Note: it is stated that over fifty percent of Philly drivers have no insurance].  One of the earlier accidents involved Church People who said they'd pray for us.  It turns out that they were using their dead mother's insurance card and the insurance had lapsed because they hadn't paid the premiums.

Over the weekend I got another call.  It's getting to the point that I'm afraid to take calls from the wife. This time it was a pothole.  Apparently it had swallowed a few businesses and it took out one of the horribly expensive performance tires (on our Hyundai).  Off to Pep Boys after triple A arrived to change to the donut.

Pep Boys, ever the accomodating enterprise, informed her that it would be three and a half hours, minimum, to replace the tire.  The fellow advised her to come back the following morning, scheduling an appointment at ten.

So the following morning (Easter, mind you), she showed up at ten in the morning and found people lined up all over the place.  She went to claim her ten o'clock appointment, only to discover that the previous evening's employee wrote nothing down, including the alleged appointment and wasn't in all day, as is customary.

So I got another call.  I wonder if somehow I stop accepting her calls, flats will stop happening.

Eventually they get to her.  I can't stress highly enough that you purchase the optional tire insurance for your tires (especially the performance tires, which are as rugged as tissues). The total price was thirty bucks.

But WAIT......

Whilst replacing the tire with the huge performance hole in it, the technician discovered another tire, which apparently had a performance bubble in it.  A second thirty bucks well spent.  And it's much better to learn of a tire bubble on a lifter than on a road (at the speed limit, of course).

If anybody knows a shaman or voodoo priest who takes the whammy off cars, please refer them to me.

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For some reason known only to my wife, Closed Captioning is enabled on our television.  It's not really a problem unless we want to see something on the bottom of the screen.

So she's watching some horrid old movie, as is customary.  There's a Jewish wedding happening and the father is talking to the bride, telling her how proud he is and how she has always brought him naches. Naches is a Yiddish word, meaning joy or blessings,pride especially from ones children, grandchildren.

The people who do Closed Captioning apparently don't see much Yiddish, as what came onscreen was 'You have brought me knockers.'

Dad must've been really proud.

Yes, Deer...

No, I didn't spell that incorrectly.  More later.

How was your week?  I ask because mine was a real doozy.

So it's Thursday night and I'm waiting for the wife to pick me up from work.  I leave at four.  Round about four thirty, I called her, wondering where she was.  Round about five, she returned the call, apologizing profusely for falling asleep and telling me she was on her way.

Closing in on six, I got another call: she had hit a rock and gotten a flat.  Triple-A was forty five minutes away, so she'd be really late.

An hour later, guess what?  Yet another call.  Triple-A hadn't exactly appeared yet, although she had been on the phone with them for a while, attempting to give directions to the apparently direction-impaired soul driving the truck.

I don't know about you but I'd think that a national auto rescue corporation would have something of a sense of direction or at least a GPS.  Old school maps, maybe?

But no.

Another hour later, another call.  This time she called Triple-A and was told the direction-impaired driver terminated the request, which was her prerogative.  Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell my wife; neither Sparky the driver nor the dispatcher.  This caused the entire process to start again.

You'd think a national auto rescue agency would have more than one driver in a large metropolitan area.  Still, it would be up to another hour.

Meanwhile at work, it's getting pretty bleak.  The entire crew has left for the day and I'm holding down the fort.  If I were the easily shakeable sort, I'd be terrified.  Instead I was bored.  Horribly bored.  So bored that I had to resort to doing my own work.  And maybe watching a little South Park.

The next wifely call revealed that the battery was dead.  Why?  Because Sparky the Direction-Impaired driver told my wife to leave the headlights on so she could be located easier.  Meanwhile the occupant of the house in front of which my wife was broken down, wandered over to inquire what she was doing parked across her driveway.  Once explained, she was terribly accommodating, offering food and a rest room, just in case.

Eventually a second driver showed up and had the car running in no time.  He was polite, had no trouble finding her at all and really wanted to assist her.

Closing in on ten pm, I was rescued from work.


FRIDAY

My wife said she'd be at Pep Boys first thing in the morning, bless her, to get the bad tire replaced (we had a warranty).  I took the opportunity to sleep late.

Unfortunately so did my wife. Or rather, her alarm slept late.

Off I went to Pep Boys, in a flurry of loving epithets and general four-letter verbal exercises.  Pep Boys, to their credit, jumped right on matters.

I somehow managed to VPN into work, thus becoming the first member of my department ever to work from Pep Boys.

Hours later, I had my replaced tire.  Too many hours, in fact, to efficiently return to work, so I went home.

While home, my wife informed me she couldn't find her credit cards.

Yes, the Tire Incident had morphed into a Missing Credit Card incident. [I am not blaming any organization or person, other than perhaps my wife for not having had them stapled to her forehead].

I had a doctor's appointment at seven.  Something looked odd about the car.  Of course something looked odd - I had a flat.  Yes, another flat - this time on a different tire.

Cursing Pep Boys and the Universe in general, I tore through the trunk, looking for our poor excuse for a spare and the tools necessary to change it.   Naturally the tire was in plain sight but the tools had entered the fifth dimension, which is located either at the very bottom of a car's trunk or the very bottom of a woman's pocketboot.

Continuing to curse, I somehow managed to change the tire with enough time to get to the doctor's.
While there, I inquired whether he had gotten a referral from my primary.

Oops.

Didn't he talk to me about this?  He just went cash-only.  No insurance.

Oh.

Well, that was awkward.
And wasn't his fee exactly the amount of money I had for the week?

Meanwhile, my wife had taken the entire day off and was spending it snoring on the couch.  As she had given up sleep for lent forty years ago, I left her alone.

SATURDAY

Back among the living, the wife took care of her missing credit cards and license, then went back, again, to Pep Boys.  Pep Boys fixed the issue with haste.

I don't know what they did to my car but it tends to veer toward Pep Boys whenever it sees one.

SUNDAY

After a day of rest, we were off to visit friends.

SMASH - out of the supermarket, we were almost hit.
BLORP - fifteen minutes later we narrowly avoided hitting yet another kamikaze deer.


Go ahead - tell me it's not personal.