The Surreal Life

This past weekend further solidified my belief that my life is being conducted solely for the entertainment of a viewing audience as I previously described here. The Tiki family was subjected to a whole host of weirdness but first we had a normal evening with Dale and Carol.

Dale and I had a Warsteiner and a Maredsous 8 that we've previously rated and Carol and the Tiki Gal had Rum Punch. Dale won the continuation of the Oh Hell! game we couldn't finish the previous week and also won Cutthroat. The guys also won at Pitch. It was not a good showing by the girls. Not good at all.

On Sunday, Mother's Day, we drove two hours to visit the Tiki Gal's mother, my mother and my grandmother. During the drive, both sides of the interstate were under construction and were reduced to one lane for a few miles. Even worse, the westbound lanes - the direction we were travelling - were backed up while the eastbound lanes were clear. It took us about thirty minutes to get through the two miles of construction.

Once we made it to my mother's house, we sat down to lunch. We hadn't even filled our plates yet when we hear a lady's voice behind us saying, "Please press the memo button to begin the setup process." We all looked at each other and then turned to look for the voice. Apparently, my mom's telephone with built-in answering machine had chosen that exact minute to die a painful and annoying death. Not knowing this, I tried to push the right combination of buttons to get the lady to quit telling us to press the memo button. No such luck. The lady kept talking so I sat back down. Throughout lunch, every few minutes the lady would ask us to push the memo button. At first it was funny. Then it turned annoying. By the time we had eaten, I was ready to try for the world record in phone tossing.

Once I was nourished, I thought I might have better luck with the phone so I unplugged it and plugged it back in. This little trick always works with my wireless internet equipment but it apparently does not work on telephones. The lady continued to ask me to push her button and, as an added bonus, the phone's display was now filled up with gibberish. At this point, my mom asked me what I had done to her phone. I could only chuckle at the brilliance of the Truman Show writer who came up with this little plot device. I'm sure he - or she - was expecting me to rip the phone from the wall and stuff it in some unsightly place but I'm not going to play that game. I don't want to end up on Celebrity Apprentice or the Surreal Life or - God forbid - Dr. Phil after this gig ends. I calmly continued to poke and prod at the phone until the display was back to normal. That lady kept asking for me to push her memo button, however, and I soon developed a small facial tic each time she said it. Also, the phone didn't have a dial tone as my mom pointed out to me a few times. I'm just glad I remembered my flask.

We then went to my grandmother's house where my faith in my hometown was severely shaken. I'm from a tiny town in central Oklahoma and, growing up, always enjoyed the quiet and calm of small town living. Things have changed in my home town, however. My grandmother told me that a few days ago, a woman and her husband had allegedly been abusing pain medication. When the husband's prescription ran out, the woman was allegedly unhappy and allegedly stabbed him several times with a knife. She then allegedly ran naked down main street, allegedly breaking into houses searching for drugs. She allegedly managed to make it about a mile before she was allegedly arrested. I don't mean to make light of this situation because the husband was seriously injured but things like this never happened when I lived there. Also, my grandmother heard that a man had allegedly accidentally shot himself in the face. In a town of less than one thousand people, the odds of these two things happening within days of each other have to be pretty long.

After visiting the Tiki Gal's mom, we stopped at a Sonic to get drinks for the drive home. When the car hop delivered our order, she noticed a Tulsa Zoo decal on the window of our car. The ensuing conversation went a little like this:

Car hop: "You must work at the zoo."

Me: "No. I don't work at the zoo."

Car hop looking perplexed: "I noticed your zoo sticker and thought you must need that for employee parking at the zoo."

Me: "We need that sticker to get into the park surrounding the Tulsa Zoo without having to pay."

Car hop looking really perplexed: "Oh. I thought you worked at the zoo."

These are the people that I meet. You can't tell me that conversation wasn't scripted.

Finally, we got back on the interstate and found the eastbound construction area. The traffic was backed up for at least ten miles so it took us an hour to get through the construction. The westbound lanes were not backed up at all. It can't be a coincidence, can it?