By: Toc
[2004-02-05]
How I Broke My Briefcase
Mental note: get a jack for changing tires and smashing windows.
I broke my briefcase.
It's not badly broken; I think I can fix it. Here's how I broke it:
I decided to work at home this afternoon because (1) I can and (2)
there are a lot of sick people at the office, and I wanted to minimize
my chances of catching the flu. So at about 2:15 I headed for home.
On the road, a white car suddenly swerved into my lane and almost hit
me. I stood on my horn, but the car kept on coming. When I saw that the
other car wasn't going to stop, I hit my brakes.
The other
car didn't stop until it smacked into the guard rail. I slowed down to
see what the other driver would do next. The car slowly rolled to a
stop; then the driver slumped sideways into the passenger's seat.
I stopped my car, hopped out, and walked-ran to the passenger side of
the other car. The driver was slumped over, on his side and almost on
his back, looking upward. His eyes were open, but he wasn't moving.
I checked the doors; all doors but the driver's were locked. And since
the car was wedged up against the guard rail, I couldn't get to the
unlocked door. I banged on the window; no response - the guy didn't
move.
I figured the driver must have had a heart attack or
stroke or even a diabetic seizure. I pounded on the windows and yelled
at the guy to get up. No luck.
Next step: I waved my arms at
oncoming traffic while I ran back to my car. I looked for something to
help, and eyed my briefcase. I grabbed the briefcase, ran back to the
other car, and used it to try to break the rear-passenger side window.
Now, I figured the window would give way after a few good blows. After
all, it was glass, and my briefcase is a heavy piece of equipment
filled with books. I was mistaken: the window held. Oh, I scratched the
thing - I even left little burgundy colored marks on the glass where my
briefcase hit it - but the window didn't budge.
After a few
good heaves I stood back; it was then I noticed another car that had
pulled up. The driver of the third car wanted to know why I was trying
to break into a car sitting on the side of the highway. I can imagine
what I looked like, assaulting a car sitting in the emergency lane.
With cars whizzing by I shouted that the driver was passed out, and
asked the new fellow to call for help. Mental note: investigate cell
phone prices.
Because my briefcase solution didn't work, I
decided to push the car backwards and away from the guard rail; that
way, I reasoned, I should be able to get to the driver's side door. I
was parked a little too close to pull this off, so I ran to my car,
threw the briefcase in, and backed my car up about 30 feet. Then I ran
to the front of the first car and pushed. Still no luck: apparently the
driver had hit the emergency brake before he passed out, or had his
foot on the brake pedal in (what I was afraid was) a stroke-induced
rigor-mortis-like state. At least, that was this layman's prognosis.
Don't laugh: I was an English major, not a doctor.
I pounded
on the window some more, and shouted at the motionless driver. I looked
at the third driver; he was still in his car, on the car phone. Out of
ideas, I decided to try a tire iron or jack on the first guy's window.
He still hadn't moved.
I ran back to my car and to the trunk.
No tire iron or jack - only a spare tire. Mental note: get a jack for
changing tires and smashing windows.
I was running low on
ideas. In desperation, I grabbed my old standby - the slightly
scratched burgundy briefcase - and ran back to the car.
I was
about to cut loose with a second assault when I saw the driver
twitching! He wasn't doing much, but I could see his shoulder and hand
moving. I shouted at him several times to unlock the passenger door; no
response. I shouted at him to hang in there - that help was on the way.
He didn't unlock the door, but the car did start to inch forward. A
mystery solved: he had been standing on the brake when he passed out.
That was the good news. The bad news is that the third driver was
parked about 20 feet in front of the now-revived driver's car. So I ran
between the cars and began pushing back on the first car. About all I
accomplished was ruining a good pair of slacks. And after a few seconds
the now semi-conscious driver stood on the brake again. He had also
half sat up and opened his driver-side window a few inches.
I hopped the guard rail and stood beside the driver's side door. I asked him how he was doing; no answer.
It's funny: I noticed that he had a mark on the bridge of his nose,
like maybe from where a pair of glasses had gotten smashed against his
face. But I couldn't tell you what he looked like. Odd.
I
told him to unlock the doors; he mumbled, "I can't." I kept talking to
him and telling him to reach over and unlock his passenger-side door. I
realized that I was a dummy when all three remaining door locks
suddenly popped open. The guy had hit the unlock button on his door
panel. Here I was telling him to reach across the car, when all he had
to do was push a button about three inches from his finger. Even in a
stupor, he was thinking more clearly than I was at the time.
I ran around to the other side of the car and opened the door. I was
about to grab his wrist to check his pulse (it made sense at the
moment) when a police arrived. So I stood back and let the cop take
over.
With all this free time suddenly on my hands I struck
up a conversation with the driver of the third car, thanking him for
his help. He had done a good turn, but he didn't miss the opportunity
to tell me that instead of messing with the guy's car I should have
just gotten to a phone and called the police. If I had broken into the
car, he told me, the driver could have taken me to court. I thought
about asking the third driver if he was a lawyer, but decided against
it. After all, why argue with a guy who is being reasonable (and maybe
a lawyer to boot) when I'm feeling frazzled?
Anyway, just
simply leaving the possibly dying driver sitting there never occurred
to me. To be honest, I was worried about what I was going to do if and
when I got the door open. I'm glad the cop showed up when he did; I was
so fixed on getting the driver out of the car that I probably would
have tried to pull him out through the passenger's side car with 80 MPH
traffic zooming by not five feet away.
That was pretty much
it. Another cruiser showed up, then an ambulance; the officers got my
name and personal info, then told me to go home. When I got home I
noticed for the first time the damage to my briefcase (some of the
fittings popped loose; I think I can fix it). And that's how I broke my
briefcase.
I didn't do anything noteworthy, except maybe put
myself in harm's way in case the really did need help (A for effort?).
The guy with the cell phone told me I was a hero; the truth is, though,
I just wanted to go home and go to bed. I remembered the time as a
freshman in high school, when I came across the lady who'd shot her
heart out with a .38 - kids talk about that sort of thing being cool,
but I was just sad; I never did tell anyone at school about it. It's
different when it's real.
I was driving down a local back road and passed an old guy's house. He had two Triumph TR-3's, old sports cars. Also, out by the curb was a bunch of junk. "Whoa!" says I! There was a nice saddle-leather briefcase! I made a U-turn, and picked it up, noticing that it had a broken hinge. I took it to luggage repair place and got it fixed, fine. Then, some junky kid breaks the crap out of the briefcase and robbed me of three calculators. OK, so couple of years later, a guy goes to Thailand and leaves me all of his junk from storage, including a brand new very fine briefcase. Except this one has two different combinations to open it, which took a long time to figure out. Also, a nice heavy fountain pen with gold and iridium point.
Also, I admire your very valiant effort at being a good samaritan; I would like to think that I would have done as well.
No way.....Something I actually liked. It was..funny actually, but I would have watched the guy. It's funny seeing you earthmonkies.
I grew up in rural south Alabama, and there are lots of two-lane back roads to traverse when you're trying to get from one place to another. Anyway, one night, when I was about sixteen, I was on one of these dark, seldom traveled roads, and I saw a pickup truck pulled over to the side with his emergency flashers on. As soon as I had pulled over and got out of my car to talk to the man, who I could barely see but who looked much bigger and older than me, I realized that I was a moron and that I would probably be raped and left for dead. Instead, even when I made him stay fifty feet away next to his car and shout all pertinent information to me, he was just upset that he hadn't been able to get someone to stop sooner. My aunt's house wasn't far away, and I went there and got my Uncle Chris to go help the guy, but not until after he had thoroughly scolded me about how dangerous what I had done was.
moral of the story: If it's dark, and you're a 5'5 female weakling, God will forgive you if you don't stop to help out this once.
Yuh, I did a web-search for "samaritan robbery," and there are a lot of things. Too, there's the part about getting sued for helping, so even CPR would make me think twice. But God help you if you're on a back road in Alabama after dark and you're intentions aren't pure.
Hey, Posthumous! Because of the last Zirealism with the teddy bear, I was looking at Winnie_the_Pooh_Worships_Satan.mov, and at one point, Winnie the Pooh starts singing the "Fish Heads" song! It's true!
You poor sad bastard.
The guy with the cell phone told me I was a hero;
(You need so to believe you are the humble hero; you are not.)
the truth is, though, I just wanted to go home and go to bed.
(Goodness, how tired you must have been, poopsy. Christ, give me a break.)
I remembered the time as a freshman in high school, when I came across the lady who'd shot her heart out with a .38
(?????!!!???!)
- kids talk about that sort of thing being cool, but I was just sad;
(Again, really now. You are so, so deep and above average)
I never did tell anyone at school about it.
(Only the loner girl you hung out with who wore black all of the time and had yellow teeth. She, like you, was a tortured soul. You both felt a devine right to whine about the world and how shallow people are. Although she was kind of fat, with breath bad, you got drunk and fucked her anyway; you never talked to her again.)
It's different when it's real.
(This story would be different if it were real too.)
You mean it's fiction!?!?
It's divine. I looked it up. And "Again," I notice that lexicostatistically a lot of people are prefacing on opinion with it. As if by saying "Again," they might have got by before, or mistakenly assumed that they were correct when they are off the wall as usual and nobody called them on it, but by saying "Again," they are implying that "Well, you let me slide with some off-the-wall bullshit before, so you ought to do so "Again." No. This time it doesn't get by. New instance, so you have to come up with a different perception and a different analysis. Again, you might well take exception with my taking exception to your taking exception. Do you mean, but then again, as if considering an alternative? But, no! What you mean is "same shit, so same analysis." Kind of a K-mart style of pseudointellectualism, one-size fits all, eh?
We had a hurrican that came through about 4 summers ago. There was a great deal of flooding, including our house (I still don't have carpet in my room, nor my parents' in theirs.) So, the next day we went to a parish vihicle depository of sorts in which they had a large mound of sand and sacks to make sand bags.
There was an elderly man there by himself; he must have been 60ish or so. I filled his bags for him.
He offered me cash, but I turned it down. I felt bad about the whole deal, seeing all the old people barely lifting their shovels. Euthenasia. Please kill me when I can't shovel sand.
Plug it, butt plug! It was a good story, true or not.
I get them every now and again. I had one removed and he decided to use no anesthestetics (sgrosslyic). He only charged $15, though. Mmm toes!
I hope that by the time you cain't lift stuff that you got the good sense to move to higher ground. There is one 82-year old still lifting more than 300lbs, and one loco in York, Pa. where they make the barbells, he lifts 1,000lbs how many years old he is, he lifted a half-ton 92 times! One local guy just came back from Slidell, he said he stayed right on Lake Ponchatrain in a million dollar house, but if I lived on Lake Ponchatrain, I'd want a stilt-house fishing shack.
With a house on stilts you wouldn't be completely safe unless you had a ladder instead of stairs, to keep the penguins out. Then you'd hate yourself on grocery day.
I would have a ladder, then I'd have to watch out for ladder day saints. But I'd get a trap door too so all I'd have to look out for is trap door spiders.
I'm surprised that you had to look up divine: a silly little error on my part. I promise not to use 'again' again if you promise not to use 'pseudointellectualism' again. Kind of a Barnes and Noble style of 'pseudointellectualism', one-size fits all, eh coffee breath?
"Kind of a K-mart style of pseudointellectualism, one-size fits all, eh?" ("He's so cool! He writes the way people speak" Lisa Simpson)
Isn't it 'Hieronymus', as in St. Jerome or Hieronymus Cock?
The briefcase story is true; it happened about four years ago. So was the Deluxe Carpet Cleaning story, which happened just a few months afterwards.
A bizarre addendum to the carpet story is that the carpet cleaning company called me about half a dozen times over the next two years saying, "Thank you for using our company in the past; our records show you're due for another cleaning, and we wanted to know what we could do to earn your business again."
I asked them if being terrorized in my own home was part of the basic service, or whether that was offered gratis. They eventually stopped calling after I (get this) threatened to tell the police they were harassing me.
-Toc
The .38 lady at first reminded me of the King story where the kids find a body, and it's their secret for a while. I didn't realize that you were riding around in a rescue wagon. There's a news group, alt.binaries.grotesque, that has lots of gross pictures; autopsies, diseases, morgue pictures of gang murders, people hit by trains, etc.. The best California burgers are In&Out Burgers, people alter the bumper stickers so it says, "In&Out urge" but the ultimate best burger is Nation's. Nation's is a strange kind of place, they sell whole pies and great burgers.
The King story *wasn't* "Dreamcatcher", because I just watched that, and it was so bad that I couldn't turn it off, couldn't even move my head to make my eyes look away, so I remember it all, and there wasn't kids finding a body in it.
And as for buttplug: methinks I sense a bit of antidisestablishmentarianism in his/her furious scribblings.
For my money, the best burgers are the ones eaten while hallucinating. Synesthesia is cool.
The King story was called "The Body." It was made into the 1986 Rob Reiner movie "Stand By Me," with Richard Dreyfuss and a young Will Weaton.
Also in the film was River Phoenix, who died seveal years later at age 23 of "acute mutiple drug ingestion" -- he mixed heroin with his cocaine and crystal meth, and then tried to get rid of the awful sick feeling with a Valium.
It must have been the Valium! It's funny that the longest word in English is similar to the longest word in
Bulgarian. Coincidence? I think not!
I think antidisestablishmentarianism used to be the longest word in the English language; any more I'm sure a product of some pharmaceutical company holds that distinction.
Speaking of words: in college I had a job as a research assistant for an English professor whose specialty was neology. One assigment was to review dictionaries, highlighter in hand, and mark entries that were derived from British English.
That's right: my job was reading dictionaries.
Rendered in English, the Cyrillic term on Biscuit's Bulgarian site is "Neproteevokonstututsuonctvuvatelstvuvayeetye!"
Hey, I just noticed they misspelled my pen name in the story above. I demand a recount: who knows how many people would have voted for me if my pen name had been spelled correctly?
The Bulgarian word, the translation offered is: "do not act against the constitution." Similar to "antidisestablismentarianism" but not similar to "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
Your name is Bic?
It's Hieronymus Bosch, Hieronymous Bisquick
buttplug is an angry person. He or she is so full of hate!
my money is on buttplug being female. No male is so unfeeling.
i think it's healthy that H biscuit, the old warhorse, has a challenger at last.
I think it will end in tears or a marriage.
In&Out Burgers are great... but it's a long drive from Texas to get them.