Prime Embarrassment

There we go, Sadie’s asleep and I am back awake, if chilly and feeling surreal from the hour or so asleep beside her.  Poor Sadie was still arranging and rearranging herself while I fell immediately, inexorably to sleep.

We borrowed my brother’s old van to be able to go to my sister’s for Christmas dinner and festivities on the 23rd.  While he wasn’t in a hurry for it back, and has the truck for the commuting needs the van primarily fills, I was not intending to have it this long.  It came in handy for going to my mother’s on the 26th, rather than suffering her dropping by here.  Those were the only two times we drove it.  Being a van, driving it from Holbrook to Middleboro, Middleboro to Hanson and back, Middleboro to Bridgewater and back, grand total about 72 miles, made it go from almost half a tank to “I’m starving, give me some gas before I strand you by the wayside!”

Before I returned it, I wanted to gas it back up to something approaching either side of where it was when I got it.  We were ordered not to fill it as we did last time, only to find out the fuel line had seen better days.  Before I could gas it and return it, I needed more than the $5 I had on me to feed the beast.  Thus delaying going to the bank delayed returning the car.

Which has the supreme merit of running and being a van, but has seen better days and, like the sainted Sentra, has foibles not necessarily worth fixing.  It’s ironic that I would keep the Sentra forever if I had money, like a memento or a beloved pet, but if I’d had money, I’d never have driven it, or at least never kept it long enough to be amazed.

One of those foibles is that the driver’s door cannot be opened from the outside.  You must open the passenger door, or leave the window down, and open the door from the inside.  My brother is used to it, and doesn’t even carry spare car keys in his pocket to defuse lockouts the way I do.  That started out as a ring with a key or two for a car or two, maybe a spare house key set, riding in my left pocket.  On the very off chance I locked the keys in the car, I could reach in my pocket and let myself in, no AAA required.  It grew to include my office keys, shrinking when I closed the office and shed the big client.  That eventually peaked at keys to the building, the office, the three inner office doors, the client’s office, and the client’s building and little satellite office in Fall River.  Near the end there were keys to the bathrooms in the building, but I never put those two on the same ring.  I’d have made a copy and done that, if I’d stayed.  The keys to the bathrooms thing was one of those shark jumping oddities that made it feel wrong to stay, even if there’d been reason.

I still think of electric lock controls as newfangled.  If I think about them being there, it’s with a degree of wonder that might have me clicking up and down annoyingly a few times.  Using them habitually?  To unlock all the doors in one go?  Not on my radar.  Why would I unlock everything when there’s just me?  My brother always uses the electric control and then gets out of the car.  Which, incidentally, locks every door as soon as the car goes into gear, speaking of newfangled and not necessarily welcome.

Middleboro has an utterly insane rule, at least for self-serve gas stations (the full-serve around the corner gets two-way traffic at the pumps so I assume they are exempt), whereby everyone must go through one-way.  This means that 95% of the cars go to one side of each pump island, while the other side goes all but unused.  It’s apparently some sort of fire safety thing.  I can remember when self-serve gas stations were a new thing in the region and the towns put places that wanted to offer self-serve through the ringer fearful and/or trying to protect the incumbent full-serve stations, making it next to impossible to get permission to be self-serve.  I naturally wondered why they even required permission to operate, but I’m not most people, and there was a lot of hysteria.  The rule in Middleboro strikes me as a throwback to the days of “oh sure, you can try to be self-serve if you want, but we’ll make it all but impossible.”

We like to get gas at the Prime station on route 28, at the lights near Stop & Shop.  It’s usually the lowest price, or close to the lowest.  It’s also a bit inconvenient, being on the wrong side outbound, and having limited pumps that are further limited by that regulatory madness.  It was on my way, so I went there despite the left turn and the wait while two cars were ahead of me on the used side of the island and nobody was on the other side.  Being low, I turned off the engine while waiting, then fired it back up and pulled up to the second pump.  I felt a bit funny about going in and saying “$5 on pump 3,” since that’s less than two gallons, but hey, it’d get me to the bank and some.

The confluence of events led me to leave the keys in the ignition.

I never leave keys in the ignition.

The wait in line and turning the car off and on and fretting about only having $5 to put it came together.

I didn’t unlock every door.  Just my door.  I didn’t leave my door ajar.  Why would I?

So I pumped and after the five seconds of pumping and the door handle laughing at me, I found myself patting my coat pocket and my pants pocket and then peering in the window, saying “oh shit!” and wanting to shrink into the background.  There I was, stuck, totally in the way, reducing the place from having half the pumps it should to a quarter of them available.

Worse, I could see the orange of the lock on the sliding door, indicating that was unlocked, but it was locked.  Another foible.

I called my brother to see if he had any advice on breaking in, left voicemail on his cell, called Deb for his work number, called there and found he had left, then ended up talking to him on the cell without having to call her back to go find his home number for me.  I resisted the immediate urge to call AAA, knowing how long that can take and hoping to get out of the way faster.

The guy in the store was great.  He was there all alone and had nothing like a coat hanger.  In at least one Christy’s Market I worked at, we pointedly kept one for this kind of thing.  It was kind of weird having to explain that the door I’d left unlocked couldn’t be opened from the outside, not my car, yada yada.  He ended up out there with me, between customers, trying a pencil thickness shelf support hooked at one end, through the side window that we were able to open from the outside.  Which didn’t help much, being so narrow.  I ended up on the other side of the car, looking through the driver’s window (the side windows were too tinted) and trying to direct him to hooked the handle and, when that wasn’t going to work, jiggling the recessed lock slider.

Eventually other guys volunteered to help, including one who had been there, seen us, and then returned.  About this time, I finally called AAA.  They put it in as “motor running” emergency and someone was supposed to be there within 30 minutes.  Within ten minutes tops we had it opened.  In the end there were four guys helping me, working on three approaches.  Mainly, though, one had a long stiff wire, better than a coat hanger, and we used a couple tools the store guy brought out to pry and hold a space at the top of the front passenger door while he tried to press the electric lock button to unlock everything.

That worked.  Woohoo!  One guy had been working at getting the window latch on the pop-out window on the sliding door unscrewed.  I still need to make sure that’s tightened back up.  There are a few scratches, but nothing serious.

The set of guys swarming over it made me think of people you’d see cast in a film in exactly such a scene, right down to the friendly, wise, distinguished looking older black guy who was like Nicest Guy Ever.  They also reinforced the irreverent pride with which we refer to this place as Mayberry.  Of course, we also joke about the whiteness of the place, reacting with mock shock if we see someone like the aforementioned guy from balanced central casting.  I didn’t even think about that until later; at the time he was just one of my heroes.

Tools got into the correct hands.  I thanked everyone profusely, drove out of that spot and around the corner, pulled over and called to cancel AAA.  Nice to not have to use it.

I was at the gas station for just about an hour.

I still managed to make the bank.  Just.  Got the shopping done too.  And was extremely careful to get the keys out of the car each stop!

Posted by on 12/31 at 09:54 PM

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