This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

I walked down the hill from Aggie village in a drizzly rainfall, wiping water off my brow every few seconds with my hand and then smearing my hand on my already-sodden pants, as if that did any good.  I didn't mind walking in the rain, really.  I mean, I'm from Seattle.  But on this particular day, I had broken my own rule that states I must always have real pants on when I leave my house.  I have plenty of pairs of pants, but only one pair of elastic-waisted ones, and I'm not up to wearing stiff waistbands again yet.  So I had left my apartment in a pair of knit pajama pants that just didn't seem to hold up to the water as well as ordinary blue jeans.  The rain collected in my hair, spilled over my forehead, and sent a single drip right down my nose.  I wiped it away.

At the bottom of the hill, I entered the Tesoro station and went straight back to the restroom.  I knew I needed to buy something, so I selected a spicy hot V8 and took it up to the register.  I produced a payment card.

"Is it debit or credit?"  Asked the teller.

Horrified, I stared at the card.  I had no idea.  I knew my confusion and hesitation must be obvious, so I started doing the exactly wrong thing: explaining.

"It's my husband's card."  I told her.  "He gave it to me to do laundry, and then I got locked out of the house.  Then I had to go to the bathroom, so I came here, and..."  I noticed a spot on the card where it said it was a debit card.  "Oh, you know what?  I says Debit right there."

"You can run it as either debit or credit."  She told me, and it didn't register at first how helpful she was really being.  "That way, if you don't know the pin, you can just sign."  Ah.  There we go.  If she ran the card as debit, I would be embarrassed and stymied because I didn't know the pin.  She was helping me out, I realized.  "Let's do credit."  It worked swimmingly and I signed the receipt.  She handed me a second receipt.  "Wait...do you keep one of these, or do I keep both?"

The checkout girl reached across the counter and delicately plucked the signed receipt out of my hand.  "There ya go.  Yeah, I'm...totally with it."  I took my leave and fled out into the parking lot with my beverage, only to stand next to one of the outside garbage cans and drink it so that I could throw the bottle away properly.  This accomplished, I set out to return home, back up the hill.

But now I had a new problem, because it had gotten dark.  I usually dress carefully in light colors if I am going to walk at night, because I don't trust Utah drivers to really actually look for pedestrians.  I cautiously crossed every driveway into every apartment complex, and a couple of SUVs really would have mowed me down if I hadn't been a defensive walker.  Avoiding being hit by cars is something I've been good at ever since I got run over at age four.  I learned that lesson but good.  I use crosswalks and walk signals, but I was dressed in dark purple pajamas and a black SUU sweatshirt.

I hadn't even intended to leave my apartment complex!  I railed and no one in particular.  I just wanted to go to the laundry room and wash some clothes!  But I hadn't been able to make the new card-op laundry system work, and when I went into the housing office they had told me I had to call the repair man myself.  I had to go home to get my phone because my pajama pants don't have pockets, and that's when I learned I had locked myself out.  Shayne wasn't going to be home for another couple of hours, and I was unwilling to ask housing to let me back in because they would charge me a dollar and I have exactly $1.57 to my name right now, and I don't want to give my last dollar to housing.  I already pay to live here, and I helped pay for that spiffy new laundry system that costs more per load, and it's not cleaning my clothes because it doesn't work, even though other people's laundry is spinning merrily in the machines, and I didn't even bring a book to read while I wait for Shayne to come home.

That's when I hesitated to walk to the gas station.  See, I don't like to go walking around town in my pajamas.  Heck, I don't even like to go to Walmart in my pajamas.  I'm not an expert in fashion or beauty, but I do have standards.

As I walked, I hoped that my pajama pants would just look like printed blue jeans under the streetlights.  Maybe, with a little luck, that would happen.

Heading back up the hill to Aggie Village, I made the only smart decision I had made all day.  I arrived at a bus stop just as the Aggie Shuttle was opening its doors, and I knew that if I got on I would just have a pleasant ride around campus which would culminate in the bus letting me off right in front of my apartment.  Instead, I chose to walk up the hill.  The docs prescribed walking as the very best form of exercise.  All the squillions of docs I talked to agreed on this point.  They all urged me to walk.  So I pretended that I was just out for an invigorating tromp, in my sleeping clothes, on a rainy night.  Yeah.

Shayne was home when I got back and was able to let me into the house, thankfully.  Unfortunately, the laundry is still dirty.  I'm considering driving it out to another laundromat in town.

The Night Morning Never Came

It was the year 1999.  I was working at a corporate pig farm that lay about fifty-odd miles outside of Cedar City, which was where I lived at the time.  The work was very hard, but I was perservering.  I was determined to succeed at the silly job, even though it was evident that the job was all wrong for me.  I mean, I went to work there because I love animals, and I naively thought it would be fun.  It was a factory farm.  Ha.

Anyway, I came home from work one afternoon, exhausted.  Even though it was only about 5:00 PM, I decided to just go to bed.  I had worked my butt off that day.  I had to get up at 3:30 to go to work, so it's not like I was breaking any sonic barriers with my sleep.  I was too tired, so I went to bed.

When I awoke the next morning, it was already 8:00.  Holy crap.  I was already two hours late for work.  I frantically searched for, and found, the phone number to my workplace and called it on the archaic land line phone we had back in those days.  I got a recording that said this number had been disconnected.

Desperate, I dialed the operator.  She tried to call the number, then she looked it up and told me it was a cell phone from California.  I got out the phone book and dialed the farm's corporate office in Milford, but no one answered.  Bereft, and knowing I had failed, I dismally put the slip of paper away.  The phone number I needed wasn't listed in the phone book, and the corporate offices weren't answering, and I had somehow managed to write down the number to my farm wrong.  I couldn't look it up online because it was 1999, and even if someone in my apartment had had the internet I certainly wouldn't have known how to use it, or how to hack into their computer without the password.  I'm a child of the 1920s.  So I did the last thing left to me to do.  I went and sat on the stairs of my apartment and started crying.

Barely a moment later, my roommate walked in and asked me what was wrong.  I told her through my tears, relating the entire story in all its gory details.  I had done everything a person could do.

"It's too late."  I sobbed.  "I'm already fired.  It's a no-call no-show.  It's all over.  I don't know.  Should I drive in to work?  Should I try to explain what happened?"

My roomie was staring at me with a very strange expression.  She kept staring after I had finished speaking, and after several seconds it started to make me uncomfortable.

"What?"  I demanded.

"Um, Cydni?  It's 8:00 at night.  Are you really supposed to be at work at 8:00 at night?"

I didn't comprehend.  I probably made a very humorous facial expression, the one where my mouth falls open and my whole face goes slack.

"What?"

"It's 8:00 at night.  Do you think it's 8:00 in the morning?  Because I would be really surprised if you needed to be at work right now."

"It's 8:00 at night?  I repeated thickly.  "It's not morning?"

"No.  You're not late to work.  You're fine."

By now my roomie was struggling to contain her laughter, and as my comprehension dawned it brought with it crushing embarrassment.  Oh, hud, I thought.  (I really did think that.  I hadn't met any Hudsons yet, and in Cedar City many people used "hud" to mean, like, "shit."  So they weren't swearing.  And I was like that back then.)

I ran back into my room.  I probably fell to my knees and started dramatically praying, cause that's the kind of girl I was.  The humiliation was unbearable.  I had taken a nap and awakened three hours later.  I hadn't slept all night and ignored my alarm.  It was fine, except that I had thoroughly made an ass of myself.

Well, it took thirteen years, but now I can finally look back on it and laugh.

Also, this.