As I wrote in the previous entry, yesterday Rudder called to ask me to meet him at the garage. Apparently when he went home for lunch, in a moment of brainfade he drove into the garage with the boat rack on the Hummer. The garage roof is only about 4" above the Hummer roof rack sans boat cradle.
Damage to the boat cradle was nil and to the garage roof was minimal, but the Hummer rack to which the boat cradle was attached is not not quite connected at right angles. When I left work I went to pick him up in the Mozzie, my teeny teeny car already full with my gym back and the small tote I carry in to work. I put my gym back behind my seat, a maneuver that is only possible because I'm in about the 10th percentile for height, and then somehow got him and his briefcase stuffed into the passenger seat. We then compounded the problem by deciding to stop for dinner.
I had to laugh a bit at Rudder's goof, but avoided rubbing it in too much for karmic reasons, a wise move in restrospect.
While waiting for food at a local Pan-Asian place we grabbed a table. I had taken my purse out of its usual spot in the work tote and taken it in with me, so slung it over the back of my chair. I may or may not have taken it with me when I went outside to call my parents and wish them a happy 41st anniversary (Rudder stayed at the table.) We somehow got the food into the car with us and all our stuff, drove home, and unpacked: me, Rudder, gym bag, tote, briefcase, food......
No purse. Looked around: car floor behind the seat, passenger footwell, tote, gym bag, even in the food bag incase it somehow jumped in there. Then Rudder drove me back to the restaurant (in my pickup) because I dislike driving without a driver's license, which of course was in my purse. I spoke to the servers, the manager and the busboy and loooked at the seat where I'd been sitting to no avail. No purse. The manager took my number and promised to call if it turned up, which I thought unlikely if it hadn't turned up already. Then it was another ten minutes' drive back home, during which I was resigning myself to replacing credit cards and license trying to figure out how I'd replace all the little things like AAA and health insurance cards.
Just to be sure I checked around one more time ....
and found the purse on the tiny and hard-to-see-onto shelf under the back window, where it must have landed because there was so much other stuff behind my seat. Sigh.
At least it paid back all of the effort of not being obnoxious about Rudder's blunder, and at least my goof only took half an hour to fix and didn't cost several hundred dollars.
Posted by dichroic at September 9, 2004 12:46 PM