So it’s been a while since I’ve written anything on this blog, and that’s due in part to the string of bad luck my family has endured in the last month or two. It started small. Our garage door opener broke. I’ve always heard that homeowners have to do a lot of maintenance, but since I’ve only lived in a house for nine months, this was the first major home maintenance project I had to take on myself. Over the course of two weekends, my sister-in-law and I pieced together the parts of the new garage door opener and bolted it in (hopefully) to the proper rafters, and when I finally pressed the button to see if it worked, it did.
Then, my wife was in a car accident. Everyone involved was fine, no real injuries at all, but the car was totaled. So we had to rent a car while we went about buying a new one. And one afternoon, while the rental car was in our garage, a spring on the garage door snapped, totally unrelated to the garage door opener, trapping the rental car inside. I don’t know how many of you have tried to lift a garage door without the aid of springs, but it is difficult. With some help, I got the rental car out and hired someone to come and help me fix it.
We bought a car to replace our old one, and we were so excited about it, and felt we’d made a great choice, and when we got it home we realized that while we’d been signing the papers to buy the car, someone in the car dealership parking lot had dinged it. A minor scratch, but it just drove me crazy.
Finally, last week, my boss had some kind of melt down and began to advocate for a total restructuring of the radio program I work for, which would involve me not working on it. He’s since decided not to be so rash, but I’m seriously considering looking for other ways to make a living.
I joked to my wife that someone must have put a curse on us. And since I’ve been dealing a lot with the insurance company, I’ve been wondering what insurance agents think about luck. Do they think all accidents are freak occurrences, or do they know better than any of us how dark clouds hang over certain individuals?
One of the things my wife and I have been doing a lot of lately is watching the TV program 24 on DVD, and its conspiratorial storyline feeds into my paranoia about all these misfortunes. Maybe my garage door spring didn’t just snap. Maybe a Serbian terrorist is lurking around my backyard, looking for things to sabotage. Maybe the car dealership is in on the conspiracy, and they purposefully damaged my car just before I drove it away, in hopes of destabilizing my mental state. Maybe the insurance company is toying with me, by making me call them back repeatedly, to answer the same questions again and again. And they’ve even gotten to my boss. There’s no one I can trust.
Last night my wife said she was going in see if the baby was awake. She said, “If I don’t come back in a couple minutes…” and then trailed off. She was struggling to find her train of thought, so I finished her sentence for her.
“If you don’t come back, I’ll send a field agent after you.”