A couple of weeks ago my parents went out of town to do a favor for some elderly relatives. My parents were going to open up our relatives’ summer residence to air it out, clean it up, and make sure that no repairs needed to be done before it was time for our relatives to come and take up residence there.
So on the day that they were going up there I got a call from my mom. I thought she was just calling to let me know that she and my dad had gotten there safely. But I was wrong.
“Hi, Jen,” she said, when I picked up the phone.
“Hey, Mom,” I replied, “how are you guys doing?”
“Well,” she said, “suppose that you had gone on a trip specifically to get a house ready for summer. What would be the one thing you would not want to forget?”
“Um, shorts? Sunglasses? Your computer! (And so you can all see where my priorities lie: creature comforts and Internet access, BABY!)
“Well, let me ask this in a different way,” said my mom, taking pity on my pathetic guessing skills. “What if you had to get inside the house in order to work on the house? What would be the one thing you really need?”
“Oh-keys!” I shouted, so proud of myself for coming up with the right answer. And then the consequences of their not having keys dawned on me. “Oh. So what are you gonna do?” (I should mention here that this town is very, very far away from where my parents live, and possibly involves needing 2 separate, specialized planes to get to. So there was no question of anyone just running home to pick up a few forgotten things.)
“Well first we went to Lowe’s, because we thought that maybe they could just magically make us a key. And they laughed at us, Jen-they actually laughed at us.”
“Uh,” I replied, struggling desperately to control my own laughter, “what about a locksmith?”
“Well, ok, about that-the only locksmith around here is 30 minutes away,” she said. (And I can’t remember why, but he couldn’t-or-wouldn’t-drive out to where my parents were.) “So what they told us to do at Lowe’s was to call someone who has a copy of the key, get them to take it to a locksmith where they are, get that locksmith to decipher the magical, mystical alchemical formula of the key, and then have that locksmith call the locksmith up here, and then he could make us a key, and then we could go and pick it up.”
Um, yeah.
So I know that you will be shocked-SHOCKED!-to learn that that multi-step, multi-person, multi-state plan completely fell apart at like, Step Zero and A Half.
So then my dad called the relative whose residence this is, and he said, “Well, there is another way in. Just get a pry bar and break open one of the windows.”
Hm. Never would’ve thought of that one.
“So where are you now?”, I asked, wondering if they had some kind of Plan B.
“We’re on our way back from Home Depot with a pry bar in the backseat,” replied my dad
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