The End Must Be Near

What an insanely crazy 24+ hours! I’m almost afraid to ask “What else can go wrong?”, for fear I will just jinx myself. But honestly, What Else Can Go Wrong?

It all started yesterday afternoon when I decided to take my car in for some general maintenance and to get the wipers fixed. Mainly the wipers. They would just go off at random times and intervals. Not at all annoying (sarcasm). Anyway, nothing to crazy about that other than it’s an incredible pain in the ass that requires getting up at the butt crack of dawn so that my wife can drive me to work, then drive the kid to school, and then drive herself to work, on time.

Oh, did I mention that while we were taking my car to get worked on, all the way on the other side of town (because it’s really the closest, most honest and reliable dealership), that one of those freak summer storms blew up. You know the ones that drop like 5 inches of rain in a half an hour, causing a large portion of the city to be flooded and without power.

45 minutes later we finally drop off my car and head back home so that I can fry about 10 pounds of bacon for a breakfast party thingy we had at the office this morning. Don’t Ask. Finally about 9PM last night I finished up with everything and I was going to sit down, watch a little TV and work on a post for today. Only, and I’m not making this up (seriously), when I turn on the TV all I get is a black screen with a message that says something like “Your Service Has Been Disconnected. Please call….” Just fantastic. Fearing I might not have paid the bill, the first thing I do is go and make sure I actually paid the bill, and I did. Whew!

After an hour or so on the phone with the cable company, it came down to someone, somehow, mistakenly flagged our account for disconnection, they were sorry and it was going to be up to 8 hours before our service would be restored. Figures. My DVR better still have recorded Rescue Me.

I tell myself it’s no big deal. It’s late and I don’t need to watch TV because I have a post to write. Well, little did I know, but my wife was in the other room with the laptop surfing the web when, and these are her words, it just quit working. Upon pressing her further I finally got a little more detail as to what she was talking about. (side rant: why is it that most women can talk for ten minutes on what could be said in 4 or 5 words, but when asked for example “what isn’t working?”, they’re tongue tied?) Anyway I pressed for more detail and according to her the screen went white, a couple seconds later there was a small popping noise and then nothing.

After giving it a once over and exhausting all of my skills, I concluded… it was dead. WTF? At this point I’m almost afraid to even go to bed thinking it might collapse and kill me in the middle of the night. But alas, I was tired, and had to get up in a few short hours so we could start the carpool, so I summoned my courage and went to sleep.

Fortunately when I woke up everything seemed to be alright, the bed hadn’t collapsed, the house was still here and bonus, the cable was back on. We all dragged ourselves out of bed, got ready and even made it to work and school on time. Since I was at work almost an hour before normal, my plan was to just finish one of the many posts I had semi started and maybe even sneak in one for tomorrow. I should have known better.

When I got to work I quickly realized our entire network was down and things just went down hill from there. I won’t go into all of the details of the many work crisis today but I will say that I would probably be further ahead if I just called in sick.

Then to top off an already bad day, my wife calls me and tells me that her car won’t start. Well, it will start, it just won’t stay running unless you give it constant gas. So my wife borrows the company car, picks up our son from school, picks me up from work and we head back downtown so I can have a look at her car. Sure enough the thing just dies if you let off the gas. Not wanting to pay to have the thing towed, I decide that I can drive her car all the way across town to the dealership and just power brake it at the stop lights. After the car died about 40 times and what seemed like an eternity, we finally get the thing to the dealership.

Our first stroke of luck comes when we realize that my in-laws are out of town for the weekend and they have a vehicle just sitting out their house. Which is good news as my wife needs to return the company car because it’s already been spoken for tomorrow.

So here I am sitting at the in-laws, borrowing their car and computer to write this post, wondering what else can possibly go wrong.