billpalmer.net

Make strange things happen in one easy step

Want to know how to get crazy, one in a million things to start happening? Just decide that you're going to move, and then watch as the weirdness coalesces around you. That's right, I'm moving the whole operation southward. I think of it as taking a vacation to South Beach and then just staying there. But anyway, the weirdness in the final forty-eight hours prior to my move has been steadily building. No one thing to set off all the alarms, but a growing cacophony of nonsense nonetheless.

Ever try using your cell phone with your eyes closed? That's what I've been doing for the past two days, because while my phone itself is still functional, its screen has left the building. This phone was already contending for the title of worst cell phone I've ever owned, and now it just took the prize. Actually, I'm kind of having fun trying to see just how much of the phone I can still use by simply knowing all the menus by heart. And trying to blindly navigate your way to the people you need to reach in your invisible address book is precisely what you want to be doing while you're in the middle of moving two hundred miles, right? See, I'm looking for the positive spin here.

And the poetic. My entire stint here in this area has been marked by the various hurricanes, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise that we're under threat of one on the day I'm finally leaving the area. Actually, this one's a tropical storm, and it's kicking up rain and tornadoes more than anything else, but you see, this is JUNE. Hurricanes don't happen in June. The first storm of the season comes in August, when you're throwing an iPod Party. Or September, when your sister is getting married while large objects are blowing past outside. But this particular storm has been kind enough to make a special appearance just to see me off. I'm touched.

Perhaps the best part is that fate has decided to take this moment to remind me of residences past, as it took two consecutive instances of FedEx emailing me to say that they couldn't deliver a package because I wasn't home, at a time when I was home, with no slip left on the front door, before I finally figured out that for some reason, they were trying to deliver a package to a place that I haven't lived in for years. No big deal, I'll just call FedEx and get them to deliver it to my current address tomorrow. Nah, that's not going to work, I won't be living here tomorrow. Alright, I'll just have them hang onto it and deliver it to my next address once I'm actually living there. No, that's not going to work either, because the package just happens to have two tickets to the NBA Finals inside. For the game tomorrow.

As I'm straightening this all out in my head, the FedEx guy arrives (because I love irony). Does he magically have my package? Nope, he's got some other package, along with a story of how a tornado just blew out a storefront a mile or two down the road. Because if there's one thing I love more than moving in a hurricane, it's moving in a tornado. Keeps you on your toes, and I could use the exercise.

So I call FedEx and ask them where I can go to pick up my missing package this evening (because the door slip with the pickup address on it is hanging on the door of a place I haven't lived at for years), and they give me a nice set of directions that has me getting off a Turnpike exit that doesn't exist, at which point I realize I'm pretty much on my own. Hey, no problem, one last opportunity to get lost in the hopeless mush of roads in this area that all go in a diagonal circle and never do intersect with each other. So after getting my fill of random roads that I hoped the FedEx facility just might be hiding on, irony strikes yet again as I suddenly find myself stuck behind a slow-moving FedEx truck. Suddenly the one functioning brain cell in my head screams "follow that truck!" And so I do...and I end up in a Wendy's parking lot. But across the street? The FedEx facility. Hey, that was too easy.

While I'm inside claiming my package (surprisingly easy to do, considering I didn't have the door slip), the other customer in the building utters the Line Of The Day: "You have to be smarter than the piece of paper you're writing on." I still haven't decided what it means.

So I got my tickets, everything's set to go, and for one added bit of punctuational humor, I turn on the television this evening and they break into the broadcast to run the following message:



Now don't that just sum it up?