I was on a deadline – I had called AAA because my car battery died last week and I figured that they would be busy around Christmas and New Years towing drunk driving wrecks. My room was still in a deplorable state and I wanted to clean my dorm and eat before the AAA guy came. I took a shower and then headed towards the campus convenience store. As I crossed the dorm parking lot heading towards the store my pocket buzzed: AAA had arrived. The, “not more than two hour” waiting time was really “not more than twenty minutes”.
The guy tried to start the car with a mobile booster but it wouldn’t work. He said my battery was shot and I’d have to get a new one. I thanked him and walked off to the convenience store. I wasn’t going to be driving that day so I had to get some food. It was closed. So was Sbarro’s.
I called AAA again and asked them to tow the car to Sear’s. I was really hungry, so I scurried to the McDonald’s across the street from my campus, praying that AAA wouldn’t be as prompt as they were last time.
They were. I had only eaten half of my burger in the parking lot near my car when the tow truck rolled in. He drove past me and into the neighboring parking lot – and I thought I saw someone in the passenger’s seat.
My pocket rings and he asks me where I’m at. “Behind you!” I respond. After a brief exchange I had to actually walk to the tow truck, wave him down, and escort him to my car.
There was a woman in the passenger’s seat.
We spent the next twenty minutes trying to get the car on the tow truck. The towtruck driver was a bald, husky middle-aged Cuban who hardly spoke English. I couldn’t understand what he wanted me to do and he became increasingly agitated. He kept screaming, “What?! You don’t dddrive?! You gotta license?! Then what’s wrong with you?!”
He had me steer my car as it was being hoisted onto the back of the tow truck by a cable. I was worried that he expected me to ride in my car the entire time. (he was that angry with me) But, I didn’t have to ride in my dead car, instead I rode in the tow truck, sandwiched in between the door and his wife, who had a small girl (about four) on her lap. There was another girl, who looked like a second grader in the car too. She practically sat on the clutch.
The girl on the mother’s lap kept eyeballing me and the used pink bicycle with a “sold” sticker on it that was strapped to the back of the tow truck. I suspect that was her Christmas present and she knew it.
The entire ride the tow truck driver was screaming into his phone in Spanish. He sped through Coral Gables towards Sears, almost hitting a dozen cars and running a half dozen lights along the way. In the Sears parking lot he wanted to turn into a narrow aisle and almost smacked into a compact SUV. The Martha Stewart-like woman driving the SUV wanted to get out of the lot but couldn’t turn because the tow truck was blocking the entire parking lot exit. The tow truck driver screamed at her out of the window and angrily drove to the next aisle.
He plopped my car in front of Sears and sped off. It took about two hours, but I eventually got a new battery and then drove to my fish store and got a 15 gallon tank for the turtles. I needed something to put in the 5 gallon tank that I would move the turtles out of but I didn’t want to buy another $30 filter for fish. There were two hermit crabs in the store but I looked at their tank and they were these immobile things that lived in shells. “What depressing pets.” I muttered. The guy who was helping me, a twenty-something Hispanic guy with unibrow, agreed, “Yeah, depressing as hell.”
Great.
He said he didn’t really know how to take care of Hermit crabs. The cumbersome blond woman behind the counter, who I consider the most knowledgeable person in the store, even said she didn’t really know how to take care of them.
“What I do know is that they hate moisture, but that you need a bowl of water in the tank. You also need to feed them,… uh, they eat peanut butter and coconut.”
I was sort of shocked, “peanut butter and coconut?” I repeated stupidly.
“Yeah, like, you know the ones you eat? Just break that open and they’ll eat the inside.”
I peered at the crabs for another ten minutes and decided to buy them since the guy couldn’t come up with a suitable replacement. The best suggestion he had was a snake…but those are definitely not allowed in the dorms.
I went to CVS and got cereal and milk – the staple of my intersession diet due to laziness, and peanut butter for the crabs. I then drove home and set up the tanks, and started cleaning again. Peter asked me to hang out, which I thought was weird since we haven’t talked in a month. I finished cleaning my room and setting up the fish, then went to bed.
I woke up this morning and it was 68 degrees in my room. I was offended.
After a phone tag session that ended a few minutes ago. I found out that my dorm, Pearson, works on an antiquated heating system. They basically pour hot and cold water into the pipes to make the heat work, instead of us actually changing the temperature within our room, we can just change the degree of hotness or coldness, depending on what the entire building has at that time.
So, in theory, I can’t heat my room while another person cools theirs.
Mahoney, the building right next to us (that’s connected actually by the lobby) allows heating and cooling. Ugh. I just hope my fish don’t die during this break.