An altogether frusting day. Yet interesting.
July 11, 2005
Inexplicably, I woke up before 6:30 this morning, as alert as the cats. This never happens. I drove (20 miles each way, yep) to work for a few hours of meetings and drove back home again, packed, and left for Vancouver, BC, where I need to attend a conference.
The first sign of woe was my teeth-clenchingly annoying gasoline experience in Kelso, Washington. It had already taken me longer than I would have like to stock up for my adventure at the local Target (toothpaste and socks, yes, socks), and I wanted to be on my way.
I’d begun to lose my cool at the Target. I’d been in line behind a ponderous adolescent buying deodorant with exact change. The exit was blocked by a rectangular solid of a woman expounding about how she’d just had the guy living in her house thrown in jail.
The relatively adjacent freeway-side Arco station had gasoline a full twenty cents per gallon cheaper than the surrounding stations, and the swelling mass of attracted vehicles from a several-state radius attested to this. I pulled in and found a place in the line of cars and started swearing prematurely, just to prepare myself for the inevitable nincompoopery (credit for that brilliant and oft-appropriate term goes to Mike).
In front of me: a drooping, thirty-year old heap of unidentifiable, inert crap, parked in front of a pump, blocking access to the pump on the other side. Uninhabited to boot. It sat there dropping rust flakes on the blacktop while I steamed.
Eventually a surly, watch-cap topped guy in lazy jeans and heavy silver chains slouched toward it, accompanied by an equally-dour girl with too much hair in a perplexingly argyle sweater. Then commenced a good two minutes of adjusting the position of the beast, as the gas-hole was under the license plate in the rear, and the gas-hose was not in any way long enough to reach it.
At one point, dopey guy drove the thing up to the far pump and I thought:
“Eureka! He has seen the light. He is going to let me use the closer pump while he, efficiently, uses the further pump. Two cars can fuel at once! It’s a miracle.”
I pulled up behind him, got out and prepared for engagement with the sweet, sweet nectar of the gas gods, when Dopey Guy yells: “No! I have four dollars on that pump! I have to use it!”
Sigh. Four dollars. Of course. Enough to fund gas to propel his wheezing, terminal pile at least a half a mile.
After some very blunt gesturing and my slowing down my speech to communicate my plan in some sort of pidgin, I manage to talk him into letting me coax my car around his and use the front pump.
I performed the ritualistic dance of gas-hole unscrewing, pump unplugging, and then pulled out my credit card to find no credit card-hole on the pump. After some dumb spinning around on my part, I saw that all patrons had to share one payment unit thing in the center of the gas hell complex.
Swipe. Beep. Enter PIN. Rejected. Swipe. Beep. Enter PIN. Rejected. New card: swipe. Beep. Enter PIN. REJECT REJECT REJECT. Ten swipes later and success.
I literally ran to the central food hut thing to buy myself some much-needed beef jerky. I grabbed the first bag I saw and went to the counter, glad I had cash with which to pay for my prize.
The attendant reaches out her hands, shiny with carnation-pink nail polish on corresponding nails as long as tusks.
“I can’t take this,” she said.
I look down at the dollar bill I’m trying to use.
“It has something on it,” she said.
I looked at the bill again. It had a slight brown stain on one end.
“But it’s legal money. Tender for all debts, public and private, blah blah.”
She gives me a gape that lets me know my protest is hopeless.
“We can’t take money with stuff on it.”
I fork over my debit card.
The woman behind me buys a “Support the troops” adhesive ribbon for her minivan.
I also desperately needed to take a leak, but some rickety geezer had just grabbed the bathroom key (the bathroom was outside, never a good omen) and was teetering off at glacial speed.
I didn’t have a geological epoch to wait, so I cut my losses and took the hell off.
[This portion of the post devoted to my sweetest David, who is convinced that self-serve gasoline is a gift from the deeply enlightened. No, but, really, I love him like burning, I just don’t understand his obsession with inconvenience. And I mean this as an informal ribbing. Sigh. Internet communication and its lack of facial expression.]
–
There is nothing memorable or endearing about the I-5 corridor between Portland and Seattle. It’s so bad, in fact, that I emerge at one end or the other each time (I suffer this drive often) feeling as if I’ve been sedated for several hours. I think it’s comparable to taking a nap on a too-hot day and waking up a few hours later feeling dyspeptic, damp and burpy.
It wasn’t until I got into completely stopped and completely incompetent traffic just south of Vancouver, B.C., that I realized I’d forgotten the AC adapter for my laptop. Like in Portland. At home.
Not so good for a multi-day conference that relies entirely on my computer.
This is a bad situation to be in six hours’ drive from home. I was already a few eggs short of a carton, with headache, grumpiness and the general disillusionment that comes with leaving the country, but only to go to Canada, which is quite like the country I’ve left, yet not quite, which is, as I’ve described to many people, somehow more unsettling for me.
I called my company’s IT department, which didn’t pan out with a definitive answer.
“Which city are you in again?” they kept asking, and gave me the part number of the obscure thing I needed to track down, which I penned helplessly on the back of my hand, steering with one knee and holding the phone to my ear (I’d like to note that I almost never drive and talk on the phone…we were moving at about four feet per hour).
I begged David (via mobile phone) to help. I drove into Vancouver’s downtown area without the usual smile it prompts from me, found my hotel, parked illegally and grimly, handed over my car key and checked in (no one offered to help me with the eighty-five pounds or so of baggage I was carrying, which irked me to some degree).
I found an open-late drugstore on Robson Street with a computer section staffed by a guy who laughed along with me and seemed to feel my pain at forking over $180CAD for an adapter I’ll feel too guilty to expense. Well, the good news is that this adapter should power ANYTHING: it came with about forty hundred attachments. So bring your laptop over to my house and we can plug it in!
Subsisting all day on nothing but beef jerky is inadvisable and the effects were beginning to make themselves known. I stomped back to the hotel, threw some stuff on the bed and came down here, to the hotel bar, to stuff myself with something.
It was awesome when, five minutes ago, the valet parking guy came over and told me they couldn’t find my car key. Utterly freaking wonderful, even. It’s funny how sometimes I have a complete absence of stress over the things I should stress out about.
As a coup de grace, the conference I’m attending tomorrow is a mile away and starts at seven. Like, in the morning. There oughtta be a law.
I seem to have just ingested an entire pizza of sorts. Yes. The entire thing. Goat cheese and all. I wonder if they’ll find my car key.
59 Comments
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Rawk on sistah! Just don’t break the fucking trunk.
S
Kelso, my home town. Love it or leave it! And I’m oh so happy I left.
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I’ve been searched; I’ve been blown right through lane… airports and land borders alike!
Good guys and Bad guys (or girls) all look the same, and they can’t stop the bad guys without looking at a few good ones.
It is just a matter of perspective. Ever notice that police pull over out of state cars more frequently than in state cars? Did you know that 80% of large size narcotics seizures on traffic stops comes from an out of state car. If you are not doing anything wrong, no reason to worry – Right?
Sounds to me like you just felt violated. So if you don’t want to be subject to border search authority, don’t cross the border.
The whole story is pretty stereotypical of our society today. People complain when there are no cops around when they see a speeder – yet when the same person receives a ticket – the Police Officer is a jerk.
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