{"id":742,"date":"2012-01-12T05:11:27","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T13:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nothingtoreadhere.com\/?p=742"},"modified":"2012-01-12T05:11:27","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T13:11:27","slug":"special-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/?p=742","title":{"rendered":"Special delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’m starting a new job in a little over a week, but until then, I have some time during the weekdays.\u00a0 This means that I can go places when not everyone else is there.\u00a0 Markets and stores are much less crowded at 10am on a Tuesday than pretty much any other time I used to be able to go.\u00a0 Two days ago was a perfect example; mid-day, I took a trip out to the bank, the post office, and then the drycleaners before coming home, and none of them were crowded.\u00a0 It was great, but that’s not why I’m writing.\u00a0 Nay, friends, I’m writing because my middle stop was a little out of the ordinary.<\/p>\n

As I pulled into the parking lot for the post office, I smiled at the number of empty spaces.\u00a0 I settled on one just a few spaces away from the entrance, which was good since I was going to be carrying a box into the establishment.\u00a0 I walked in and got in line, which was mercifully short – only three parties ahead of me and one was already being helped.\u00a0 Directly in front of me was a woman who had a baby in a carseat with her.\u00a0 The baby was small, and when the woman saw me smiling at the kid, she implored him to say hi to me (which he refused).\u00a0 I asked how old he was, and she said, “Almost three months.”\u00a0 I was thinking about when my kids were that small when I heard a pretty loud crash behind me.\u00a0 If you had frozen time and asked me to predict what caused that sound without looking, my best guess would have been that one of the “Line starts here” stanchions had fallen over.\u00a0 I would have been wrong.\u00a0 I turned around and saw the front of a car partially inside the post office.\u00a0 I shook my head a little and looked more closely.\u00a0 Indeed, a car had run into the building and broken the lower panes of the window through which it entered.\u00a0 Next to it was an uprooted parking sign that had a Q-tip-esque mound of dirt attached to where it had once been firmly in the ground.\u00a0 Part of the car (a piece of fender maybe) was inside the post office, a good five feet from the window.\u00a0 My first coherent thought was something like, “Well that’s interesting.”<\/p>\n

Other people were not as calm.\u00a0 Some ran outside immediately to see if the driver was hurt (which is a better reaction to have, I’d say).\u00a0 A group magically appeared around the car, assessing the situation.\u00a0 The woman at the front of the line kept asking, “Do we need to dial 911?\u00a0 Do we need to dial 911?”\u00a0 A woman near the door finally told her that it had been done already and that the lady who was driving the car was shaken up but fine.\u00a0 “She hit the gas instead of the brake,” she explained.\u00a0 “That’s an important distinction not to fuck up,” I said inside my head.<\/p>\n

The lady with the baby and I made eye contact.\u00a0 We both made “big eyes” to intimate “wow” to each other, but she immediately turned more distracted.\u00a0 She took a step away from the carseat on the ground, walked back to it, left again, and returned again.\u00a0 “You ok?” I asked.\u00a0 “I just remembered that I’m parked next to that spot,” she said.\u00a0 “Oh yeah,” I thought, “I guess it’s good that I parked a few more down.”\u00a0 “Will you watch him for a second?” she asked me while pointing to the carseat. \u00a0 “Of course,” I said, and she left me – a complete and total stranger – with her almost three-month old baby.\u00a0 She came back less than a minute later and said that her car was somehow spared.\u00a0 “The police and ambulance are on their way,” she said, but she still looked really nervous.\u00a0 “I’m sure she’ll be ok,” I said reassuringly.\u00a0 “Oh, no, it’s just that I hope their cars don’t block me in.\u00a0 Maybe I should leave now so that doesn’t happen.”\u00a0 We collectively decided that since she was now next in line, she’d take her chances and stay where she was.\u00a0 Only one of the three postal workers was helping customers at that moment, since the other two were getting information from the driver, telling people what happened, etc.<\/p>\n

Just a few minutes later, a male postal worker resumed his post and waved me over.\u00a0 “You don’t see that every day,” I said, figuring that that was the most appropriate quip.\u00a0 I was wrong again.\u00a0 “Well, four or five times actually,” he said.\u00a0 “Really?\u00a0 All here?”\u00a0 He nodded.\u00a0 “Why?” I asked, not really expecting him to have an answer.\u00a0 “The parking lot comes right up to the side of the building, and people push the wrong pedal,” he said matter-of-factly. I let it go, but I couldn’t imagine that enough people make that exact error in that exact location to have him witness four or five cars drive into his place of work.\u00a0 Shows what I know.<\/p>\n

I walked past the crowd to my car, backed out of the spot very slowly (by pushing the correct pedals, might I add), and headed over to pick up my drycleaning.\u00a0 Thinking about what had just happened, I wondered if it was some kind of cosmic balance thing: oh sure, you can go run errands when it’s less crowded, but be careful – that’s when the highest incidence of pedal confusion happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m starting a new job in a little over a week, but until then, I have some time during the weekdays.\u00a0 This means that I can go places when not everyone else is there.\u00a0 Markets and stores are much less crowded at 10am on a Tuesday than pretty much any other time I used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,222],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crash","tag-post-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}