Blind Spots

Recently, my husband and I headed out for a weekend trip to Nashville. He had business there and I came along for the ride.

Well technically, he came along for the ride since I nearly always drive. I get motion sickness on a playground swing so car trips are no fun when I’m not steering.

We made it about two hours into our five hour journey when we decided to stop for lunch. We were debating whether to continue on to a larger city further down the road with more dining options or take what we could find in the middle of highway purgatory along the way. In the height of the debate, I spotted a sign for Taco Bell and made my play. I only rarely get my husband to agree to Taco Bell, but that day I felt hopeful. He was in a good mood, with all those weekend getaway vibes, and there were no children around to take his side in opposition. While I understand his hesitation - it is guaranteed indigestion and the staff act as if they’d rather be prepping for a colonoscopy than taking your order - there’s just something about Taco Bell that I love. Perhaps it’s the mystery of whether you will get anything close to what you actually ordered or the shock of new and ever-more disgusting taco meat and snack chip combinations, but it all just feels like a treat to me.

The Taco Bell was actually located in a food court of sorts, flanked by a Burger King and Popeye’s, all inside a large truck stop 200 yards off the interstate. Taco Bell was far and away the most popular that day, with a line snaking through the food court’s lobby of dirty tables and scattered chairs nearly to the door. I was disappointed to see a large group of boys wearing matching basketball uniforms ahead of us. Not because I dislike athletic teenagers, but because they were probably all paying separately and making requests for extra sauce.

I’m sure it’s a sign I’m getting old, but kids make a lot of special requests at restaurants. Perhaps it’s because it’s one small area where they are allowed to flex a little. Personally, I was raised under the strict guidance of a father who dictated to my brothers and I throughout childhood that under no circumstances would there be any “special orders” at a fast food restaurant. There was no option to request any variation to any item that was not explicitly stated on the backlit acrylic hanging behind the cash registers. I fear that my father’s approach to ordering off the menu will likely die with his generation because I, like many of my peers, let our kids exert way too much preference in those settings. My compromise has been to allow my kids to order whatever they want, but that they have to do it themselves. That way they are the ones that appear difficult, not me. It’s all very passive-aggressive.

In the end, these kids weren’t too bad. In my rush to judgement, I forgot that young people are Taco Bell’s key demographic as their colons are still capable of gently passing whatever magical meat-like substance lies within those hallowed tortillas. They knew the menu, they knew the prices and they weren’t afraid of the purple Mountain Dew. We were able to place our order, two crunchwrap supremes and two beef burritos, and were headed out the door and back on the road, ready to binge some true crime podcasts and lament about how we should not have eaten Taco Bell without direct access to a restroom.

We walked to my nearly brand new car, a SUV of European origin that I call Bernice. I had parked her proudly in the outermost row of cars so as to reduce the chances of another vehicle parking alongside and an errant door opening into her sleek facade. As I approached, I observed that she did not chirp in recognition like she usually does. My Bernice is equipped with some sort of voodoo computer where she can sense my presence with a whisper from the key inside my pocket and unlock with a confident grip around her driver’s side handle. But not today, she sat silent - almost standoffish. I held my body closer to the door and gripped her handle even tighter as if to say “Look Bernice! It’s me, Amy!” Still, nothing.

I set down our bag of Mexican-inspired delights and dug the key out of my pocket and firmly pressed the unlock button. She responded but I could sense hesitation. I climbed in the driver’s seat, wanting to quickly turn her on and get the air conditioning going. It was nearly 80 degrees outside and humid. I pressed the ignition button and an error message appeared on her screen. “No key present,” it said.

No key present? No key present?? There’s a key right here! I held the key up to her screen. She ignored me. I tried to press the ignition button again. I shut the door and then tried. I made my husband shut his door. Tried again. Nothing. I opened the door. This time the alarm went off. So I shut the door. The alarm kept shouting. I locked the doors and mercifully, the alarm stopped. But Bernice was adamant in her defiance. She refused to acknowledge the key’s existence. I held it up to every surface I could think of but she would. not. start.

We fished the manual out of the glovebox and plowed through the table of contents. We found that the key could possibly have a dead battery. My husband beelined for the truck stop and sourced a replacement battery. We pried the key apart, replaced the battery and tried again. No dice.

Moving on. The manual said “The key may need to be reintroduced to the vehicle.”

Yes, I said “reintroduced”.

I went through the “reintroduction” process a dozen times. It involved holding the impotent key up to the steering column and moving it millimeters at a time while pressing the ignition button over and over. Nothing. I gave up the self-help experiment and called roadside assistance. The representative on the other end of the phone sounded like he was 18 and was very clearly reading from a script. Yes, we replaced the key’s battery, yes we tried to reintroduce the key to the car.

“We’ll have to send a tow truck out to take it back to the closest dealership.”

Great, right? No problem. We’ll tow the car back and get it fixed. Did they have a car to borrow in case it took awhile?

Brief hold. Nope. No cars to borrow.

Ok, what about a rental car? Perhaps there is someplace nearby?

Longer hold. Nope. No cars to rent.

“We can offer you an Uber voucher.”

So we conceded. We’ll get it towed back to the closest dealership, wait for them to evaluate it and then take an Uber. Three hours. To Nashville. Then we’ll take a plane back to Atlanta. Then we’ll take an Uber back home. Then we’ll drive back to the dealership that is not actually close to our home at all and get the car which is by then hopefully fixed.

The representative informed me that I would be receiving a text shortly with a confirmation from the towing company. My husband and I glared back at the Taco Bell that was our unraveling. We migrated to an outdoor concrete table whose umbrella had given up long ago and ate our Crunchwraps, now soggy and lukewarm.

The text arrived. “ATKINS TOWING WILL BE ARRIVING IN 260 MINUTES.”

260 minutes? That’s like a parent describing their child as 48 months old. Just rip the band-aid off and tell me we’re never getting out of this place.

This revelation threw my husband into action. We were not going to wait four hours at this truck stop if he could help it. Crisis is where he shines. Once, on Fourth of July weekend, his boat rental reservation was canceled and he sourced a boat from a nearby redneck within 2 hours. The man had made it himself using spare parts and lawn chairs for seats and it was most assuredly never going to make it past any mechanical inspection, but it floated and he and his friends had a great time. He dug out his phone and dialed every contact he could think of. The tow truck driver he met three years ago, the import mechanic who is friends with his college buddy. He managed to find a tow that would take the immovable Bernice back to Our Town so we wouldn’t have to make our way to a dealership in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have to wait on him either, just hide the key in the tailpipe and take off. Excellent. Now to find a ride to Nashville.

Guess where you can’t find an Uber for a 200 mile trip? At a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. So we started calling hired car services. Places that rent stretch Hummers and “party buses” to the prom crowd. No, no, no. We made at least 20 calls. My husband finally got a guy on the phone who said he had a willing driver, but it would be awhile. The dispatcher was Nigerian, and he spoke quickly with a thick (to my untrained ear) French-tinged accent. My husband’s accent is thick too -southern as it can be - he’s one of those people who says things like “knee high to a grasshopper” without irony. Needless to say, the two of them could not understand each other at all. They addressed this dilemma by simply repeating the same information, with the same heaping helping of their native jargon, at increasingly greater volumes with increasingly greater irritation. We had moved into the food court lobby at this point, driven in by the heat and a teenager blaring obnoxious music from his lowered ride, so that everyone could experience our frustration firsthand. The cause of their discord was that the dispatcher was unwilling to confirm an actual time that his driver would be available until he confirmed our credit card went through. We were unwilling to cough up the credit card until we knew whether we were getting a ride in a few hours or a few days. They pushed back and forth against each other - ego and pride battling ego and pride - before we gave in. The other guy had all the cards and he knew it. No one else was coming to get us.

After forcing us to hang up so he could check that our credit card payment had processed, and then sidestepping our return calls for another thirty minutes, he finally confirmed a time - it would be another hour - and shared the driver’s contact information. When the hour came and went, we tried the driver, who was also Nigerian and apparently very irritated due to being stuck in notorious Atlanta traffic who informed us it would likely be another hour.

By this point, I had browsed the truck stop wares so many times that I could’ve offered tours. I was surprised both by the quantity of knives they sold in a single day and also that no one had opted to purchase the divine crystal dragon screaming “Unique Wedding Gift” from the glass display by the register. I had figured out who the owner was, a middle-aged gentleman who was surprisingly kind to his employees and seemed to genuinely enjoy engaging with his customers. He went from gently directing a young woman on the proper way to restock the snack aisle to conferring with a contractor on issues he was having with the automated lottery ticket machine to ringing up the ceaseless line of customers without pause. This truck stop was his orchestra and he conducted it masterfully.

What held my attention more than anything though was a young girl, about my son’s age, sitting at a table in the food court lobby scrolling through videos on an iPhone with glazed-over eyes. I had deduced that it was her mother managing the Burger King and some other family member blasting the obnoxious music in the parking lot. She sat right in the middle of the chaos, staring at the phone propped on a small pillow, wearing a loose t-shirt and oversized pajama pants. She was on the edge of restless, periodically looking up from the videos to confirm her mother was still there. Once, a family came in with a small dog, at which point she scrambled from her chair to ask the owner if she could pet it. I held my breath a little as she approached them, worried she might be rejected and that little spark of enthusiasm in her would fade, but humanity and well-behaved small dogs prevailed and she got a brief respite from her tedium. Periodically she would get up from her post and visit with the relative outside, sitting in his backseat with the door open listening to explicit lyrics and inhaling whatever it was that he was smoking. Eventually, her mother took leave from behind the Burger King counter with a purse slung across her chest and she and the girl walked outside to climb into the car with the young man.

That little girl had likely pulled a longer shift than me, but my husband and I were apparently in line to close up the shop. It was early evening and cooling down by then so we purchased a styrofoam cooler, a 12-pack of beer and a handgun shaped bottle opener that said “Georgia” and moved ourselves outside to wait for our ride. It finally arrived, five and half hours after our fateful Crunchwrap sojourn, and I rushed myself to his black SUV to get the hell out of there. My husband (wisely, as his bladder is the size of a peanut) opted to make one last bathroom run and left me to make nice with the driver. I thought it was odd that the man did not get out of his car to help with our bags, but you know, he had a rough day too. I hefted the bags into his vehicle and slid across the backseat, leaving the door open for my husband. The driver turned to me and said, “I cannot drive you to this place.” while pointing at a map on his phone. Then he got out of the car, opened the trunk and proceeded to remove our bags from the vehicle.

Shit.

My husband arrived as he was unloading the bags and was, not surprisingly, very upset. As it turns out, the dispatcher has fibbed slightly on the commitment he was unloading on the driver. He sold the job as a 150 mile round-trip, which meant the guy would get home in time for a late supper, instead of what it actually was - a 400 mile round-trip that would get him home well after midnight. In a final act of desperation, my husband offered the driver an extra two hundred dollars in cash. Literally showed him the cash and then said it was his as soon as he dropped us at the hotel in Tennessee. The driver paused, weighing the options, and nodded his head in agreement.

The driver then stated that now the only thing holding him back from taking us on to Nashville was his desperate desire to call his dispatcher and give him a piece of his mind. We agreed that he had been wronged and a harsh tongue-lashing was most assuredly necessary, but asked that he hold off until we got to our destination. He grunted his response and replaced our suitcases in the back of the SUV. We weren’t a minute down the road when my husband’s phone rang. It was the dispatcher. He wanted to talk to the driver. My husband grudgingly handed his phone forward and the two men engaged immediately in a verbal battle. The heightened emotion their conversation demanded forced our driver to reallocate mental energy from his pressing responsibility of operating a moving vehicle on a heavily-trafficked interstate to scouring his vocabulary for deeper and more cutting synonyms for the words “liar”, “crook” and “jerk”. The first task he abandoned was neglecting to glance at the side view mirror as he angrily changed lanes in what appeared to be a punishment to the vehicle for the dispatcher’s transgressions. We were honked at by no less than four other motorist’s in the span of his ten minute long conversation. A conversation that led to the driver abruptly hanging up and tossing the phone back to my husband.

“Don’t answer him again.”

We didn’t. The driver’s cortisol levels didn’t drop though, or he just forgot that there may be other cars in adjacent lanes, because he continued to change lanes with reckless abandon, which was scary but didn’t reach gasping and handle-grabbing terror for me until he cut off a tractor-trailer. At that point, I took action. My remedy, honed by years of trying to avoid conflict, was to start chatting to the guy about his family, his pets and his life before the U.S. in Nigeria - anything to distract him from his anger. Nervous small talk is my super power and I wielded it mightily until he was more interested in complaining about the negative impression Nigerian scammers have burdened their fellow countrymen with than grinding across multiple lanes of traffic. When we finally floated into the turnaround in front of our hotel, we had missed our dinner reservations. We managed to talk ourselves into a spot at the bar of a pretty nice restaurant and passed the rest of the evening with pleasant conversation and without significant event.

As terribly frustrating as that day was, we were goddamn lucky. Unlike that little girl, sitting there all day, imprisoned in a food court lobby by circumstances completely beyond her control, we had every opportunity to get out of that truck stop. We had phones and reliable partners and some cash in our wallets that gave us options, albeit infuriating ones, for every challenge that came our way. I wouldn’t have said it that weekend, but looking back from a distance, I see how easy can be blind to your own privilege. We do it all the time. It’s almost habit to stay focused on life’s inconveniences and fling shrapnals of irritation all over the people around us, as if we are the only ones that matter.

In case you’re wondering, we did find out what was wrong with Bernice. Apparently the prior three months when the message appeared upon start up to “Upgrade System Software”, she meant it.