What an ordeal!!!

Last night when I came home from Sarah's house, I listened to my answering machine. My father left a message on the machine and one of the main things he said was, "I need some help with the pickup tomorrow". Then he went on to say that he needed help to get Jeff and Alison's new bed to their apartment. I had no idea that he was coming up. I did not think there would be any problem with this. In my mind, when I heard that he needed some help with the pickup I thought that he just needed some help getting the bed into my place and needed me to make sure the place was unlocked.

Was I wrong. He called me in the morning at 8 am and instead of "I need some help with the pickup", he actually he said something like "Did you find a pickup?" I asked him why he needed a pickup and he said it was to get the mattress for Jeff to the apartment. From that moment I had 4 hours to find a pickup. I talked to my father for a while and I asked him about the condition of not finding a pickup.  If we did not find a pickup I didn't know what were we to do. He then asked me how far was Sam's Club from my apartment and it is 6 blocks, but some of those blocks are large blocks. So he said that if we could not find a pickup, we would just push the bed on the Sam's Club cart. I told my dad that he was crazy and that I was not going to push a queen sized bed for over a half mile or more. The push would have been farther because there would be no way I would push a mattress over the overpass that goes over the rail road tracks, so we would have had to take a longer detour. We would have held up traffic on the overpass and I would have been the one doing all the pushing and work.

Now you are wondering, what did Steve do about a pickup. Well that part of the story began at about 1pm. I needed a truck and I did not feel comfortable asking anyone to use a pickup. I think there is someone in the ward with a pickup, but I would just hate to call and say I need your pickup, and also it was short enough notice that I did not know if I would find anyone home since most people have things going on (like work) during normal hours of the day. But if my plan did not work out (which I will explain), I was going to ask anyone (even some stranger at Sam's Club) to borrow a truck and pay them money to drive us instead of pushing the stupid mattress and springs across town. Ok, the plan that my dad and I sort of came up with after I told him that I refused to push a mattress, was to test drive a pickup truck from some place in town and use the pickup to get the mattress to the apartment.

Here is the part of the story about the pickup truck test driving experience. The other night I was cleaning my room and I started throwing a lot of stuff away. During the clean up process I found some coupons that I was not going to use, but I looked through them. So in the morning when my dad called and the idea of test driving a pickup came up, I remembered one of the coupons I threw away. One of the coupons was get 2 free meals when you test drive a vehicle. The conditions were to test drive a car and have a credit report run. So I thought, why not!

So I headed to Boyer's Auto Sales on Bulldog Boulevard. I was just looking through the cars looking for a reasonable pickup that would haul the mattress. Right when I found one a man approached me and asked me for some help. I said I am looking for something just like this and I asked if I could test drive it. He said yes. He took my drivers license made a photo copy of it, and started my credit analysis to see if I could be approved for a loan. And then he handed me the keys and I test drove the pickup. I went in early at 1 pm to test drive it to see if he was going to ride with me. He did not hop into the pickup so I knew that if I was to come back that he would let me drive by myself again. So when I was done driving the pickup the first time he had not run my report yet so I told him that I would just come back and test drive it again so that I could take it to my dad so he could see it (which was an honest statement). I basically told him that I was interested in the pickup (he did not know what my interests were) and I said that I would probably be back to test drive it. I am sure he was thinking that he was set and had probably made the sale.

So I went back to my place and waited until after 3pm for my dad to show up. He was late and I was irritated. I just was laying on the couch trying to practice my part for Joseph Smith the Prophet that I will be singing on the 5th. He showed up and I told him to go to Sam's Club and buy the bed and I would meet him at Sam's when I had the pickup again. I got the pickup, drove to Sam's Club, and put some gas in the pickup because it was so far in the red that I thought we would run out of gas driving to my place. Running out of gas would have just been an added bit of bad experience for me into this story.

So we got the mattress, I drove the pickup back, and I met my dad back at my place and then we went to pier 49 pizza (which was the 2 free meals). It was pretty good. And by the time we got back it was just about 6pm. So I spent over 5 hours wasting my life over the ordeal of getting Jeff and Alison's bed. I am not ticked, just annoyed.

I sort of feel bad about using the car sales guy like I did, but I think I wasted only about 5 min of his time. If my dad would have given me more than a few hours to do this, I would not have had to stoop to a level of test driving trucks to avoid pushing queen sized mattresses around town.

Steven