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How I spent my Summer vacation ...

So you don't feel bad when those "absent-minded-moments" strike, compare your worst with my morning this morning:

It's the first morning of the first day of my two weeks off. A wonderful morning! Right?

Wrong.

It's very very hot and I'm an overheated, sweaty guy with wet stringy hair wearing the bedraggled slouchy shirt and cut-off sweats that I slept in last night. I am in no way presentable to anyone. My 'farmer's tan' makes me look even worse and I painfully notice this as I pass a store window; my milk-white legs reflect back at me from the otherwise dim and difficult-to-discern reflection which screams out:

"HEY! DUDE! EITHER GET A TAN OR WEAR LONG PANTS!!!"

I'm taking back a rent-a-car to the lot where I picked it up last Friday night.

I had left my personal car there in the lot, trading it for the rental. I thought I'd be driving around too much over the weekend for the ol' girl and knew it was going to be hot. So since I had planned to do some significant driving over the weekend, I didn't want to risk blowing the old car up in the middle of nowhere during my kid's visit. My daughter is visiting for the first time in years and I wanted to put some checks in the "cool places where I went with Dad" boxes. We drove to Naples - once - last night.

I could have used the old car for that.

So, even though I feel like a warm, wet mop that's been used to clean a rather cruddy public restroom, I'm thinking "What the heck. I'm only going to drop off a key in a drop box and turn around and go home ... Nobody'll see me," right?

Wrong.

I get to the rent-a-car place and pull up next to my car in the parking lot, right where I'd left it on Friday. Of course, it's sitting there baking as it rests on a blacker-than-pitch parking lot and I'm looking at it from within a nice air-conditioned rental. "Oh well," I think, "it was nice while it lasted."

I park the car, remove my "stuff" and trudge across the blacker-than-pitch parking lot to put the keys into the "drop box" which is pretty much a big square silver mailbox that says "DROP KEYS HERE" which is currently the temperature of a pizza oven. It probably takes the keys you put into it, melts them and forges new keys, I'm guessing. So I'll just try to figure out how to get my keys INTO it without suffering 5th degree burns and then suffer back home in the old car w/no air-conditioning, right?

Wrong.

I've left the key to the old car AT HOME.

"Not a problem," I think to myself. They'll let me drive home and get it and not charge me for the extra day, right?

Wrong.

It's five minutes before I'm supposed to have the car back, so I trudge across the blacker-than-pitch road next to the blacker-than-pitch and hotter-than-the-sun parking lot where I had intended to put the keys to the rental into the big metal pizza oven. I arrive at the not-air-conditioned RentaCar place and am greeted by a non-pleasant, non-smiling, moist and overheated-but-not-as-bad-as-I-am girl who works at the front desk. She'd rather be somewhere else.

"No, if it's returned after that time, you will be charged the extra day, sir."

Fine. (Not really, I meant that like when you are having a micro-tantrum: "Fine. BE that way.")

So I give (read: toss) the keys back to her and sign some form that could have, for all I know, been giving someone permission to remove my kidneys as I sleep tonight. I won't care, it'll be cooler, at least.

It's noon, and maybe I'll have to sit around somewhere for an hour or so until I can catch a ride with someone back home ... but then how am I going to reconnect the key to the old car which will then STILL be sitting in the blacker-than-pitch parking lot? I hadn't really thought that out properly when I remembered that there might be someone working in the store nearby where my fiancée works who may be going home at 2 or so, they would be able to give me a ride ... or something.

It turns out that there's a kid coming IN to work in an hour who would be able to stop near my house and PICK UP the key to the old car and bring it in. She's called, she says okay, she's leaving in about 45 minutes, and I am to contact someone at my house to meet this girl ON THE STREET and give her the key.

This means I now have to call 1 of the three girls at home, all of whom are currently sleeping. They are in the "Summer vacation sleep mode" of staying up late and enjoying more human and tolerable temperatures (anything cooler than the surface of the sun) and sleeping until the sun gets to a more comfortable postion ... like 3 or 4 in the afternoon.

So I call my daughter, 1 of the three girls at home, and wake her up ... she spends 7 minutes or so on the phone with me, looking for the key as I try to describe to her where it might be.

While I'm talking to my daughter, I'm also trying to multi-task and get a $20 out of the ATM where I've made the hook-up to get the key to the old car so I can go home.

My daughter, half-asleep, is doing her best to look where I think the car key is, but she can't find it. As I'm trying to slowly walk her thru checking the places where it might be, I ignore the 'beep, beep, beep, beep' of the ATM telling me that my card is sitting there in the slot unprotected.

As I turn to grab the card, the machine eats it.

I go inside the mall-area, intending to retrieve the card from the Bank on the other side of the wall. The mall-area is at least a little more air-conditioned, and I sit down at a table in a food-court area to further describe to my daughter where to look for the key.

I put the satchel I'm carrying down on a table and the key to the old car falls out.

"Nevermind, I tell my daughter ... I found it."

She hangs up.

I go to the store where my fiancee's manager helped me with the "transport" for the key I now don't need anymore and tell him I've found the key.

He laughs.

Then I head to another store in the mall where I'm going to get some scotch tape for another of the girls who's preparing a package to send to her fiancé in Iraq. I'll be able to return home and have helped SOMEbody out, since I'm not doing so well helping myself out today. And at least my trip won't be TOTALLY a pain, right?

Wrong.

I found the scotch tape, but can't find duct tape, which she also wanted, for some reason.

As I'm hunting for the tape, I'm struggling with the satchel I'm carrying (no shoulder strap) made out of leather and rather slippery for a guy who's as wet as a fresh caught fish and feeling as smelly as that fish would be after a few days on the beach. I'm surprised by a friend of my fiancee's and mine who I can only imagine saw me enter on a security monitor in the store, as I'm trying to fly undetected thru the store, so as not to offend any more people than necessary with my unpresentable state. She must have noticed me skulking by one of the cameras and came out of that secret hole-in-the-wall place where they sit and watch people steal stuff and came out to investigate the weird looking shadowy figure.

She tries to make small talk, telling me about a toothache, and I'm thinking "GO AWAY! DON'T LOOK AT ME OR YOU'LL TURN TO STONE!" but she's either too polite to say anything or her tooth, hard though it might be to imagine, hurts too bad and is more painful and offensive to her than I am. I figure out some way to say "Have a nice day" so I can slide out of sight, finish my mission and get the heck outta there.

So I take the tape that I've found and head to the cash register.

"That'll be five dollars," the cashier says.

I don't have the cash, so I'll use my bank card, right?

Wrong.

You're probably ahead of me, right?

Right.

I don't have my check-card. The machine ate it. YOU might have remembered that, but *I* didn't.

"I'll be right back, I need to get my card; I left it in my car," I tell the lady.

I don't know why I feel the need to make up a story that's more lame and makes me look like a bigger idiot than if I told her what the REAL location of the card was. But I did.

So, like I intended earlier, I go to the bank located on the other side of the wall from where the ATM machine is that ate my card. I enter the bank and hide in a corner, waiting for someone to notice the big overheated, sweaty guy with wet stringy hair wearing the bedraggled slouchy shirt and cut-off sweats that he slept in last night and ask me if I needed any help.

Everyone in the bank turns and looks at me as if I'd just crawled out of a multi-vehicle accident, was missing an eyeball and and a bloody stump where one of my limbs was supposed to be.

Not bad, actually, that's about how I felt.

I ask the customer service girl if she can retrieve my card for me from the card sucker.

"Sure," she says, give me your ID."

Apparently, she felt it necessary to compare my ID with the myriad of cards that must have been eaten that day to make sure she gets the right idiot's card. No problem, I'll have my card back in 2 minutes, right?

Wrong.

I don't have my wallet.

WHERE THE HELL IS MY WALLET? Did it fall out of my stupid little satchel? In the now locked renta-car which is back in the hands of the RentaCar lady? In the store where I was trying to buy tape? Fell out somewhere in between? I don't know why, but I decide to go check in the store where my fiancée works. It's there. I grab it and whistle at the manager as I leave, he looks as if to say "What's up?"

I hold up my wallet, he laughs.

Yeah ... funny.

Back at the bank, in the 2 minutes it takes her to get my card back to me, probably everyone I know has decided to choose that particular timeframe to conduct their business at the bank. If one more person asks "Is it hot out there?" as a means to say "Dude, you look like a big overheated, sweaty guy with wet stringy hair wearing the bedraggled slouchy shirt and cut-off sweats that he slept in last night" without being rude, I'll kill them and (eventually, if I ever get around to buying some) return and wrap them up in Scotch tape.

The girl returns w/my card and that next person is spared a grisly death.

I go back to the store, get the tape ... trudge back to the old car and go home.

So after forgetting car keys, but not REALLY forgetting them, and losing my bank card while I was looking for the non-lost car keys over the phone with the help of a sleepy kid who didn't need to be woken up in the first place and then buying some tape with a card that was eaten by the card sucker because I was distracted looking for a car key that wasn't lost ... I'm now worn out on my first morning of the first day of my two weeks off. I need a vacation from my vacation. A wonderful morning! Right?

Right. If you laughed, giggled or smiled while reading this totally true account of this morning, then it was all worth it.

At least that's what I'll tell myself until I forget about it.

:o)

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