NEVER SAY.......

Rerun from 2010.  

Fishducky's funny post about Having a Bad Day reminded me of one of my worst days ever. Thus this rerun.

Never say------

The rest of that sentence is ...."this day just can't get any worse."

My last year reading meters 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 of the dirt roads had 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. Maybe I'd get to see him--- though pretty sure it would not be like this. 

 Knowing I had a solid 8 hour, non-stop, hustle day, I started early. That was fortunate for I was maybe an hour into the route when my little pick up started acting up. It was coughing, wheezing and stalling.   I was able to lurch into the town of 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 4 door passenger car and maneuvering the narrow, rutted dirt roads was a challenge. I squeezed down one driveway only to have an aggressive, large black dog challenge me at the gate. I honked and honked but no one came out.  While 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. 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 disagreeable black dog. 

I saw a curtain move in the window and only out of frustration and not bravery I decided to try the house. To bluff the dog, I snarled horrible things at him under my breath. It was something about my tearing his legs off and making him eat them if he came near me.  Slowly I pushed open the gate. He must have sensed my fragile mood for he circled, slobbered and growled 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 three miles from where I was.

Time was a factor so I started to jog down the dusty roads. As I was jogging along I was feeling pretty darn sorry for myself. Then it started to seriously 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 towards me came an angry Doberman intent on making me a snack.

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 dog's name was Dammit or something similar sounding for he stopped, ears came unglued from his head and his stub of a tail wagged. I knelt in the wet 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 into 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.

One of the last meters of that long day was on Burt Reynold's ranch. No longer did I want to see him, I just wanted to go home. 

Burt was in the process having a large live-in tree house built at the back of his ranch.  As I was making the long walk to the construction meter, I heard several wolf whistles and a"hey babe" or two.  God bless them, construction crews whistle at anything vaguely female, even angry, grubby, worn out 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 as the sun was setting and I decided surely nothing else could screw up my world. However when I returned to the office to drop off my route 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 Reynold's tree house today?" Jim asked.

When I verified that I had, he broke my heart by saying that he had talked to Burt a little while ago about needing a permanent meter for the tree house. Burt had commented 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 was hilarious. 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--more often than not.