Divine Comedy

Lately I'm beginning to feel that, if there is a god, and if he does have a sense of humor, I'm his punchline.

There's a co-worker of mine — sort of not a co-worker, and sort of in the executive echelon, with boobs bigger than her brain — who handles a few of our clients' smaller meetings. Despite doing the job for somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years, she still hasn't grasped the concept that cutting the crew in half just to meet the laughably low budget she created will seriously affect the amount of time and energy those remaining must put into the project in order for it to come together as she promised.

One of these meetings, held in a ridiculously archaic building downtown, I always seem to get roped into. This year the new show manager was put in charge of the technical details of the meeting, and he was finally putting the proper number of bodies on it, unlike the three bodies Big Boob Barbie always requested. And he required that I, the camera operator, need not be there until later in the afternoon. HALLELUJIAH! That is, until BBB got wind of it. So my day changed from a leisurely call time of 3:00pm — after a 9:00am appointment with my chiropractor, followed by a mid-day hack at getting some much-needed filing done — to a freakin' 8:00am call time after a 27-mile commute from the northwest suburbs, helping to unload a couple of tons of equipment from a truck and move the cases almost literally one-by-one up to the fifth floor on The World's Tiniest Freight Elevator — which is also the only service elevator in the building, and so is used by all of the kitchen staff to get to all seven floors.

So I had to call my chiropractor's office and cancel the appointment I had made only 12-hours earlier, and I had to gird my loins for an extra-early wake-up and commute down into the city.

Fortunately Tuesday Night I fell asleep quickly. I was with someone…I don't know who it was…just someone. We were near an airport and we saw in the distance a jet plane taking off and heading toward us. Excited that it was likely to fly over our heads at low altitude, we stood and waited for it. I was distracted by something, and just a few moments later the plane was passing us, not overhead, but a couple hundred yards away from us. I looked over to see a huge American Airlines jet, possibly a 757, flying about 300 feet off the ground.

Upside-down.

As it passed us by I watched it, and I said, "That's not good…."

Then the plane angled upward toward the sky, as though in an effort to right itself. But the pilot angled up too sharply and the plane stalled, its tail whipping up amid the fierce scream of the engines until, at the top of its arcing swing, the tail section began to disintegrate.

I remember thinking, as I saw the plane trying to climb, "This is not a dream! This is really happening!!" Large pieces of the tail of the plane began falling to the ground, and I and the people I was with turned and began running away. I heard the horrendous crash and explosion of the plane's body hitting the ground behind me as I thought in horror of all the people who must have been on that plane.

And then I woke up.

I don't remember many dreams, but of the ones that do stick with me, very few are nightmares. And rarely are they so vivid. Had this one been any clearer, I would have been able to recite the plane's FAA tail number! Needless to say, I, a frequent air traveler (on United Air Lines, thankyouverymuch!), lay awake for quite a while trying to catch my breath!

The alarm came too soon, and I showered, shaved and dressed myself out the door. At such an early hour (I padded my time a little, too) the traffic wasn't bad, and I pulled into the parking garage directly across the street from the venue. I asked the garage attendant if there was a restaurant nearby that served breakfast. He looked at me with mild shock on his face, and then he pointed to the north and said, "Right next door! They serve a real good breakfast!"

The big, flashing neon sign read "Plymouth Restaurant & Bar," which I had seen, but, misled by "Bar," I assumed it was only open in the afternoon and evening. I went in and was served by a cute, young waitress with black hair, pretty eyes and crooked teeth. Corned beef hash and eggs. They were good, but they didn't make the list. I tried flirting with the cute waitress, but she was distracted by conversation with some regulars and didn't stick around. Or maybe it was too early to be flirted with. Stupid regulars.

The truck was nearly 15 minutes late. I helped move a couple of cases, and the new show manager, aware of my back issue and afraid I'd really screw it up, told me to just "drive the liftgate." When all our stuff was on the sidewalk, he sent me up to the fifth floor, where we "bucket teamed" the cases: one guy pushed a case to the elevator, one guy on the elevator rode up with the case and pushed it out into the dark, narrow, possibly rat-infested service hallway where I grabbed it and pushed it into our venue room.

No need to bore with the details of setup. It is pure tedium. We broke for lunch around 1:30 and wound up back at the Plymouth Restaurant & Bar, for I had unintentionally whetted the other guys' libidos at mention of the cute waitress. We didn't see her at first, but she was there. However, we did see an even cuter hostess. I, being the only single or unattached male at the table, failed miserably in my duty as The Single Man. I barely managed a "Hello."


After lunch we went back to the venue, finished setting up, waited around for a while and then the program commenced…and finished…all 65 minutes of it. Welcome to my world. Tons of gear, pounds of sweat and swearing, ridiculously unaccommodating locales (sometimes), all for an hour of program. By the time we had struck all the gear, moved it down to the street — during which the elevator broke down…right after we moved the last case off of it! — and loaded it all onto the truck, it was 9:30 pm. That's a sixteen-hour day, people! I managed to get through it all with only a minor irritation of my back issue, right at the end of the load-out as I helped push the heaviest (by volume) case onto the liftgate. I thought for a second I would be doubled over for the rest of my life, but that proved not to be the case. The truck driver dude bid his farewell (he had to be back downtown at 7:30 the next morning), one other dude took off, and the remaining three of us decided on a late-night bite at… you guessed it …the Plymouth Restaurant & Bar. But they were fresh out of cute waitresses.

I crawled into my apartment at 11:15pm.

During the day the topic of flavored condoms came up in our many conversations. (It was a bunch of guys. What can I say?) Grape. Apple. Cherry. We're all adults here (You kids! Go to bed!). We all know why they’re flavored. I can only imagine that the unflavored ones taste awful…a lot like rubber. But, as I observed, if it's something someone would do anyway but for the concern about health, wouldn't it make sense to make them penis-flavored?

It never occurred to me to ask the cute waitress.

We always tend to feel that whichever line we step into anywhere is always the slowest line. With me it's the real truth. My co-workers have witnessed it. Producer has witnessed it at the airport. He and I will go past the TSA ID-checker-person at roughly the same time, then we'll go to separate lines. His line ALWAYS moves faster, even if he starts farther back in his than I did in mine, he will emerge from the metal detector a good several minutes before I do. Today three of us went to a local restaurant with a food-stand type service. There were two lines of equal length (about six people deep) formed at the registers, I stepped up to the end of the one on the right, and my co-workers stepped in right behind me. Almost immediately the line to our left moved forward, and ours stagnated. Producer looked at Editor and said, "We goofed; we got into [Farrago]'s line."

Editor said, "Yup."

There's at least one intersection I go through on my way home every evening, after I stop at the post office to get my mail, where I always hit the red light. It's a small street that intersects at a six-lane divided highway and the entrance road to a high school parking lot. The light is controlled by sensors in the pavement that react to the metal in cars that stop over them. It doesn't matter from which direction I approach this stupid intersection, I almost always get the red light. Every evening, as I back out of my stall at the post office, I can see that the light at the intersection is green, but no matter what I do — drive maniacally to the intersection, or give up hope that it will still be green when I get there — it turns red before I can get through it. Even when I'm on the six-lane highway, eight times out of ten I get caught at that light.

So chuck your bibles into the trash. Right up there's all the proof you need that god exists.

And he's picking on me.