The Craziest Day

When things start to go really wrong or not the way you thought they would, a common saying is to "expect the unexpected". As soon as things started to go wrong yesterday, even expecting the unexpected could not prepare for the craziness of my day.

It all started when I started work at noon yesterday. I went to Restaurant Depot to get food for the 90 college volunteers we have this week from TCNJ. I am at the check out and I find out that I do not have enough money on my company card. Now this is not a big issue - I simply have to call my boss and ask her to put more money on my card. There is definitely fine print in my job description that reads "guaranteed to be stranded in a store with an empty card".

I arrive at work with all the food I have purchased and am unloading it when I get the news that all the pipes in the shower and bathroom trailers had froze over night. This means we have 90 volunteers and 0 showers. Just imagine 90 sweaty, tired, smelly college kids coming back from the work sites and not being able to shower. This is what I was imagining ensuing:

We called the plumbers to see if they could help us but they replied that they could do nothing for frozen pipes. So Emma and I filled the sinks in the kitchen with hot water, grabbed some buckets and got to work! For two hours we were pouring water down the drains of the showers, blow drying the sink pipes with hairdryers borrowed from volunteers and chipping half inch thick ice off the shower trailer floors. I am pleased to inform you that we got all the showers up and running and the sinks! I have never been happier to see running water in my life.

I also should mention that at the same time I found out that the pipes had froze I also found out that the oven broke, the stove top burners need to be manually lit because the pilot light is weak, the heat in one of the rooms broke and as I am walking back to my office after a half hour of scraping ice, the smoke detector starts chirping. I am running around trying to make sure dinner can be made with our broken appliances, I move a space heater into the room with the broken heat, and at this point I don't even hear the chirping smoke detector because I am so overwhelmed.

The oven part won't be in until the next day so we basically improvise dinner. I feel like I have been improvising the entire day at this point so it doesn't even phase me. Dinner is cooking, the room with the broken heat is (fingers crossed) hopefully warming up and the smoke detector is still chirp, chirp, chirping. I make a run to Winn Dixie to get french bread to go with the pasta and upon driving there notice that my car is making a loud, gurgling sound coming from the engine. Now my engine has been sounding loud for a few weeks now and when the service engine soon light came on a few days ago I had an appointment for this upcoming Friday. I discuss with my dad and he says NO WAY am I driving that thing any further. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I must tow my car.

So I call AAA and they inform me that someone will be there in the next 45 minutes which means I will be late to my weekly Tuesday YAV meeting. Can I get a break? So I help the volunteers finish cooking dinner and as they are getting settled down and I prepare to make my announcements. I start off by thanking them for being so understanding during the chaos and then my phone rings. The tow trunk is here! So I hand over my announcements to the group leader and meet the tow truck guy. He hooks up my car, I grab my stuff and he drives both me and my car to our proper homes for the evening.

I found out today that my muffler needs to be replaced because it has rusted out from normal wear and tear (phew!) I am much more relaxed today but boy oh boy what a day yesterday was.

Lesson from the Journey: My car in its current state sounds like a motorcycle. You can hear me coming from miles away and in the words of the tow truck man "you can't creep up on no one with your car like that".