Friday, November 23, 2012

When It ALL Really Goes To Hell....

  To say that things went to hell when Todd was gone on business would be an honest assessment of the situation. Griz sensed the impending Apocalypse and devoured the recycle bins in the back yard, the horses broke down the fencing and all ended up together in one stall hosting the first episode of Kick Fest 2012, and Colt and I had Hot And Ready Pizza 4 of the 7 nights Todd was gone.
So on Friday morning, the day Todd was set to arrive back home, and the phone rang at 4:15 am I naturally assumed it was him, home early, phoning for a ride home. Or, someone was in a car wreck. Because, seriously, why else would anyone call THAT early?!! So, you can imagine my surprise when I answer the phone and don't recognize the caller, but he's talking to me about something I'm familiar with. Then I realize....this is work calling me? At 4:15 in the morning? Seriously? Then I think, "Something has to be on fire, right?" No. Not at all. The call went something like this, "Rikki. I'm so glad you answered. (WTF?) I couldn't get a hold of Joe (my boss). God, I'm glad you answered. (WTF?)" and blah, blah, blah...which pretty much resulted in "Get in here as fast as you can. We need to sell this gasoline and we don't have a certificate for it. Hurry!"  OK. Single parent (for 12 more hours), demanding job, a boss who's smarter than me and turns his phone off at night and not enough coffee in me to make a sound decision. Off we go!
  I leapt from bed and pulled on my jeans from the day before, grabbed my lunch, my kid, fed the animals, got some coffee and off we went.
  Sadly enough, even with a 4:15am wake up call, I still only arrived to work about 10 minutes early. Because, let me tell you: after the week I'd already had even emergencies needed to be planned out. What really ticked me off was that after this post-sunrise emergency, I arrived to find that there wasn't really an emergency after all. Just a miss understanding. A giant misunderstanding that forced me out of bed an hour early in a panic and caused me to arrive unshowered and wearing my clothes from yesterday. Happy Friday.
  Where the story takes a turn is when I start to work. The lab tech that arrived had been working feverishly on the now-non-emergency and left a lot of the routine work for me. I grabbed a cart and headed to the back sample receiving area where there was an operator adding more samples to the already huge backlog of samples. I recognized the operator, but didn't know him by name. Regardless, I start chatting him up. "How's it going?" "Friday, huh?" "Lots of samples today." You know, the usual. As we're standing there talking it felt like my left pant leg was cuffed or bunched up and it was bothering me. So, mid sentence with a mostly stranger, I gave my foot a good kick to reset my pant leg. This was my fatal mistake. Immediately following the mid-sentence kick a pair of underwear flew out of my pant leg and landed between the two of us.
  An immediate series of events played out: I had jumped up and thrown on my pants from yesterday, not checking first as to the fate of the underwear I'd worn that day as well, gone an entire hour with them riding around behind my knee and then with one kick, they appeared at the absolutely WORST time ever. I screamed, "Oh my God!", grabbed them quickly, pretended like nothing happened and stuffed them in my lab jacket pocket. Because maybe he didn't see, right? Maybe he was pretending it didn't happen. Maybe he'd blocked it out? Whatever the reason, he pretended like nothing happened, we said our good byes and I walked away mortified. With my underwear in my pocket. And it wasn't even 7am yet. Ugh. The awesome part about being a woman at a refinery is you're a major minority. Like 2 in 500. So, the likely hood this happened infront of an understanding lady coworker was, like, zero.
  The good news, however, is the lab tech who arrived early (who, thankfully, didn't witness my amazing powers of materializing underwear from nowhere) came back hours later from a trip out to the refinery and promptly reported, "I was out in the refinery and no one was talking about your underwear." To which I replied, "Were you expecting them to be?"...and he said, "Well, FYI, new like THAT travels pretty quickly. So, I don't think he saw anything."

Sunday, November 18, 2012

"'Cause Shit Like That Doesn't Happen To Normal People"

Seriously. Someone said that to me yesterday. There is was: drinking with friends and relaying a hilarious situation that, naturally, doesn't happen to normal people, when it popped right out of her mouth. I didn't take it poorly though because, seriously, shit like that does NOT happen to normal people. The good thing is that I can laugh at the myriad of strange, awkward and inappropriate things that have happened to me. Which is good. I think?
Like the time I inadvertently told my coworker, "Oh, I didn't recognize you with clothes on." Which, I admit, sounds really bad when taken out of context. But, when you know that I ran into him, his wife and family in the mall shortly after I started an internship at the refinery and just simply didn't recognize him without his coveralls on (we all were generic blue coveralls at work. Hundreds of us. All dressed in blue) it doesn't seem so bad. Right?
Or, like the time I left the sunroof open on my car all night in the pouring rain and decided the best way to dry the leather was to drive the car with my seat warmers on and I ended up shocking my own ass. It felt like a 400 volt electric fence grounded on my butt. Not cool.
Or, a crowd favorite: the time I was house sitting and  my high school boyfriend chased a morbidly obese sheep to death on accident. Which, is funny in it's self, but then followed up by the story of my two brothers helping me bury the thing at my parent's house makes you about wet your pants. Remind me if you haven't heard the story about the dead sheep. It's makes you think, "Shit like this really doesn't happen to normal people."
And, there's the time I moved to Cody, Wyoming, and had lived there a total of FOUR days when the barn at the place I was house sitting burned down while I was at the gym. Went to gym, barn burned down, firefighters put it out, left me a hand written note on the kitchen table (small town mentality!), and were gone by the time I got off the elliptical. And, when I showed up to my first day of work a picture of the barn on fire was on the front page. Above the fold. In color.

And, as friends have reminded me lately, I just haven't been writing the blog lately. It's not that the crazy things stopped happening...it's just other things like life, a family, horses, swimming lessons and preschool DID happen. So, instead of remembering all of this crazy things, I've vowed to start writing them down again. And, I promise, I'll get around eventually to updating the pictures on my blog. But, one thing at a time, right?