I get so MAD!

September 16th, 2005 at 11:12am Posted by Bill

Moving from our rental house into an apartment last week-end was quite an experience. We’re finally now all unpacked, and just last night I got the boys’ beds put together. We’d been too busy at night after we got home from school and work to put them together, doing things like moving the last of the smaller stuff from the old place and getting it ready for the landlord. They’ve been sleeping on the mattresses on the floor, so it’s nice to finally have their room presentable now. We’ll see how long it lasts.

But anyway, back to my story. To help save money to buy a house in a year or so, we moved from a 1700sf house to an 1100sf apartment. The apartment comes with a refrigerator and washer/dryer, so we had to also rent a small space at a self-storage place to put our fridge, our upright freezer, our washer/dryer, as well as the lawnmower, and all the other things we won’t need while living here. The storage place has sturdy wooden carts to use for making it easier to get a stack of boxes from your car to your storage unit. When we were loading up one of those carts this week-end, I kept cracking up remembering something that happened to Kathy and I years ago, when we lived in the L.A. area, before we had kids.

We had rented a storage unit in a huge self-storage complex that sprawled over several acres, and was several stories tall. While I was at work, Kathy had made all the arrangements to rent the place, and the manager had taken her around the huge complex in a golf cart. The next week-end, Kathy, her sisters and I were going to start to move things there, and it was the first time I’d actually been there myself. We backed the car up to the door nearest our unit, and Kathy said she’d go get the cart to help unload things. The carts were kept chained up around the corner from the office, and she went inside to get the key.

A few minutes later, Kathy and her sisters come ripping around the corner almost full speed in the golf cart. With a puzzled look on my face, I asked if she was sure this was what they meant when they said we could use a “cart”. She was sure, and besides, the key that they gave her fit the golf cart’s ignition. It didn’t look like a regular key, though, it looked more like a padlock key. She put the key back in the ignition, but it wouldn’t turn this time. We couldn’t get the golf cart to move again.

I went to the office to explain the situation, to tell the guy that the key wouldn’t fit in the cart anymore, and so we couldn’t move it out of the roadway. The guy couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get the key to fit in the padlock, and why we couldn’t just move the push cart out of the way. When I was finally able to make him understand that I was talking about the golf cart, and not one of the push carts, he refused to believe me. “That key is to open the padlock on the chained up push carts. The golf cart uses a completely different kind of key. There is no way that you can make that padlock key fit in that golf cart’s ignition”, he said.

“You’ve never met my wife, have you?” I said.

Entry Filed under: Memories, Family