I have not locked my keys in the car since I was 16 years old. Yesterday, that 40 year streak came to an end. Let me ruin the dramatic tension and just say this story has several types of happy endings.
First, some background. I am co-treasurer of our church, and I am the one who writes the checks. If our church was meeting in person, I would leave the paychecks in the mailboxes of our staff on the Sunday before pay day. But since we're not, I needed to take the paychecks to church, and since my work office is close to church, I decided to zip over there yesterday afternoon before my important 3:30 work meeting.
I had the 2 paychecks on the front seat. I keep my car key and house key on a carabiner, so that my heavy ring of work keys doesn't damage the ignition hanging there every day. The church keys live in the car. Somehow, I ended up outside of the locked car with the paychecks in my hand, the work keys, and the church keys, and my car key on the front seat. My purse and my phone--also in the car, hidden away in the glove box.
I checked the car doors--yep, locked tight. I went inside the church office and put the paychecks in the mailboxes. You might say, "Make a phone call from the church office." Years ago, we canceled the very expensive phone account because everyone was using their cell phones, and we never got phone calls on the traditional phone. So that option was out.
I knew that if I had to, I could walk back to my office. It's only about 1.5 miles, and I was wearing sandals that are well-cushioned. But I decided that first I would check at the parsonage, which is several blocks away, and in the direction I'd need to be walking back to the office, if it came to that.
Happily, my pastor was home, and he was able to give me a ride back to work. We had a great chat about the crazy real estate market. He thinks we were wise to sell our house, not because of the profit that we could make, but because of climate dangers, and it was good to hear that. I have this feeling that people in other parts of the country that aren't dealing with hurricanes and flooding see me as this crazy Cassandra person who sold her house on the off chance that her house might be damaged by future sea level rise.
My house has already been damaged by a variety of climate dangers, but I digress.
I headed to my office to call my spouse, but before I got there, a stranger said, "Could you take me to your server room?"
Hmm. Can I take a strange man down the hallway to our server room that's full of expensive equipment? I said, "Let me make a phone call first."
The first IT person I called said he didn't know anything about it, so I called the head of IT and said that a man I'd never heard of was here to install equipment I knew nothing about. The head of IT said, "That sounds right."
I said, "So I should go ahead and let him in the server room."
The jovial head of IT said, "Sure!"
Long story short, the stranger would eventually need access to a room of electrical equipment and no one on site had the key, so he'll come back. At least I'll be expecting him when he returns, and I'll know that he's got IT's permission to access the server.
But I digress.
I called my spouse, and we did not lose the extra car key in the move. He was able to swing by the church and get my key off the front seat of the car so that no one walking by would see it and smash the window. He came to my office and waited for my 3:30 meeting to finish.
We went back to the church, where my car was unbroken, and we got the money that had come since the last time we made the deposit. My spouse headed home, and I headed back to the office, finished up, and then came home to eat dinner and "go" to my seminary class on Speaking of God in a Secular Age.
Yesterday was surreal in so many ways, and yet, it leaves me wondering: when day after day is surreal, at what point do we begin to think of our daily life as not surreal but as real life?
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