I think life decided to imitate blog yesterday.  After my odd, yet somewhat informational post, the afternoon devolved into randomness, and I eventually lost all capability of putting words together into proper sentences.  That last part was kind of a shame.  Before that, the major events included the city deciding that my job description might fit better in the IT department than in the library.  They actually suggested moving me to the IT department.  That made me laugh.  It isn’t going to happen (I don’t think).  It is a little like the squatter’s rights article though.  If the IT department claims me for long enough, I become one of them.

Then I went to lunch and fell asleep in the warm sun.  It was perfect until I tried to start my car to go back to work and realized that my car battery died sometime during all of that sunny bliss.  In 45 minutes, my car battery died.  That has to relate somehow to wine country in Germany, right?  (That was the random Wikipedia article from yesterday, by the way.)  My car is German, and perhaps he had a bit much to drink, thus the lack of engine starting capabilities.  I was only drinking Coke Zero, just for the record.

When the car situation happened, I was parked across the street from a relatively large church.  I figured somebody in the church office would be able to help, so I thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t look like a total mess and marched right on over to ask for help.  All of the doors were locked, but then somebody came out as I was about to give up.  He looked for jumper cables in his car, then went for reinforcements when he didn’t find any.  Between four guys, they produced a pair of jumper cables and went across the street to help me.

Oh, right, the funny part.  That’s the fact that I kept worrying that these guys would think I was trying to do something sketchy by luring them to my car across the street.  That’s rooted in a story from my freshman year of college.  I was driving in downtown San Antonio (a much larger city than Suffolk, Virginia, in case you weren’t aware) at 3 A.M.  I had a good reason for that.  And I was lost.  That’s normal for me, and it was even more normal in my pre-GPS days.  I was driving my Jeep Wrangler with a soft top, which means that the only thing between me and the city was some zipped fabric. I wasn’t worried about the situation.  If you aren’t pressed for time, being lost isn’t all that bad.

So there I was, stopped at a light with no other cars around, when this 40-ish guy comes out of a dark alley and asks me to roll my window down.  When I didn’t, he asked me to come help him in the alley, because his car battery died.  I was a naive 18 year-old, but I wasn’t about to go into a dark alley at 3 A.M. with a random guy.  The alley didn’t look like a particularly likely place for a car to be anyway.  As a law-abiding citizen, I sat at that stupid red light for at least 30 more seconds as he not-so-patiently encouraged me to open my window.  He didn’t notice that he could have unzipped the window himself.

Now when I need help with my car battery, I always think of myself as that super sketchy guy at 3 A.M.  I tried so hard to put on my best “I’m nice” face when I asked for help.  And that’s really kind of hilarious, because I was/am a 26 year-old librarian in a nice skirt and totally librarianish sweater.  I’m pretty sure I’m not threatening to four grown men on a busy street in broad daylight.

When I got back to work, I consoled myself by fixing a printer’s alignment and trying to sort through whether the IT department or the library is responsible for payment on a specific service renewal.  It worked.  I did feel better, with the exception of that lingering feeling that I was a sketchy guy asking a bunch of people to follow me into a dark alley.