Vehicular Follies
GREETINGS and FELICITATIONS. Why did I type that in caps? Well, because for want of actually having a screenshot of that message from “The Squire of Gothos,” I decided to do something to make it stand out as more than a simple regurgitation of that tired old expression. But, moving on.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve started parking my car on the bottom level of the parking garage. Actually I call it “the bunker” because it’s a separate piece of the garage that actually resides beneath the rest of the deck, and is accessible only from the opposite side of the building. Not much of anybody parks over there; just some maintenance trucks and a couple of our employees from the operations department. The other nice thing about parking down there is that you don’t waste all kinds of time coming and going. You just turn in, park in the bunker and go upstairs. When you leave in the evenings, you drive right out of the deck and onto the road. No winding your way down four floors of garage.
Well, that came to an end on Tuesday afternoon when the fire alarms went off in the building. Since our building is technically still under development (although fewer and fewer office spaces remain unoccupied now), this has been a common occurrence since we moved in. Usually it’s just a test, or some gooblefab pulls the alarm as a prank, or what-have-you. But they’ve got this whole place wired so strobe lights start going off everywhere, a very Star Trek TOS-like electronic klaxon starts hooting and an automated voice starts barking instructions to get out, don’t use the elevators, yada yada. It’s quite distracting and quite annoying when it turns out to be for naught.
But on Tuesday when it went off, we just decided to take a hike. There was no announcement saying “Duhhhh, sorry, this was like a test and stuff” and we were all jonesin’ for a chance to get away from our desks for a few minutes, so we tromped down six flights of stairs and out into the parking garage. Coincidentally, the stairwell near our office empties out into “the bunker,” and what should we see when we got there but a ruptured fire suppression pipe blasting water into the parking garage. About ten feet from my car.
Well, fortunately it hadn’t been going on long, so I leaped into the T/A and drove it out of there before it was forcibly auditioned for its new role as a submarine. I parked at the drug store next to our building, since I wasn’t going back into that parking garage for anything. The goofy red alert siren continued to shriek, and since they have klaxon bullhorns in the garage too, you could hear it echoing off the landscape even over at the drug store. It made it seem like the mouth of the parking garage was the bunker at NORAD and they were sealing up the gates. I don’t know what happened to the water, but eventually they must have got it shut off. The alarm went off a second time later that afternoon, but nobody left that time, and after about ten minutes, it was cancelled with no explanation. Yeeeeaaah. It goes off so often, one day we’re probably all going to burn because nobody believes it anymore.
Now that I’m finally (I think—knock on wood) getting over the last remnants of the stupid flu, and am ready to get back on my bike and go for rides again, the weather has started to suck hardcore. Rain, rain, rain. It rained nonstop since two nights ago and only just let up this morning (hopefully for good, although I hear possibly otherwise). Still, it’s better than snow and ice! Just being able to ride a bike in early March is saying something, so I guess I should keep my mouth shut.
Which reminds me, it’s kind of interesting to think about how much residents of my town (myself included) always complain about traffic and homeowner’s associations and all that other jazz, but really, compared to lots of other places in the country or even in the world, we’ve got it pretty damn good down here. The weather is nice most of the time, everything around us is new and classy, there’s hardly any urban decay or abandoned buildings or crime…I mean, really, there’s not much to bitch about. Still, as weird as it sounds, sometimes I just get a weird craving for some scenic darkness or desolation. Some culture, if you will. But there’s plenty of that to be found on the INTARWEB, so that’s good enough. Once in a while you just need something imperfect and organic to counter all the manufactured beauty.
But as the Doctor on Voyager once said, “I’ll complain if I want to! It’s comforting.” And thus I will regale you of my second tale of woe which occurred this morning. My office building is on Vanderbilt Road, the same major east/west thoroughfare as my house (about 8 miles apart). So I only have to drive one road to work each day. Unfortunately, Vanderbilt is a two-lane nightmare—host of literally the worst traffic congestion in town. The county keeps building six-lane north/south megaroads which connect to it, dumping still more traffic on it, but they remain hopelessly behind schedule on their Vanderbilt widening efforts. But at least in the last few weeks they’ve set up a whole bunch of heavy equipment and started making a mess, so maybe that’s a prelude to something getting done.
What sucked is that while I was driving to work today, I happened to pass a huge big dumpster-like thing right at the exact moment that a bulldozer was dumping a heaping load of wet mud into it, and SLAP! Huge dollops of the slimy clay-like shit plopped all over my car. I was furious. At first I even thought it might have been wet cement, which nearly caused me to turn right the hell around, drive home and wash the goddamn car that instant, but fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and I simply toweled the crap off when I got to the office. Barfy.
Last night I was at work late (because some of our honorable employees dropped the balls I had passed to them last week, and it became my responsibility to clean up after their incompetence). While I was slaving away, I saw a silver Trans Am come up to the roof of the parking garage (our office windows overlook said roof). It was pouring rain at the time. When the T/A turned around and went back down the ramp, he hit the gas too hard and wound up fishtailing crazily. Yes, sir, you’ve bought a rear-wheel drive car! Please learn to drive it correctly! Then when I went down there to leave, I saw the T/A parked on the fourth floor and a whole bunch of kids all skateboarding in the parking garage. Hmm…okay, that’s spiff-tastic. Reminds me not to park in any of the ramp spaces.
The sun is out today, and hopefully I won’t be staying late at the office, so with luck my car won’t have to put up with any more shizz. I’ll be washing it this weekend, and changing the oil either this weekend or next. Speaking of which, I hear they have this new Mobil 1 oil now that’s made for high-mileage cars—in fact, there are three flavors. Although I don’t know why I’m even mentioning that, since I have yet to turn over 48,000 miles on my 7-year-old Trans Am.
More posts coming up soon. I saw a news story this morning that cannot get by without some of my snark, and an equally turgid letter to the editor in today’s paper that simply must be commented on.
Categorized as Cars