I knew this week was going to suck before it started. When you work in a department of two people, and the other guy goes on vacation for a week, you expect that you're going to suffer. However, I didn't expect that the entirety of Long Island was going to suffer with me just because Mauro was away.
It all started on Sunday night. Since I had to be available to cover problems at the office early, I decided to make my way to the place I stay near work early. I left around 11pm, and amazingly enough made it there before midnight.
You see, after a quick trip through Manhattan, I again found myself in moderate traffic on the LIE. This weeks sports car race was against a fellow in a Dodge Viper. After whipping Ferrari boy's butt last week, Viper guy seemed like a good challenge. We jockeyed for position for a while, with me sometimes pulling ahead during the crowded areas. As soon as we hit a straightaway, through, I heard this monstrous engine roar and he was right back next to me. At one point, we were both cruising between 75 and 80MPH, and started approaching a police car that had somebody pulled over. I slowed down, but Mr. Viper continued unabashed. I am therefore forced to admit that Viper guy has way more balls than I do. Or perhaps he just has a very small brain, who can say. I've never seen the attraction of owning a very expensive car from an American company. Like my father used to tell me: "no matter how much money somebody spends on a Corvette, never forget that they're still driving a Chevy".
I tried to get some sleep, but a thunderstorm knocked out the building power at the office and I got paged by the monitoring system at 4:35am. Bonus: the power was off in the place I was sleeping. I nearly killed myself stumbling around, disoriented from waking up at such an odd hour, in the dark. I had to use the little LCD panel on the pager as a tiny flashlight to find my way out to the car.
Welcome to Monday morning.
On Tuesday, I'd gotten a paniced request to fix a computer system in Queens. Since I can't really leave the office unmanned for that long during the day, I was forced to wait until 5pm to leave. The trip normally takes around 40 minutes, I told them I could probably make it by around 6 considering the traffic.
Then the rain started. "Rain" isn't quite a good enough word. "Deluge" comes to mind as a better one. There was so much water coming down that I felt unprepared, it seemed I should have put two of every animal in my trunk before departing into a storm like this. I called up the person I was going to visit and mentioned I was in a monsoon, and would probably be a bit late. I gave them the option of rescheduing until the next day, but they declined--this needed to be fixed NOW. OK, I kept going.
6pm? I wasn't even close. Just to make sure it wasn't just the LIE, I tried all the other paths through that area. The rain, err, deluge had cars everywhere stuck. I rang my appointment again and said I was still at least 15 minutes away, maybe more. She says "well, if you've come this far, I guess I'll wait." You guess? Damn right you'll wait. I'd just gone through an hour of hell to make it to your place, and you think you've got the option of leaving? I don't think so. The mood I was in at this point, if I'd have shown up and they'd have left, I'd have went to the local hardware store, bought a sledgehammer, and demolished their whole fucking office.
The rain let up as soon as I arrived. I thought I was safe. Two hours later, when I walked out, it started right up again. It was waiting for me, I know it. I almost got knocked off the road by a guy in a station wagon pulling, you guessed it, a boat. That night he'd have made better progress having the boat pull the car, I think.
Wednesday morning, the people I visited call again. The storm on my way back? It generated some lightening that hit the building and blew up the very computer I'd gone out of my way to fix. So it was even more of an emergency to repair it this time than the previous one, because one more day of downtime was involved. My original plan for the day had been to hit the gym at 5pm, take a shower at 6, and make it to Pub Night at 7:30. Ha. In reality, I didn't leave work until 7 (by which time the gym had closed), and it tooks me several hours to straighten out the mess in Queens. I didn't make it to Manhattan and a beer until 10:15. The grill at the restaurant had closed at 10, and the whole place shut down at 11. I decided to drop off my friend Melissa at her 93rd street apartment on my way back, as she'd just blown all her cab money on her own vacation the previous week. Uptown traffic was moderate, and I was on my way along the FDR by 11:15. Cross the Triboro Bridge, I was told, and off to Long Island I went. As I went through the toll booth, there was a backup to get on the bridge. I didn't have any other options at that point but to wait, figuring it was just a local delay due to merging or something.
An hour later, I wasn't even halfway across the bridge. And the bridge is all uphill on the part I was driving across.
I think there's one circle of Hell where people are stuck forever in slow moving backups, climbing uphill, with a manual transmission. This is the place that all the people who never use their turn signals get sent. After an hour of this, my clutch leg was aching. I sometimes have this nightmare where I end up with this huge, malformed left leg from all the extra work it gets in these traffic jams. And through some Lamarckian genetic twist, I have kids who come out with the same monster leg, and everybody makes fun of them. When I bought this car, my girlfriend at the time predicted this pain. Given the amount of driving I do, not getting an automatic made me a "fucking idiot". I had thought she was just being bitchy to me because of that nasty yeast infection she was fighting off, but lately I'm starting to think that maybe she had a point after all.
Another half an hour went by before I saw the cause of the backup. If I'm stuck in traffic for that long, I want to see dead people at the end. That's the only thing that makes me feel better: "yeah, the traffic sucked, but those dead people in front of me had it even worse". I was dissapointed this time; no corpses, just a work crew. But what a work crew. When I say there was a hole in the road, you're probably thinking a big pothole or something. Not even close. There were two lanes blocked off for this one. The hole was so deep, I think they hired Jules Verne to manage the operation. The last time I saw so many men working in one hole it was during an ad for that "World Record Gang-Bang" video I keep getting spam about. After navigating past the hole, the rest of the trip back was simple. Total travel time was over two hours--just to get from Manhattan to exit 50 on the LIE, which is less than a 35 mile trip.
It's now 9:20 Friday night, and I haven't left the office yet, even though I'd intended on splitting out of here by 6. You see, it seems that there's an accident so large that they've shut down a huge stretch of the LIE. Accordingly, all the alternate routes are packed to the gills as well. There are most certainly dead people involved with this one, which is a small consolation. But I wonder if those people would still be alive today had Mauro not gone on vacation...