This Just Happened To Me.

So you know it's true.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table and a car pulls into the drive way, and it's dark outside. We don't get many visitors so I'm curious. Somebody gets out of the car, walks onto the porch and rings the bell.
I open the door and there stands a pretty young thing, about 20 or so I'd say and she's looking at me, so I say, "Can I help you?"
And she just looks back and then blurts out, "Can you tell me how to get back on to 322 I got off to go to the bathroom and I can't find it again and I've been driving for 6 hours and tears start leaking out and she's shivering.

Now I'm taken aback for the moment because we live on a little two lane, no paint line road in the country and 322 is about 5 miles away via back roads and a couple a turns away.

So I start to tell her, "Well you follow this road to a T, then make a right and go down the hill until"...

"Is it far? I have to get to Reading (PA, as in the Railroad) and I only have an 1/8 tank of gas and my phone's broke so I can't wire my grandmother for money."

Reading is about 2 1/2 hours away so I know we got problems.

"What happened to you phone?"

"I dropped it and heard a crunch and realized I ran over it with my car." And she holds up this IPhone or something and the screen is sort of sparking and making random visuals all over the place, then it turns off and back on and she hits it a few times but it still doesn't work.

So I say, "Come in for a minute, we'll get you some gas and you can follow me to 322. Once you get to 322 can you find Reading from there?"

"Oh yeah she says." So I ask her, "Where are you coming from?"
"Pittsburgh", she says.

And that stops me for a minute cause she's about 45 minutes off course as you need to make a right off the PA turnpike and travel north for about 45 minutes to get where we are by several back roads, wrong directions, and general screw ups to get were she is now when she should have gone straight and not make that right hand turn that ended her up out here in the country.

Turns out she's an art student, so that explained a lot.
So I go get my coat and 20 bucks and I tell her, "I'll get my car and meet you here in the driveway, you back out, let me get in front and then follow me and we'll get you some gas and I'll take you to 322."

I back the car out of the garage, drive up to the front of her car, she gets in her car and then gets out, gets back in, then out. Then starts looking around the ground....
So I get out and walk up to her car, "What's wrong."
"I lost my car keys."
"Well you had them when you got here."
"But I can't find them now."

Geez. So we start looking for her car keys, she finds a set but she's driving a Dodge and these keys aren't Dodge keys. So we keep looking.

My wife comes out to see what's going on...I forgot to mention my wife.

We get a flashlight, look under the car, up the walkway, in the house...no car keys. I'm about to go through her pockets but figured my wife wouldn't like that.

So I'm looking here and there and finally after about 15 minutes she shouts, 'I found them." Turns out they were under her gas pedal.

So I'm thinking, this chick might take awhile to get to Reading. So I run back into the house and grab a pack of crackers, a banana, and a bottle of water...to give her for the road in case she gets lost again.

We head out and get to the gas station and I give the dude the 20 and she starts pumping gas after moving her car because she pulled into the wrong side of the pumps. And I'm watching her and the pump starts clicking off.
"What's wrong?"
"The pump keeps clicking off."
So I grab the nozzle and sure enough it won't stay on. So I look at the pump and we've only put in 12 bucks worth, less than 6 gallons or so.
"Are you sure you had an 1/8 tank?" And I pump some more and gas comes outta the car all over the place, the tank's full.
Either she has a busted fuel gauge or she can't read it and I'm thinking the gauge is just fine.

So I get the change, shove it into her hand and say let's go.
She follows me another 3 miles, I get her onto 322 headed in the right direction and head home.

Back at the house my wife and I are trying to figure out how she got to where she did as she is pretty far from the PA Turnpike and we reason out that she didn't have any money to pay the toll so she took route 22 which turns into 322 but takes about 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours longer than taking the Pike but gets her near our house. Then she got off to take a leak, got lost, and ended up at our house.

The only problem is there's no place to take a leak unless she just stopped along the road somewhere and went in the weeds.

We unanimously conclude that's what happened as it explains how cold she was and the cell phone that went crunch when she ran it over.

Either that or we got scammed for 20 bucks.
But what the heck, it's Christmas time!

 

I seem to get into these predicaments from time to time.

Once when I went to pick up my son about 12:00 at night when he got off work he ran into a guy in the parking lot that got a flat tire and didn't have a spare.
So he talked me into driving the guy home to get his spare tire. I don't know why it was at his house.
So we're driving along and I ask him where he's from and it turns out that he was originally from a small town about a mile away from my father's house about 250 miles away. Maybe 50 people live there.

Then he tells me his name and I realize this is the guy my fellow workers used to tell me about that was taking a bath one night, like ten years ago, when his radio fell into the tub and he was electrocuted almost to death. Then he couldn't work anymore and had to quit. Now this is in very large town so who would think I'd run into someone who lived a mile from my father's house, 250 miles away, worked in the same building I worked in at one time, and was electrocuted almost to death and I had heard lots of stories about? At 12:00 at night in an empty parking lot?

Jung musta been right.