Hangin' with My Peeps

Before I forget, today is Mrs. Sneed's birthday. Let's just say it is the umpteenth anniversary of her twenty-ninth birthday. Any good birthday needs a cake and Sneedlet One is trying his best to help his Grandma blow out the candles. It was touch and go for a while, but amid the screams of the smoke detector, they successfully blew them all out. We will be having a family party of Sunday and both of our Sneedlets will be present. That is always a treat.

I had to go to WalMart today, but more on that later.

I have been taking our various Honda's to the same repair shop for about fifteen years. The shop is run by a guy, I'll call him Bob, who used to work for one of the Honda dealers here in our fair city. We like him because his prices are reasonable and he is honest and reliable. He only has this one thing that kind of bugs me.

No matter how many times I have been to his shop or talked to him over the phone, every time I bring one of the cars in, he acts as if he has never laid eyes on me before. Without exception, his greeting is, "What can I help you with sir?" Am I that forgettable? Crap, people who have been trying to forget me with the aid of trained professionals can't do it.

I decided this morning that I needed to take my '99 Civic in for an oil change. Bob always tells me to avoid the quickie lube places and just drop in anytime I need an oil change, no appointment necessary.

When I arrived, Bob was sitting in the front seat of an Odyssey minivan, listening to the engine run. I asked him if he could change my oil and to my surprise he said no, and acted a bit out of sorts when he said it. It seems that illness has struck the shop and he has a load of cars waiting to be fixed, with no technicians to fix them. He said to call him next week. Okay then.

Well, I'm a strike-while-the-iron's-hot kind of guy and if I didn't get the oil changed today, God knows when I would think of it again. I sometimes go to Jiffy Lube with my pick up, but they are hard sell outfit. According to them, it is a miracle your car made it as far as their shop, in the condition it's in. Usually, this means that they will try to sell you every service they offer. No thanks.

Then I remembered that WalMart, with a location near you, has an express lube service. So I drove over there. Daughter Sneed accuses me of going to WalMart to hang with my peeps, her little joke. Not all of us have the cash to shop at Target, where they carry a better class of Chinese crap and all the employees wear shoes.

When I got to the WalMart there were two cars being serviced in the two bays and no one waiting, I thought I had hit the jackpot. The old in and out.

While I waited, I strolled around the store, which like WalMarts everywhere, is a pigsty. The fellow in the lube area told me that it would be a thirty to forty-five minute wait, but it stretched into an hour and a half. So much for express lube.

Unfortunately, during the wait, I met a crazy former coworker, who now works at WalMart. Tedious Systems gave her medical leave for a mystery illness and asked her not to come back.

Before she left Tedious, I was one of the many people she blamed for her troubles. She had sworn revenge on ninety percent of the folks in the office, me included, so when she suddenly appeared two feet from me today, my urge was to run. But today she was all smiles and full of stories about her wild adventures after leaving Tedious behind.

I wracked my brain trying to remember if I once actually told her to f*ck off or if it was just a fantasy I concocted. Either way, she seems to have forgotten her grievances against me. She says she is moving back to a large Southern state soon, (Jenny Haha brace yourself) so I hope to never meet her again. I'm no Little Big Man and today was not a very good day to die.







Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky