olutfey – Page 29 – Lutfey.com

Imagine this: After a moderately busy day at work, I’m sitting in my La-Z-Boy making saltine and peanut butter sandwiches.

One side of my brain (I’m not sure which– possibly the inside) is busy mentally writing a letter to the cracker company. “Dear Zesta, I should start out by saying I quite enjoy eating your saltine crackers. I find them pleasing to my palette and very reasonably priced. However, as I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy eating saltine and peanut butter sandwiches I realized a potential quality control problem with your product. When I get to the bottom of a sleeve of crackers, occasionally there is one left over. Each peanut butter saltine sandwich I make uses exactly two saltines. I was wondering: is there supposed to be an odd or even number of crackers in each sleeve? Personally, I would prefer to have an even number. Which leads me to my question: what should I do with the last cracker? I tried using both one and three saltines with peanut butter, but found the results unsatisfactory. Any information you can provide me on this matter would be greatly appreciated.”

The rest of my brain was busy processing information from earlier in the afternoon– the shorter days, the first significant snowfall of the year, the icy roads I had to navigate all morning and, of course, the trailer park where I got a UPS truck stuck twenty miles away from the center. It all reminded me (with the exception of the trailer park bit—more on that later) that is was time to write my annual Christmas letter. I jumped up from the La-Z-Boy, looked down at the last couple of saltines, sat down again, finished the last of the crackers, got up again, let the dog outside, decided I, too, had to empty my bladder, grabbed a soda from the refrigerator, and then raced to my computer to start writing. Oh, yeah, and somewhere in there I had the oil in my car changed.

Speaking of automobiles, I just realized that I’ve been driving my Saturn almost as long as I’ve been writing Christmas letters. Based on my personal experience, 1996 was a good year to buy a Saturn. In the seven and a half years I’ve owned this vehicle, it has served me well. However, after consulting my ancient Chinese astrological charts I discovered that 2003 was destined to be “the year of the broken alternator.”

Here is what I learned from the situation:

When the battery light on the dashboard goes on, hoping it will just turn itself off in a few days may not always be the best solution.
Anyone familiar with northern Colorado will agree that being stranded alone in a non-functioning vehicle in the complete void of civilization between Loveland and Greeley is not the best way to start an evening.
When #1 and #2 are no longer just hypothetical situations, it is possible to take your girlfriend’s car to Wal-Mart, buy a new, fully charged battery, install it in the vehicle with the broken alternator, drive to a nearby mechanic for repair work, and finally return the slightly used battery the next day without the woman at the customer service desk realizing what happened. When she asked the reason for the return, I simply said I made a mistake and only needed a nine volt.

September 25, 2003 marked my one year anniversary working at UPS. I’m not sure why, but I expected the day to be kind of special. Nothing too fancy– maybe a nice bottle of wine or some flowers. You know, just a little something to make me feel like I’m important to UPS. But no, UPS just went on like it does every day, completely oblivious to my feelings.

Now that I completely understand / mentally repress everything that happens during the morning shift at UPS, I find my mind occasionally wanders while my body is busy running in and out of the delivery trucks. Just looking at a box moving down the belt can reveal a lot about its contents. Packages from a company such as L.L. Bean have a distinct look and feel that says, “Hello, I’ve got a sweater inside me.” Packages sent from less frequent shippers say things like, “This is a care package for my son who just started college.” Or, “I used to be a box of coco-puffs cereal.”

Sometimes during the spare seven nanoseconds between loading boxes I ask myself questions like, “Come on, now Omar, really, do you even know how long a nanosecond is?”, “Do you like movies about gladiators?”, and, of course, “Who comes up with these street names?” One part of town in Fort Collins is full of “Lord of the Rings” themed street names such as Shire, Hobbit, and Gilgalad. One morning when a coworker asked if a package for an address on Gilgalad Street should be loaded on one of my trucks, I replied with one of my favorite Hobbit songs, “Gilgalad was an Elven-king. Of him the harpers sadly sing…” I stopped only because someone threw a moderately heavy package at the back of my head, but that’s another story. (one I don’t remember, for some reason.)

I made my first official “career move” at UPS in September when I started working as a Saturday air driver. So now, in addition to my usual responsibilities of loading trucks Monday through Friday, I now spend Saturday mornings in a brown UPS truck. After I put on my cute little brown uniform, I deliver packages in the towns of Fort Collins, Laporte, and Belleview. For anyone not familiar with northern Colorado, Laporte is a small town up in the foothills where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Fort Collins. Belleview is nestled even further up in the mountains where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Laporte, usually with little more than a handful of cows and several high caliber firearms.

Driving UPS trucks has been a good learning experience for me. After one moderately sized Friday night snowstorm, I found out what a UPS truck can and can’t do. It can descend a moderately icy inclined entrance to a trailer park without much trouble. After I delivered the package, I discovered that getting back up and on to the main road was not a simple task. After several failed attempts, I looked around, found some trash to stick under the rear tires, and was soon on my way.

Well, that just about wraps things up for 2003. Will 2004 be the year I resolve the odd saltine cracker mystery? Will I keep working at UPS? Will my coworkers keep throwing packages at the back of my head? If you want to know the answer to these and many other totally unrelated questions, stay tuned for the 2004 edition. Until then, just remember my favorite line from the movie “Office Space.” Bob: Looks like you’ve been missing quite a bit of work lately. Peter Gibbons: Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been MISSING it, Bob.

For one reason or another, my family isn’t very big on Christmas tradition. We don’t cut down live trees. We don’t prepare an elaborate turkey dinner for Christmas. Heck, we have yet to construct a family coat of arms. This probably means the Lutfey family isn’t every going to be featured in a Norman Rockwell painting anytime in the foreseeable future. Despite all of this, we do make an effort to be in the same city every year around the holidays. This year my mom and I packed our bags and headed out to visit my sister in San Francisco. (NOTE TO SELF: Come up with a witty and insightful “Rice-a-roni” joke to end the paragraph.)

My journey started out by driving to Denver International Airport. My plan was to park in the long term parking lot and take the shuttle to the terminal. Which would have worked fine, except for the fact that the long term parking was too full to accept any new cars. I honestly don’t how this could happen since the airport is located in the geographic center of the Great Plains. I think letting cars park next to the paved parking lot in one of the hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped prairie land would be a valid option. But then again, people often tell me I think too much. My concern started growing when I kept driving towards the airport only to find the on-site long term parking was full. Same thing for the relatively close-in economy parking. The only option left was parking in the actual parking garage. Fortunately, there was plenty of empty spots. Unfortunately, it is the most expensive place to park in the entire state of Colorado. As I got out of the car I noticed a sign stating that all cars left would be towed when either A) Thirty days had elapsed, or B) The bill for parking exceeds the estimated blue book value of the car.

Once we arrived in San Francisco and got all of our belonging settled, my sister drove us around the city so we could see various points of interest. After seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf, my sister drove us through the mission district (a predominantly gay part of the city.) As we were stopped at an intersection, I pointed to a man in the crosswalk and said, “He looks SO gay.” Right after I said that, I realized my window was open. The guy looked right at me, made a “telephone” gesture by extending his thumb and pinkie finger, and mouthed the words “call me.”

OK, the last part just happened in my “wouldn’t it have been funny if…” fantasy world. My mom was completely offended by the whole situation, which only made it more entertaining for me. My sister was amused, but thought I was flattering myself. I spent the next hour or so making the telephone gesture whenever my mom looked at me. My sister’s boyfriend sat in the car quietly thinking to himself, “They will be gone in three days. They will be gone in three days….”

Over the past few years we have gotten into the habit (or “tradition”, if you will) of going to see some form of theatrical presentation around the holidays. In the past we have seen “Rent” and “Phantom of the Opera.” This year my sister purchased tickets to “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” I must say it was quite an experience. Anyone familiar with transsexual Nazi propaganda musicals knows exactly what I’m talking about. For all the other people out there still living in trees and caves, the show centers around a young man whose penis is cut off in an elaborate attempt to escape from East Berlin during the mid 1980s. Despite (or maybe because of) the odd premise, I enjoyed the evening. The musical numbers were fun to listen to and the finale used enormous volumes of artificial fog. (NOTE TO IMPRESSIONABLE READERS: Please do not take this paragraph as an endorsement of genital mutilation.)

After my whole “getting stuck in the women’s bathroom in an Amsterdam McDonalds” experience back in 1999, I thought my days of writing about fast food franchise restrooms were over. Not so, it turns out. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Despite being in the culturally diverse city of San Francisco, we stopped in a McDonalds near my sister’s apartment one afternoon for a quick bite to eat. Situated on the west side of the city near a monstrously large park, the area is home to quite a few homeless people. One of the fundamental rules of owning a restaurant in a large city is to make it really difficult for anyone to use the bathroom facilities. Most of the time this involves the use of a bathroom key tied to some sort of large and cumbersome item such as a brick or open container of scalding hot french fry grease.

This facility, however, took the inaccessibility concept one step further by installing a remote buzzer device. Anyone wanting to go to the bathroom would go to the cashier and asked to be buzzed inside. In principle, this is a decent solution. There is, however, a weak link in the system– it assumes everyone understands the concept of a buzzer. Which, unfortunately, was not the case. As we sat at a table we watched several people have difficulty gaining entrance to the bathroom. One young man kept trying to turn the knob after the buzzer stopped, which turns out to be the exact opposite of what he was supposed to be doing. This led to a rather annoyed manager coming over and giving him a quick lesson on how to operate the door. This was followed by a spirited philosophical discussion of “if there is one person in the bathroom and two stalls, am I allowed to go in?” After we finished eating, I decided it would just be easier to go outside and pee in an obscured corner of the parking lot.

Eventually we had to fly back to Colorado. We got on the plane and I realized the passenger in the seat next to me was the same guy one I yelled at in the Mission District. Let’s just say I had some explaining to do. Or was I sitting next to my mom? Either way, the plane landed in Colorado, I went back to Loveland, and my sister’s boyfriend is happy to be rid of us for the better part of a year.

Author: olutfey