redkanga

My morning started off rotten. I woke up groggy and my intentionally cold morning shower did not help. I managed to leave the house on time, but not without forgetting my work clipboard. It wouldn’t have been a problem if I had remembered it within a few minutes of leaving my house, but I remembered about 10 minutes later - on the freeway with the traffic going back towards my house at a complete standstill. “Oh well,” I said to myself, “I probably won’t need it today.”

That was until 5 minutes later when I remembered I needed to drop off some paperwork at the shop and turn in yesterday’s hours. “No problem. I can do that tomorrow,” I think. And I continue to drive to the shop. I manage to get almost all the way to the 57 freeway when traffic starts to really slow down. I’m thinking that this is not a problem, until I step on the gas to get going again and my van says “OK, uh, well nope, won’t do it!” I start pumping my gas pedal, trying to figure out what is going wrong. The van hesitates, tries to accelerate, then I lose all power. My previously blaring radio turns silent, my power steering has no power. I immediately turn on my right turn signal and try to get over to the right side of the road. On another freeway, I would have just gone for the center divider, but the carpool lane prevented that thought. So, I slowly make it over to the right should, cutting off a few cars and upsetting a few horn-honking drivers. At least I got over to the side of the road.

I called Katie, to let her know what had happened and to get some support. I was about to call AAA when a tow truck from the ‘Metro Freeway Service Patrol’ pulled up behind me. I was pleasantly surprised because I thought that only L.A. County had the roaming tow truck service. The tow truck driver hooked my van up, and towed me off the freeway into a quite residential area. “Now, I have to call the shop and then figure out how to get my van home,” I think to myself.

I call the shop, and talk to the project manager (PM) for the job that I was going out to. He is sympathetic, but he needed me to go out to the site. I told him that I wasn’t going to be going anywhere without a car…

My PM told me he would give me a call back in a couple minutes. When he called back, he told me he was sending someone to pick me up and we were going to go pick up a vehicle that was at a repair shop. Cool, I get to use a company vehicle.

Well, the vehicle was a Toyota pickup with no air conditioning. I knew it would get me where I needed to go, which is important since it’s hard to make things work when I’m short on hours. It was a long hot drive to the job site and a long hot drive back to the shop.

The shop, where I faced another dilemma… how am I going to get myself and my tools back to my van (and then home), my van someplace to get fixed and then home, not to mention the materials I need for tomorrows job. My dilemma was solved when one of the guys talked to the Operations Manager and suggested that he let me use another one of the company vehicles. I lucked out and got to use one of the spare trucks. It may look like hell, but it has a few things going for it: it runs, it will carry a ladder and materials, and it has air conditioning.

So cars may suck, but cool people at work rock.