Anyone who knows my social surfing habits recognizes that when it comes to my LiveJournal, I keep up with it at least three times a year whether I need to or not. As such, I heavily rely on people informally telling me “Hey! Did you see such and such entry?” and a URL before I can drag up the motivation to fire up a browser. Consequently, it takes a pretty hefty event to happen before I’ll feel inspired enough to even post. Today was such a day.
It started off simply enough: work from home reading a small rain forest of documentation, catch up with a buddy for lunch, and drive into the office for more tree slaughterings.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s only one company that paints the stripes in parking lots, and that there’s only one guy who does the measuring. Furthermore, I’m convinced that he’s been using the same ruler since 1920, and that by now the ends have worn down substantially. Why? Because the width of parking spaces has been drastically decreasing over the years.
I remember when my mom used to pull into a parking space. She’d pull in, and about five minutes later of 37-point turns, we’d be set. She’d kick the door open, and it’d swing as wide as you please, leaving plenty of space for her, her kids, and a six foot sofa in tow to withdraw from the car unhindered.
Not in today’s world. Parking spaces are so cramped together that dent resistant doors have become a completely new marketing feature of automobiles, though counterintelligence has developed better edges to scrape and gouge the surfaces of nearby vehicles so you can still establish dominance by brute force and unawareness of surroundings.
Having been the victim of dents, scratches, and gouges in the past, I try to take care of vehicles parked next to me. My hope is that the returning occupant will see the lack of damage and reciprocate in kind.
To that end, after pulling into my tiny space at work, I needed to grab something from the trunk real quick. After popping the trunk and disembarking, I shut the door so that it wouldn’t swing into the vehicle next to me.
Naturally, I don’t notice until I’m standing at the rear of my car that I’ve locked my keys inside. Furthermore, as I feel hot exhaust hitting my leg, I also come to the realization that I didn’t turn the car off either.
Meanwhile gas prices are rising to $7 a gallon, and I’m slowly burning up my tank in an effort to damage the environment without the added benefit of mobile transportation.
I do the obvious, I check the locks. All locked. I check the doors anyhow. Locked. I try them again, still locked. If this were a mail slot, I would be the guy who looks down the shoot every letter sent. The windows wouldn’t budge, and no amount of coaxing was helping. Yes, I had to face facts, I was locked out by the sheer power of my own stupidity.
By this time, the sun’s presence is making itself known, and I’m starting to consider how effective a brick might be against shatter resistant glass. Instead, I decided that perhaps I could gain entrance to the vehicle by lowering the back seats from the trunk. For those of you who have Saturns, perhaps you can take comfort and security in knowing this isn’t possible.
Naturally, I had to climb into the trunk to discover this fact, making a spectacle of myself to everyone at the smoking area, the loading dock, and basically anyone with a window office on the back of the building as I almost slam the lid on my head in the process.
“Hey Herb, come on over here… you’ve got to see this! This guy just pulled into the parking, locked his doors, and now I think he’s going to lock himself in his trunk. Funny, I didn’t think David Blaine was white….”
I also tried opening the hood of the car in hopes of being able to shut the car off and disconnect the battery. Naturally, this too was a locking mechanism only available from the inside of the car. Boy, GM thought of everything.
There were other complications as well. Let’s see, first of all there was stuff in my trunk that I needed to hand off to someone at work, it was too bulky to carry around, and if I shut the trunk I wouldn’t be able to get it open again. If I left it, someone would take it. If I closed the trunk and he came out, I couldn’t hand it off. Near the same time, the four glasses of water I had during lunch decided they were nearly done visiting my bladder.
Hot sun. Couldn’t leave. Had to pee.
Solution: Call someone at work and have them come out and watch my stuff.
Number after number after number was greeted by voice mail. Know why? In retrospect, I gather they were all pressed against the plate glass windows seeing if this moron in the parking lot was going to saw himself in half after escaping from his trunk.
The next solution was to call my wife and ask her to bring a spare set of keys to unlock the car. Now, if you’re wondering why I didn’t have a spare set of key, you’d be wrong. I did have a spare key. It’s just that I locked it in the car because I put it on the wrong key chain when I had it duplicated. Dunce.
Naturally, because this was a time of great need, desperation, and perspiration, Murphy’s Law kicked in and there was no answer. But this just wasn’t your every day “not there,” it was a colossal cluster of errors. Now, if I were James Burke, I’d have to blame the following sequence of events on the way batteries store electricity. Follow this tangent if you will…
In order to be able to contact each other in emergencies, I bought my wife a cell phone. And like many people new to cell phones, she didn’t take it with her because she had no intention on placing a call. I raised the point that if she was in an accident, then she’d want to and then where would she be? Stuck, that’s what. Plus, should I want to call her and tell her I’m running late, or even to meet me for a surprise date somewhere, she wouldn’t get the message, and I’d be watching Billy Joel at Wolftrap with someone like Michele, who does carry her phone with her.
So, logic wins, and Tamara carries her cell phone. However, this causes a new problem, it never gets charged. So now she’s carrying a dead cell phone. And again, same argument, a dead cell phone is about as good as no cell phone.
So, logic wins again, and we get a wall charger, a car charger, a solar powered charger, a hydro charger, a hamster wheel charger, you name it… she could charge that phone. And charge it she did.
She charged the phone to the point where it no longer worked. But how is THAT possible?
Back when I worked for GE, I had a friend who had a laptop that died on him. He’d fire it up, and it’d automatically shut off due to no power. No matter how long he tried charging it, it always died. But it worked fine when plugged in. Aggravated with it, he got on the phone with technical support and was put on hold. A customer? In an emergency? Put on hold? No! Really. Go on…
So, being the engineer he was he figures, “I’ll keep turning the unit on when it shuts off, keep track of the count, and use that as a metric to convey to them just how busted this battery is.” And so he does. And he’s on hold for a long time. On… whir, off. On… whir, off. On, whir…off. On, whir, off. On, whirr……………….. and it stayed on.
He hung up the phone and realized the problem, which was new at the time. Batteries have “memory.” It’s like if you fill a glass with hard water to a certain level repeatedly, eventually you get a white crust on the glass at that level. When a full battery is discharging, when it gets to that crusty white watermark, it thinks “Oh, I must be empty” and tells the device to shut off. By turning on and off his laptop, he slowly drained the battery over the hazy mark, past the memory point, and it functioned until depleted.
By completely discharging, and then completely recharging, and then completely discharging, and completely recharging, and so on, the battery life actually gets extended! Plus the process wipes the “memory” from bad charging behaviors.
What Tamara had done by constantly charging her cell phone was to make the battery high-water mark so near the full mark that it was nearly unusable. After explaining the above story, she adopted the new behavior of completely discharging and completely charging. Tamara’s just great at adopting new technological procedures at my whims. Guys, if you’re looking for someone to marry on a long term basis, pick someone like Tamara. She’s got a good geek-factor she keeps hidden from the surface. Her side of the story is simply that she complies to keep me from whining.
Anyhow, battery technology has vastly improved in the last decade. It’s possible to buy batteries that don’t have this memory problem. Sure they’re more expensive, but it’s worth it. Such a battery is in her NEW cell phone. But, and this is my fault for not pointing this out to her, so she’s been adopting the discharge/charge model which before was giving us 7-9 days of battery life on a 3 day battery.
Back to the story.
Tamara’s about to head out to meet up with my parents who are heading to the hospital for a visit with my mom’s doctor. She takes her T-Mobile SideKick and plugs it in to charge because it’s completely dead. And with that, she heads up stairs to take a shower.
Walt calls her cell phone. Ring, ring… voice mail. Leaves a message. Tamara doesn’t hear the phone ring, but Mike does.
Walt calls the land line to get any human. Ring, ring… answering machine. Now I know my house is filled with people, so I leave a message saying I need someone to pick up.
Walt calls the cell phone. Voicemail. Calls the house, no answer. Cell phone. House. Cell phone. House. Cell phone. Cell phone. Cell phone. Why am I paying for all this technology if we’re not using it? Wait, that’s it! Technology shall save me!!!
This is T-Mobile. I leave Tamara an AIM message and an eMail before going back to filling her call log with panic crys from lack of sunscreen and excessive exhaust fumes. For a few moments switching to another medium generated that false sense of doing something constructive. However, if she’s not answering her cell phone, what’s the chance she’ll just decide to check email on a whim?
What I don’t know is that Mike is on the phone with a client, and the phones around him are ringing like crazy. He can’t get to them, but he can relay a message to Tamara. Or so he thinks.
Tamara, steps out of the shower, and zips off to the appointment without checking the answering machine. Personally, I check it once a month, which is why you all have been instructed to use email; no faulting anyone there. She knows the cell phone is “dead” (it’s not, but she thinks it is) and leaves it behind. Mike, looking for papers notices Tamara pulling out of the driveway. She’s snuck past him as not to disturb him.
Meanwhile, my bladder is on fire.
I call AAA, hoping to get anyone. As it’s ringing, I’m wondering whether or not piss will evaporate on a tailpipe in this heat.
“Hi, I locked my keys in my car. And before you ask, it’s running.”
(The operator holds back her laugher, but not well.) “Where are you?”
Oh, let me see… I’m in a parking lot of a new job in a building I don’t know the address of with coworkers I can’t get ahold of to ask. I thumb though some notes and give her a street address. Obviously it isn’t enough.
“What’s the cross street?”
Cross street? There is no cross street. I’m in a 2 mile wide parking lot in the middle of frickin’ nowhere, surrounded by trees. I took an unlabeled access road to get to this facility.
“You don’t know the cross street?”
“No, but if you’d take some notes to pass on to the driver, I can tell you how to get in from the major roads.”
“Why don’t you give me your cell phone number?”
Cell phone number. Great. I just got this cell phone, I haven’t memorized the number, and I’m talking into what feels like a cake of soap. “Hold please.” I’m now wondering if it’s even possible to extract the phone number from my SideKick while on a live phone call. I’m mumbling to myself, trying to navigate menus, and wiping the sweat off the LCD display that was moment’s ago stuck to my face.
Turns out, it is, but I thought the device was muted while I navigated the menus. She heard every mumbled word. When I return to give it to her, there’s just more laughing. And not the “with-me” type.
“Are you parked in front or behind the building?”
Great, my build isn’t a rectangle. It’s like a propeller blade. I have no points of references, and this thing has more sides than I can count. “Go to the front of the building and go counter clockwise, I’m somewhere in the back.”
“Okay, what is the make and model of your car so we can spot you?”
I swear I said this, “Spot me? I’m the only guy out here with the trunk up, wearing a green jacket, sweating profusely. You can’t miss me because I’ll be waving down anything with yellow blinking lights, and if that doesn’t work, look for the guy standing in a pool of his own urine.”
“Make and model, please.”
“Uh, Saturn.”
“What model?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the model of your car?”
“It’s silver. Does that help?”
“What year?”
“I don’t know. Look, I’m a programmer, I don’t know jack about cars.” Meanwhile I’m circling the car for a model number, a name, a year. Nothing. Boy, those Saturn folks sure can keep you in suspense.
Before I can offer up something like a license plate, she asks, “Did you buy it recently or several years ago?”
I have no idea. Full bladders and excessive sun exposure will do that to a person.
“Look, ” I said, “you get a truck anywhere near here, and I’ll talk him in on the cell phone. If I see a truck, I’ll wave like a wild man. But honestly, I’m look at about 10 thousand cars right now, many that look identical to mine. And before you ask, they aren’t labeled either.”
She thanks me, says a unit is dispatched, and in 45-90 minutes, I’ll be set.
Meanwhile, I’m trying my parents who haven’t heard from Tamara. My thought is, let them meet up with her, and give her the message.
After some time, this does happen, and things quickly degrade into a “if you get here, AAA wastes a trip; if AAA gets here, you have no cell phone for me to send you back (and I didn’t want her circling forever — given I was in the heat, I was not going to pass up the airconditioned building that she couldn’t enter); if she borrowed the cell phone, she’d have to make an extra trip to return it.” Heat delirium prevented me from dawning on the fact I could cancel the AAA call until much later.
Much of the rest of the time was waiting and getting a light suntan.
Eventually, things did work out. Tamara met up with them at the hospital, they lent her my dad’s cell phone, and she got to drive around in the parking lot several times before she called me and I talked her in. Keep in mind, she knew where she was going.
I called back AAA, thanked them for trying, and canceled the dispatch. They were pretty quick with it, suggesting that no assistance had actually been dispatched. Another game AAA plays from time to time. (Always ask your emergency help person when they got the call. You’ll be surprised it usually is about 10-15 minutes from when they show up.)
About 3 hours after this had all started, I’m back in the car.
Anyhow, it was my own fault… perhaps next time I’ll just ding a stranger’s door and save myself the aggravation.
Original post at http://whiskeyrivers.livejournal.com/10445.html