Hi Nichole,
Man I’ll tell ya, nothin’s easy.
Annie Rose, Bryan, and their illegally cute son Kaz are moving to Tucson. Kathy and I spent all Monday morning packing our shit which amounts to clothes (2 shorts, 2 shirts, 2 underwears, and 1 flip flops per person), 2 coolers (one devoted entirely to beer), our own pillows (we never depend on motel pillows), a portable stereo system, like seventy cds, (just in case we inexplicably need to listen to music we never listen to at home), and all of our brooms, mops, dust pans, scrubbing devices, and gallons of heinous chemical cleaning fluids. Annie’s new house may need a little sprucing up. We completely fill, to the gills, the Ford Expedition, check to make sure we have everything, get into a biblical argument about something that I can’t even remember, I remove all my stuff, bring it back into the house and announce that I am not going. “So is this what you really want?” I ask rhetorically. After we get my shit back into the vehicle we head out of town with our marriage mostly repaired within about fifteen miles.
So the plan is we are to meet Annie Rose and Kaz at the airport. As you know, you are not allowed to stop in the passenger pick-up/drop-off zone at the airport, so I slow to two miles an hour, Kathy shoulder roles out of the Expedition, bounces to her feet and goes to baggage claim to find Annie Rose and Kaz. I proceed to drive in circles around Sky Harbor International Airport (one of the largest in the world) in 110 degree heat, over and over, and over again until mom, daughter, baby, and luggage are waiting at the curb in front of baggage claim. I risk coming to a full stop, note the armed guards rustling in alarm at our lack of forward movement, scream to the fam, “HURRY THE FUCK UP!”, luggage is thrown in, baby tossed in, Annie jumps into the rear seat, Kathy in the front, all doors slam simultaneously, Annie looks over her shoulder and screams “STEP ON IT FOR GODS SAKE!” I stomp the gas, the tachometer shoots up to 5000 rpms and the truck grinds forward at a rate of approximately ten feet an hour. It appears that the protracted slow speed circling of the airport in the 110 degree heat cooked away the transmission fluid and the gears are slipping. So it begins.
Finally we pick up Annie’s brother Ben and slip and rev our way down I-10 towards Tucson. The motel is nice. Kathy and I stay at this place every time we come to Tucson. We get adjoining rooms and install Annie Rose, Ben, Kaz, Kathy, Scott, and what has now become a stupid amount of stuff into the rooms. The schlepping of the luggage from the truck, up three flights of stairs, to the rooms scares the motel management. “Who are these people?” management would wonder. “How many of them are there?” management would quiver. “How long will they stay?” management would calculate while reaching for the phone. Call the authorities. Which authorities? Realizing that it is a week day in the middle of summer in the Sonoran desert and there are no other guests in the three hundred room motel the manager thinks better of calling in the constabulary and we settle into profuse beer consumption and wait for Annie Roses’ husband, Bryan, to arrive with the Budget Rent-a-car moving truck containing all of their worldly possessions.
Rent a truck, put your shit in it, drive from Sacramento to Tucson, unload your shit, return the truck. What’s the big fuckin’ deal? What follows is an odyssey of Homeric proportions.
The truck was supposed to be ready by 10:00 am Monday. Bryan waits at the Budget place until noon, looks out the window and watches while poorly paid workers are washing down a truck which has clearly just come off the road. Bryan takes the truck home, loads the truck, loads the car on the trailer (provided by the professionals at Budget) and off he goes. By the way, this truck was advertised as having air conditioning which it was, in fact, equipped with. The air conditioning in this particular truck, however, is not functioning and Bryan is traveling with two very furry dogs in 100+ degree heat. At around Bakersfield our hero senses something is amiss, pulls over and correctly surmises that the only reason the trailer and its cargo have not gone careening out into central valley traffic is that he was traveling down hill and gravity, and gravity alone, was keeping the truck-trailer interface intact. In no other fashion were the truck and trailer attached. Wrong trailer it turns out. Trailer problem somehow rectified, Bryan calls Annie in the motel room in Tucson with a progress report and continues on.
Many hours later Bryan calls Annie from the mountains separating the San Fernando Valley from the San Joaquin Valley with the news that he is making the worst time in recorded history due to the fact that the Budget rent-a-pig is constantly over heating. We are all gathering around Annie Rose and the phone in the motel room, hanging on every “are you fucking kidding me?” and “no fucking way!” emanating from Annie’s part of these conversations. More hours transpire. This waiting for the next disaster would have been miserable ’cept we had beer. So, you know, there was that. Bryan calls from the shoulder of I-5 north of Los Angeles. The Budget rent-a-butt ream has irredeemably broken down. It is dusk. It is hot. It’s L.A. traffic for fuck sakes. Bryan’s cell phone has run out of power. Bryan gets a friend in Redding (damn near Oregon) to go on-line and arrange a motel for Bryan somewhere down in L.A.. Arranging the repair or replacement of the Budget bucket of bolts currently spewing steam on the Golden State freeway is a charge which finally must fall to Annie Rose who, as you know, is hold up with a bunch of drunken family members in a motel in Tucson. Bryan breaks the car loose from the trailer, leaves the rest of the smoking debris on the side of the freeway, drives to his motel which is located in Pasadena, informs Annie of his location and motel phone # and passes out in his room due to shear exhaustion. Bryan at no point in this brutality breaks. Kathy calls the front desk of our motel and informs the desk clerk that we will be extending our stay by one, maybe two days. After a long silence the clerk responds with “ok” delivered in the whisper of resignation and defeat.
Annie swings into action at this point and for two days is making calls to countless, useless as tits on a boar hog, customer service personnel employed by Budget rent-an-abuse. “We can’t fix the truck without Bryan’s permission given in person.”
“But he is at a motel 20 miles away. I’m his wife and I give you permission to repair your own truck.”
“I will ask my supervisor. Wait and listen to brain melting phone music until your ears bleed and I will get back to you.”
It seems that each customer service irritant has a check list of miseries which must be experienced by the customer, on the customer’s time, and at the customer’s expense, prior to the customer being shuffled on to the next customer service waste of space where the insult is perpetuated. The most common morsel of helpful information provided to the ever stalwart Annie Rose is “I’m sorry but our policy clearly states that the one obvious, logical remedy to this situation is not within the scope of our contractual responsibilities.”
Annie Rose knows that any outburst of disgust and dismay will only send her back to zero. She powers on all composed and shit. This is now in to the second day of musical responsibilities. Ben’s girlfriend Sylvia has by now joined us at the motel to assist us with the consumption of beer. Annie has at one point had two phones going, one in each ear. Getting calls to Bryan through his motel people has been hit and miss at best. At last the truck is officially deemed fucked up, towed to a Budget location in south central L.A., unloaded by Bryan and some questionable help, reloaded on to a new truck by Bryan and some other questionable help. And Bryan arrives at the Budget location in Tucson on Thursday late morning. Something in the vicinity of forty hours to make a twelve hour trip.
Had Annie Rose and Bryan not worked so perfectly together, had they not been able to agree as to the best course of action each step of the way, had they not been completely empathetic to one another’s experience all the while each locked in their own death grip battle with a monstrous, corporate sink hole, Bryan may well still be camped on the shoulder of an L.A. freeway and this new little family would remain estranged by circumstance. It’s not easy putting a family together. It’s not easy keeping a family together. Annie Rose and Bryan have their difficulties as do most of us. I have never witnessed team work performed with such patience, dignity and grace as that displayed by Annie Rose and Bryan during this trial.
Oh, did I tell you, Ben and Sylvia are getting married next summer. Maybe at our house.
Love Dad.
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