Kristabella: Full of Snark Since 1977

Posted By Kristabella on December 15, 2008

Oh holy hell today was a bad day. If a day starts off as bad as mine did today, there is no recovering.

First off, I am not a morning person. Not in the least. I need a longer commute in the morning just to get my wits about me and not snap your head off. I also need coffee to help this along. A former co-worker at the 49ers would not talk to me until I had been at work for at least an hour. Because the odds of me being a normal person and not a seven-headed monster would greatly increase the longer I had been at my desk. So needless to say, if unexpected things happen to me first thing in the morning, I CANNOT DEAL WITH THEM VERY WELL. It is why I don’t put my clothes on until right before I leave for the day. I have had many mornings ruined with drippings of toothpaste or a splash of make-up. If something like that happens to me that early in the morning, I would prefer to curl up in the fetal position on the floor of the bathroom and sleep the day away.

Unfortunately, I am not ever allowed to do that.

Which brings us to this morning. Everything was going fine and I was even running a bit early, which was good because I had to lug 140 holiday cards to the mail box. I had decided to drive to work today for a whole host of reasons that don’t even matter now. Mostly it was because my wine shipment is currently sitting in some UPS warehouse and I need to pick it up!

I need to pick up my wine club wine before Wednesday, when they send it back to the wine people. Which, insert pouty sad face here. We are supposed to get like 5 inches of snow on Tuesday, so I figured Monday was the best day to attempt the pick-up.

I consulted the weather on my iPhone and knew it was going to be a bit icy. We had like a 40-degree temperature drop from Sunday night to Monday morning. All that rain and melted snow was going to freeze. But I figured that leaving at 7:45 AM would be plenty of time for the salt trucks to at least cover the main drags.

What I wasn’t expecting was MUTANT ICE. This ice was not insanely thick or anything, but it had alien properties. For one, it sealed the doors of my car closed so tight I had to put my entire weight into pulling my car door open. And no, I don’t know what I would have done had it not opened. I will tell you that curling into the fetal position on the frozen sidewalk in minus 20 degree wind chill temperatures crossed my mind!

I got the door open and went about scraping the windows. That is when the mutants had their big, belly laugh at my expense. My scraper did NOTHING to the ice. It was if these mutants had sprayed a layer of glue down over my car and then put ice on top of it. IT WAS NOT GOING ANYWHERE.

So I had nothing to do but wait until the car warmed up and started to melt it. If MUTANT ICE even melted.

I scraped as much as I could off (read: NOTHING) and figured I should un-stick the wipersbecause maybe they will help get rid of the MUTANT ICE faster. So I turned on the wipers and nothing. “Hmmm,” I thought. “I must not have gotten that one blade unstuck.”

So I went back out to unstick it and heard some loud noise. I figured it was the MUTANT ICE attacking me and quickly got back in the car. I turned on the wipers and nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I heard the motor whirring but no blades moving. I went back out and tried to make them move myself. That does not work, for your information.

Commence MELTDOWN OF EPIC PROPORTIONS.

At this point, I’ve already been thawing this MUTANT ICE for damn near 30 minutes. I could finally see well enough out the windshield and I took off. It was slow going, even though I live but 11 miles from work. None of the side streets were salted and my tires spun a lot. I think those tires are still dizzy.

On my way to work, I called my mom crying because WAH! I’m going to be late! And I’m new! And I have no windshield wipers! She calmed me down and then I called my brother because he knows a little about cars. He suggested it might be a fuse (which I knew it wasn’t because the whirring, I could hear it.) Then he’s all “you busted it FOOL!” (No he didn’t really say that. He listened to me whine and continue melting down. And then sent me links to tell me what the issue probably was. Verdict? I busted it, either stripped the gears or broke something or other.)

I finally got to work, late, all cried out. I researched mechanics because I’ve not had any issues (knock on wood) with my car since moving back to Chicago. Well, no issues that my brother couldn’t fix. (Those brothers are nice to have around.) The mechanic with good reviews on Yelp said it would be more than a day because he was swamped and he’d probably have to order the part. So I went to a dealer (*shudder*) because odds are they might have the part there.

So now with the 100 million things I already had to do this week, I have to pray my car is fixed by tomorrow evening. The guy at the dealer didn’t seem shocked and was pretty sure he could have it back to me on Tuesday. So I’m hoping he’s right and doesn’t realize I was totally lying to him when I told him I had my 120,000 mile check-up done. Because I do NOT need to spend any more money at the service department of a car dealer.

On top of all this that happened, I found out that the stupid UPS place that I was rushing to get to by 6 PM before it closed is actually open until 9 PM this week. This will teach me to be lazy and NOT take public transportation. (YES, this would have ALL been avoided if I had just taken the bus and train.)

And now I will go curl up in the fetal position and go to bed, just like I’ve wanted to do since 8 AM. Well, as much curling as I can do after Jillian Michaels shredded my muscles tonight.

Categories: A Day in the Life of Me, Weather dot com, Whine & Cheese
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