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I’m a Triple Threat

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I am an avid rule-follower and a control freak.  Not a good combination on a normal day.  But send me to the airport to get on a plane and all my addictive triggers kick in.

I have the normal irritations with the people who carry on enormous bags.   They hold up the line of passengers as they spend several minutes trying to jam their suitcase into the overhead bin.  (Wait.  That does irritate everyone else, right?)

But I have to take it a step further.  On one leg of a recent trip, we were on a tiny commuter plane.  The man in the seat across the aisle from us had just such a bag.  He couldn’t cram it into the overhead bin so he tried to shove it under the seat in front of him.  When that didn’t work, he just left it on the floor and put his feet on top of it.

I squeezed my husband’s hand in a vice grip.  “That’s never going to work,” I whisper through gritted teeth.

“Maybe it won’t.”  He shook his hand to return the circulation.  “But it’s not your problem, right?”

He’s technically right.  The man’s bag was not my problem, but it was a problem for my angst ridden personality.

Security screening at the airport is another big trigger for me.

“What?  I have to take my shoes off?”  the woman in front of me asks.  While she unlaces her *thigh-high boots, my Rule Following Alarm starts ticking. [*slight exaggeration]

“What do you mean I can’t carry it through?” she says holding a bottle of water.  “I haven’t even opened it yet.”  My inner Control Freak begs to intervene.

The security guard announces that all jewelry must be removed and I notice that the woman sports a gold chain with a cross on it. I shove my hands in my pockets.  As we inch forward the guard makes the no-jewelry announcement again and points to her necklace.

“This?” she says, lifting the chain off her neck.  “Surely, you don’t want me to take this off.”

I break out in a cold sweat as she pauses to slowly remove her belt.  “What kind of a country do we live in?” she complains.

“A country with rules!” I want to shout.

We are within inches of the x-ray machine when the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  Right before the woman’s security bin slides on to the conveyor belt she turns it longways.   My fingers itch to reach out and turn the bin the other way so as to keep them the shortest distance apart in order to slide through the process quicker.

This is my third and final issue (yes, family, I said FINAL.)  I’m the Idiot Savant of Organization.  I walk into a room and my brain rearranges every piece of furniture into it’s most logical position.  A trait that has caused me no end of problems.

Oh yes, I’m a Triple Threat.  A Control Freak, Rule Following, Idiot Savant of Organization.

I understand they have officially removed the term “Idiot” from Savant.  But in my case, I think it still applies.

Unsafe at Any Speed

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At lunch today my husband and I talked about our first cars. His was a 1948 Chevy.

Knowing that he is not all that mechanical, my first question was, “How did you keep it running?”

“It never broke down,” he said.

Now, that’s just not right.

Growing up, I don’t remember a single car we possessed that didn’t break down. My earliest memory is of sitting next to Dad as we careened down a steep hill, all the while he was frantically trying to re-attach the steering wheel to the column.

Dad owned clunkers where the engine literally dropped out on the road as we were driving or overheated at the slightest incline. (One time I watched Dad resolve the problem by pouring a can of cola into the radiator, but that’s another story.) We once spent an entire month camping in the mountains because the car broke down as we pulled in the campground and we had no transportation, or money, to drive down to get a new part.

I remember riding with my older sister in the first car Dad bought for her. We were sitting at a stoplight. People started pointing and shouting and it took us a while to realize the car was on fire. In our defense the car had the engine in the rear, so it wouldn’t have been immediately obvious to us.  I mean, we didn’t have the radio cranked all the way up and we weren’t fighting over the rearview mirror to check our hair and make-up, if that’s what you’re thinking.

So, my first car was a slightly burnt, hand-me-down from my sister (as were all my clothes by the way – I mean they were hand-me-downs, not burnt – that would be weird.)

One problem was the heater. Heat was conveyed to the interior of the car by a system of ducts connected to the cylinder head. I don’t know much about cars, but I do know I often arrived at school slightly dizzy from inhaling exhaust fumes.

There was also no Park. The display read “R-N-D-L”. No “P.” I’m sure that originally the manufacturer installed some sort of system whereby the car stayed where you parked it but by the time it reached me, that portion of the car was no longer working. My only option was to find a level place to park. In my first week of driving I often came out of school to discover the car had rolled across the parking lot, jumped the curb and sat sweetly in the grass.

On a morning drive to school my love/hate meter shot from one side to the other several times.

“I love this car,” I’d say if I was lucky enough to get it started and out the drive. My love continued unabated, until I hit a bump.

“I hate this stupid car,” I’d yell when the motor shut off. As the car rolled onward I screamed and cursed it, until I’d hit another bump, which caused the motor to engage and I’d make my panicked way to school with the needle on my love/hate meter jumping wildly.

My first car?  It was a Corvair. The car declared by Ralph Nader to be”Unsafe at Any Speed.”

I have to agree with Ralph.