The Car Service Story

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So, last night I worked until 9.30p and decided to treat myself to a car service ride home (never mind that I had also treated myself on Tuesday and Wednesday).

Because I am a nimrod, I never call the car until I am ready to go (nothing gets a car there quicker than your thinking that you have twenty minutes to finish up your work), so I rang at 9.45p. They told me that it would be a 15-30 minute wait. Annoying, but I have journals to catch up on, so I waited. As soon as it was 10.15p, I called back.

"Hi, I was told that it would be a 15-30 minute wait, and it's been 30 minutes. Is my car coming soon?"
"No car has been assigned to you yet."
"Will one be soon?"
"Someone will call you with the car number in 10-20 minutes."

You know where this is headed, don't you? At 10.45p I called again, and was told that the car would be there in five minutes. Which it was, but that didn't change the fact that I could have walked to Weehawken faster.

What do you do that you think will be not only a convenience, but a treat, and it turns out to be neither?

-- Kymm Zuckert (hedgehog@hedgehog.net), July 21, 2000

Answers

Agree to have lunch with a friend on a tight schedule and then one or more of the following happen: 1) I arrive on time and the friend is late 2) I get held up a in a meeting with gassy droners and am late myself, which leaves super-punctuality-conscious me blushing with humiliation 3) The service is abominably slow and then surly when I mention it 4) The friend has to leave early for a sudden work commitment 5) The friend forgets entirely, and I have lunch alone 6) The kitchen botches the order

At least I haven't had a credit card reject my application in these circumstances!

/Robert

-- Robert (rbdimmick@earthlink.net), July 21, 2000.


The most common instance of this for me is plans for "nightlife"... as a single parent with a "normal" job, I don't often get an opportunity to go out with a group of friends, spend half the night out clubbing, going for a wee-hours "breakfast", walking the city en masse by moonlight... but it's one of my favorite things to do, especially in a large, upbeat group, especially in a fairly new place where my eyes are tourist-wide taking everything in.

Yet since it's not something I can do often, it's something my internal clock is not equipped to handle. So more often than I'd like, "treat" plans to spend half the night out with friends turn into me being half asleep at 11:30. Then it's just a drag, and an exhausting one that takes days to recover from, depresses me and makes me feel old.

-- Tynan (ty@power-lines.com), July 22, 2000.


Yesterday I had the worst possible migraine and ended up staying home from not only work but from life. Thankgodfully I live in a studio apartment and my bed is in a large closet near the front door, windowless and cavelike. Around 8:30 I felt like I could actually keep down food, so I decided to treat myself to dinner out -- in other words, get a take-out burrito (still a vast improvement over my steady diet of tinned soup and peanut-butter sandwiches. I am so damn broke without even any toys to show for it; I've bought nothing but groceries and cat litter for months. No clothes, CDs, books, nothing.)

Anyway, it was late in the day and the wraps joint was completely packed with only two people actually on shift. They were out of half their burrito supplies and the other half had been mouldering for hours, not that they warned me. My burrito had no cheese or sour cream, the rice was the consistency of library paste (with a few dried, burnt grains thrown in for variety), and the tortilla had been steamed for so long it was graced with a thin layer of slime.

Faced with disappointment on such a massive scale (it was a very big burrito) I turned on the TV rather than trying to work from home as I had semi-committed to doing. YAY! FOX was reairing "The JonBenet Ramsey Story"! I had missed it the first time. I settled into the loveseat and was enraptured. (It was actually quite well-made, I thought, but perhaps that's just the codeine talking, or perhaps my critical facilities have been atrophied by only having seen TWO movies, bigscreen or small, in the past couple months.)

They only aired AN HOUR of it. At ten the local news started, right on schedule. I couldn't fockin believe it.

Now I'll NEVER know who killed JonBenet.

-- Kim Rollins (kimrollins@yahoo.com), July 22, 2000.


I'm usually not content to get takeout from only one place. Like I want a bagel sandwich from the bagel place, but I want McDonalds fries with it. Or I want fish from LJS, but I want donuts for dessert. And I only get takeout when I'm really tired and don't feel like fixing something. I think you can see where this is going. Going to two takeout places takes much longer than cooking. And I usually have to reheat something too.

-- Catherine (catcoicrit@earthlink.net), July 24, 2000.

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