Tales from the Shark Tank

It was an exercise in total, complete, absolute chaos.

It should have been relatively simple. Collect Li, get my houseguest Sarah and her boyfriend Elliot about 3 blocks away (and not out of the way at all), drop Li off to pick up her car, (again, right on my way) drop Sarah and Elliot at my house (half a mile off my route at most), pick up Joseph at his babysitter, take him to my folk’s house for the usual Wednesday evening visit. I allowed 45 minutes for what should have been the first 20 minutes drive, and overall an hour and a half for a total of 45 minutes driving.

I knew we were in trouble when Li and I hit the parking garage to find a line stretching up to the third floor waiting to escape. It only got worse from there. Courtesy of construction delay, the 3 block drive to Elliot’s place of employment took 15 minutes. The alternate route I tried was backed up. The next alternate route was doing its best imitation of a parking lot. All told, what should have been at most a 25 minute drive took an hour and a quarter. I arrived to find Li’s mechanic had closed nearly half an hour before, about 5 minutes before my son’s babysitter was expecting me.

Couldn’t leave Li stranded, so I took her to the lab. Again, that should have been a 3 minute drive. Heck, it wouldn’t have been more than a 20 minute walk, but Li was carrying far too much for that to be practical. Driving, it took over 10 minutes, courtesy of more construction. So now I’m 10 minutes late to get my son, and Elliot and Sarah have not been dropped off. And did I mention I left my cell phone for Sarah, and my husband forgot to give it to her? I couldn’t even call the babysitter.

We went straight to the babysitter’s house. More snarls. More parking lots with street names. Distance from lab to babysitter’s: 2.5 miles. Driving time: 20 minutes. I arrived to find a frightened, crying child sitting on his babysitter’s lap. She wasn’t angry, fortunately, but she had been really worried.

So I comforted Joseph, put him in his booster seat, and took the other two back to my house, arriving thereat over an hour later than anticipated. I called my folks, who were by then also beginning to panic, as by that time it was 40 minutes later than I usually arrive at their door, let alone my own. We agreed to meet at a Chinese restaurant Joseph likes that’s about half way between our homes, as by the time I got to their house we would have had about half an hour before I had to take Joseph home to bed.

I hate construction. I hate construction. Have I mentioned just how much I really, really hate construction?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2003 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Life as I know it. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.