Rant #3,013: Bad Time

  
I was in the car on late Friday morning.
 
I had just parked in the parking lot in the local supermarket I go to, and was ready to do my weekly shopping.
 
(I usually do it on Thursdays, but as you know, I had a conference to do for work on that day, so I pushed it back a day.)
 
Just as I was about to shut off the car, my sister called me on my cellphone, and I was talking with her in the car with the car still running—as I said,, she called my just as I was about to leave the car and do my shopping.
 
So I spoke to her, and after a few minutes, a woman, probably in her late 70s, knocked on my window and asked me if I was pulling out of my spot.
 
I told her I wasn’t, and resumed talking to my sister.
 
All of a sudden, I hear a bang at the front driver’s side of my car and I notice that the woman I had just spoken to is trying to get her shopping cart as close to her front passenger door as possible so she can put her groceries into her car from that door.
 
She continues to crash into the front of my car, and I opened the window and shouted out, “M’am, what are you doing? Don’t you know you are crashing into my car?”
 
(I continued to be on the phone with my sister through this entire escapade.)
 
She says to me, “I am trying to get my groceries into the car.”
 
“Go around to the other door,” I replied. “Don’t you realize that you are constantly hitting the front of my car with the wagon? There isn’t enough room.”
 
“I want to get the groceries into the car,” she said to me in response.
 
“M’am, go around the other side to the other door and put your groceries in,” I told her. “You can’t get the wagon through and you are banging into my car.”
 
“I can’t get the groceries in on the other side either.”
 
“M’am, your car has a trunk. That is what the trunk is for. Put the groceries in the trunk.”
 
At this point, she had miraculously gotten her few bags of groceries into the car and as she was puling out of her space,  I walked out of my car to see if there was any damage.
 
Happily there wasn’t much of anything, and the woman pulled away, with all of her groceries in the car,
 
This was the type of week that I had last week, my personal “Week From Hell,” and if anything signified the horrible Monday through Friday that I had last week, it was this incident, which I guess could have been worse but really, why did it happen in the first place?
 
The woman obviously had some perception problems, but like in the old song, I had to ask myself, “Why’s everybody always picking on me?”
 
(And no, in my case, the answer was not “Charlie Brown.”)
 
Last week was an extremely busy week for me. I was running around like a chicken without its head most of the time, and when I wasn’t, I was working full days.
 
It was just a terrible week, and if I made it to 9:00 p.m. before I conked out on any of the days of that week, it was a miracle.
 
I am also still not sleeping well, as a week like that puts a lot on your mind, and continues to do so into this week, as I did not sleep well at all last night.
 
If I was a religious person, I would say that God is testing me, but if that is true, then I have to ask myself--and God--the question, “Why?”
 
I am being punished for something, but I really cannot figure the whole thing out.
 
Hopefully, this week will be better.
 
It has already started off better, as last night, my son and I took my wife out for her birthday. We went to a new, local fish restaurant, the food was very good but also very pricey, and we had a nice time.
 
Maybe that will signal a better week is ahead, a sign that things will lighten up on me and won’t be as bad as last week was.
 
I sure hope so, because I cannot take another week like the one I just had.
 
Funny, I knew it was going to be bad—I won’t go into the specifics, but let’s just say that I knew beforehand that I was in for it—but I didn’t have any clue just how bad it would actually be.
 
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and then we have the holiday season, and maybe I had to have a struggle before I hit the pay dirt of a really nice period.
 
Maybe I had to go through the quicksand before I would hit the oasis.
 
I sure hope so, because another week like the last one will literally strangle me into submission.