Monday, October 02, 2006

Thursday - No Luck Day

So, Thursday of last week I had a pretty rotten day. I needed to get up early to drive to San Diego. At 6am it's still dark out and the freeways are already starting to get congested. It seems as if any large vehicle (also known as SUVs) is late to get somewhere and tailgates me until he decides to choose one of the faster lanes to the left. One particular GMC sped around me but didn't seem to care to get fully in the other lane to do so. Once in front of me he didn't seem to have any dedication to any one lane. If another car tried to pass him on the right or left he would swerve halfway into thier lane. I think he was double-foot driving because his break lights were flashing constantly. Suddenly I became charged with super-citizen powers and sped up to be next to this large truck and see if there was a child or drunkard driving it. Once parallel with the driver I could see this short red, curly-haired irish-looking man peering over his steering wheel who, it seemed, couldn't see past his nose. I dropped behind him and dialed 911. I did my responsible duty and reported the drunk driver with vehicle type and license plate. I hung up the phone and the traffic came to a standstill. He plowed into the two vehicles in front of him. I called 911, "It's me, again. He wrecked."

An hour and a half later I'm 15 miles from my destination and the Interstate 15 freeway is under construction. The traffic is stop-and-very-slow, so I decide to put my new GPS to the test and route me a detour. I choose a three mile detour. It routed me just fine through the city streets until I got close to the freeway again and the street was just a parking lot. So I route another detour, this time 5 miles. I travel to the other side of the freeway, and when I think it's going to take me left back to the freeway, it says to go right. I zoom out the map and it shows that I'll be going around a lake. "Ok" I say, thinking that the GPS knows what it's doing. For the next ten miles I'm on a two-lane country highway that's hopefully taking me to my destination. I happen upon stop-and-go traffic again. This time I zoom way out on the map and notice that I'm being routed to the Interstate 5 freeway and back to the 15 via a third freeway. I calculate my trip from either direction and now I'm 25 miles from my destination in both directions. I decided to U-turn and get onto the 15 freeway as I should've. I happened upon my destination 1 hour past my planned arrival time.

While there I was to install applications and transfer data to a user's new notebook computer before he was to catch a plane. Everything was running fine and dandy. He had ten minutes left and I had one thing left to install. McAfee VirusScan (which I highly recommend) finished installing and the computer starts giving me errors and ultimately shuts itself down. "I've never seen this before" I say. "Sure" the user is probably thinking. I hate Dell computers. I reboot the computer and the same thing happens. Luckilly I could start in safe mode but you can't uninstall programs while in that mode. By now the user has left to go to the airport, so I go to the thinking room to ponder my problem. I came back and tested my theory to get the software removed, and it worked. I called McAfee support and explain my problem. I tell him it's a new Dell Notebook. He says, "Is it a D620?" "Yes", I say. "Does it have biometric software?" "Yes" "We have a patch for that, for some reason Dell's software conflicts." Great, I'm just glad it wasn't user error. But it was too late as the user was already boarding his plane then.

On the drive home, I'm happily on cruise control going the speed limit. I look in my rearview mirror I see a large pickup truck barreling down the road at 90-95 mph thinking he owns the road. When he gets a little closer another truck pulls into his lane in front of him causing him to slam on the breaks and change lanes almost clipping my rear bumper. The truck driver was considerably calmer after that and exited the freeway at the next exit.

At dinner I told Erin about my horrible day and she was sympathetic. I cleaned up the plates as Erin got her workout items together and turned on the television. "Look at this." she said. The tv was only showing an image on the center horizontal line. Now we have a broken television.

5 comments:

Tara said...

I'm so sorry about your totally crappy day. I have never been so glad that I don't live in Southern California anymore!

Rachel said...

That's scary! I'm glad you weren't on your motorcycle through all that mess!

Jay said...

What a day... I wish I could say there aren't jerks behind the wheel in Denver, but there are.

At least you beat me in Fantasy Football, though!

Erin said...

I think the broken tv is great! Joshua spent most of the day cleaning on Sunday because he had no distractions! Woohoo! We're not replacing that thing I tell you!

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh what a fun day. You had a car, you were coming from somewhere with a roof over your heads, you had a full belly, and you're still alive. Alleluia! Thanks be to God!