Award Tour Vol. 3: Hard Pressed to Argue

Nashville to Little Rock:

In a word, the first part of the trip was, boring. At 2:00 in the morning on Sunday, no one who isn't a trucker or an escaped convict is up. So to summarize, during this portion of the trip - I drove - the sun came up. The end.

Yes, seriously, it was like that.

Moving on.

After driving some miles we stopped to get gas, and though I was tired, I was lucid enough to park the U-haul truck in a manner that made it possible for us to get out; an effort that was almost immediately subverted when another lady driving a Penske truck (also towing a car) pulled up 5 feet beside us to fill up. Five feet may not seem like a big deal, but if you have been reading along this blog (and let's be real, you should be - reading this blog makes you cool) you know that, wide turns are the only turns we'll be making in this battleship, and reverse (like failure) is not an option. With no ability to back up, and no ability to turn short, we were trapped. There just wasn't enough space to pull out to the left or the right without clipping something, other cars, gas pump, the store itself... whatever

Now ordinarily this is where the gamma radiation starts to kick in. This is where I warn people not to make me angry, because they wouldn't like me if I was angry (I usually do this with my eyes but that's irrelevant to our story - just thought I would point it out). Today I'm not going there. I should, but I'm not. I mean, as I watched this woman get out of her truck all I could see was the frenetic scatter-brained look in her eyes as they darted back and forth; a look more appropriate for a late 80's B-movie animatronic puppet than a human being. You didn't have to be a psychiatrist to see she was not all there. Oh she was there physically, but mentally she was "Star Wars". (Read: In a galaxy far far away). And that's characteristic of someone that over-tasks.

Over-tasking (part of speech: verb \ˌō-vər-ˈtask\ Origin: this blog) def:

1) Multi-tasking taken to the extreme.

2) allocating more brain power to sub-conscious tasks than is actually available and the mind responds by taking brain power from basic conscious functions,making it difficult to do things such as:

1. Listen
2. Pay attention
3. Watch what you're doing

until eventually one fails to:

1. Listen
2. Pay attention
3. Watch what you're doing

I don't know what the lady was thinking about, maybe she was going over her grocery list, maybe she was trying to remember her login to Amazon.com, maybe she was in the process of confirming Fermat's Last Theorem in her head (cause seriously - her eyes were moving really fast) or maybe it was just good ol' fashioned cocaine (cause sometimes the most simple answer is also the right answer)- who knows - all I could safely say was that she probably didn't mean to box us in. That would imply that she was aware of her surroundings and I don't think she actually was.

After getting her gas, she spent the next 5 minutes trying (unsuccessfully) to maneuver the Penske truck so the trailer behind her would clear the gas pumps. She hit the fuel pump barrier solidly 3 times before I (fearing that a tremendous fiery explosion would be the fruit of her labor on her 4th attempt) offered to guide her out. It seems she would have none of it.

My repeated shouts of, "You're not going to make it, you're not going to make it!!!" might as well have been "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!!"I wasn't even marginally on her radar. On her final approach, I once again told her she didn't have enough room - and once again - her response was to ignore both myself, and the branch of physics that says"two objects can not occupy the same space at the same time" and applied more gas. BAM!!! She hits the fuel pump barrier again.

Around about this time I start thinking - doesn't anyone else see this? Isn't there a manager on duty? Isn't anyone going to stop this? I looked in the window of the convenience store but saw no one. Meanwhile, the lady in the Penske truck continued to bang and scrape her way out of the gas station until she was finally got clear. To this day I can't be sure if our disbelief was more due to her "bumper car" approach to driving, or the fact that no one else standing around seemed to think it was a big deal.

Wouldn't we all have been inside of the blast radius had events unfolded as they probably should have? Would anyone have walked away unscathed? Did the manager's 3rd eye see it coming before it happened? Did he feel like he probably stood a better chance of surviving the explosion (that should have occured) from a crouched postion behind the counter? I don't know, but if you had seen the way that car port was smacking those gas-pumps barriers, you'd be hard pressed to argue with his reasoning.