NEVER SAY ........

This is just the first of a couple of posts that will start with those two words. The rest of that sentence for today's post is ...."this day just can't get any worse."

My last year in West Palm I finally got a route to read that I had been begging for. It was a bear of a route, covering many miles, lots of new unlogged meters and most streets with no sign posts to let you know where you were. I must have been crazy to have lobbied so hard for such a route but it was also the route that Burt Reynolds lived in. Ah ha.

I had trained on the route the previous month and was excited to be on my own this month. Knowing I had a good 7 1/2 hour non-stop day, I started early. That was fortunate. I was maybe an hour into the route when my little pick up started acting up. It was lurching, wheezing and stalling. A mechanic was desperately needed. We were able to lurch into Jupiter to a mechanic where I called my boss. He told me to get a rental and to continue.

The rental was a huge Buick passenger car and maneuvering the narrow, rutted dirt roads was a challenge. I drove down one drive only to have an aggressive, large black dog challenge me at the gate. I honked and honked but no one came out. Tentatively backing up the behemoth of a car, I went too far and backed my rear wheels into the deep drainage ditches that lined the roads on both sides. The car was resting on its frame.

I was getting pretty frustrated by now. This was really wasting time. We had no cell phones or radios. I had to get to a phone and the nearest one was that same house guarded by the black dog. I saw a curtain move in the window and only out of frustration and not bravery I decided to try the house. I yelled horrible things at the dog. It was something about my tearing his legs off and making him eat them, while I pushed open the gate. He must have sensed my fragile mood for he circled and snarled but did not get close.

A woman with serious bed hair barely cracked the door and I asked to use her phone. Grudgingly, she let me in. My boss was not particularly pleased to hear from me twice in a little over an hour. He arranged for a tow truck to pull me out but said that the driver was unfamiliar with the area and I had to meet him on the main road to show him where I was stuck. The main road was almost two miles from where I was.

Time was a factor so I started to jog down the dusty road. As I was jogging along I was feeling pretty sorry for my self. Then it started to rain and I muttered those fateful words, "This day just can't get any worse."

Au contraire my dears, it could and did. Running down a long drive came an angry, slobbering Doberman intent on making me a meal.

I looked at him as he charged towards me and I screamed into the rain, "DAMN IT, enough is enough."

Well, my luck got a bit better for it appears the dogs name was Dammit or something similar sounding and he stopped, ears came unglued from his head and his stub of a tail wagged. I knelt in the damp earth and grabbed his head as he came wagging up to me. Was I ever glad to see a friendly face.

Dammit jogged with me to the main road and I was able to talk the tow truck driver in to giving Dammit a ride back to where I had found him. The driver was able to pull my rental out of the ditch and I was back in business, hours behind schedule.

The prize of that route was reading Burt Reynold's ranch. This was at the height of his popularity and yes, I was star struck. He was why I had volunteered for this bear of a route in the first place.

Burt was in the process of building a live-in tree house on his property behind the ranch house and as I was walking to the construction meter, I got the usual wolf whistles. Construction crews whistle at anything vaguely female, even angry, grubby meter readers. I stomped to the meter head down with teeth grinding. My mood was not just dark, by then it was black.

I finished that route just before sunset and decided surely nothing else could screw up my world. However when I returned to the office to drop off my book, one of the new business engineers who had also been working late, came through the meter room on his way to the parking lot.

"Patti, did you read Burt Reynolds tree house today?" he asked.

When I verified that I had, he broke my heart by saying that Burt had commented to him that our company had cute meter readers but they sure were "stuck up". He had been among the whistlers and I had ignored him. Seems this was the second time Burt had been ignored by a female meter reader and he thought it funny. At that moment I was too crushed to see the humor. That day had finally gone all the way to "worse."

Now days, I stay away from saying "This day just can't get any worse" for that just seems to tempt the fates to see just what else they can come up with to torment you. I have found that rolling with the punches spoils all the fun of the "bad day grinches." Now I just say "Gimme your best shot" and grin. Try it... it works.