Slapstick Abounds

Your mission: pick up a lei and get it to the airport before the plane takes off. The reason: the people you work with are incapable of planning properly. Your helper: Abe, the little Filipino contractor.

Some people from my office are going to Midway this morning to celebrate the anniversary of the battle at Midway. Apparently there's a big group of old people going up with them (WWII vets, etc.). So it's a big thing that they do every year, and they put a lei on the monument to commemorate the event. Well, they ordered the lei, but no one picked it up.

I got about three panicked phone calls from Jane this morning before we finally had a plan. Is Suzy there? No. Is Chuck there? No. Ok, I'm going to need you to find the van keys and go get the lei and bring it to the airport. Take Abe with you and he can just jump out of the van to get it because it's hard to park in Chinatown. Um, ok, sure.

It all seemed pretty straightforward, except that it might be pointless because we have about a half hour to get it all done. Doable though. And then we see the van. Refuge vehicles are parked three deep in the garage, and the van is at the back. So I have to do a turn with about 487 points just to get out of the spot: five minutes of Abe's little hand waving, waving, waving, and then STOP! It's always fun for me to maneuvre a minivan around SUVs and big cement poles.

From that point on I had a constant mental soundtrack of the music in an old Charlie Chaplin film; throw us in black and white and take out the sound, and you've got yourself a classic.

There was plenty more action in the same vein -- trying to find the lei shop, lots of pedestrians with canes walking in front of me, pulling over anywhere and putting on my emergency lights (thank god for government plates!) -- and then Abe almost got hit by a bus with the lei in his arms. "Well, at least I would have died serving my country! After twenty years in the Navy, that was the most dangerous assignment I've had!"

We made it to the airport in time, but then I got a bit close to the curb and might have had a tire on the sidewalk and security was staring at me...Abe jumped out with the lei, the security guard comes over, and I thought I was getting kicked out. And that's when Jane walks up to the car.

If this had been a movie, that's the point at which I laid my head on the steering wheel and the horn honking takes you out as you fade to black. It would have been so poetically perfect if they kept just missing each other. But, I sent her back inside, the lei was handed off, and Abe was back in the van. I think we have an unbreakable bond now.

We get back to the parking garage, and that's when I realize I'm going to have to repark the van in that back spot. Abe did it instead and I got to come put my head on my desk.

Fade to black.