Angie -vs- The Pool Pump

The comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, once put it best. Real life is funnier than anything you could make up. Who needs to be a comedy writer when you have it alive and well going on all around you?

 

Case in point, one year we purchased an above ground pool for the family. It turned out that the pump assembly we bought was not big enough to properly filter the pool. The replacement assembly would cost around $500. We did some of the normal juggling of funds and managed to purchase it. I picked it up from the pool supply company in our SUV and placed the boxed assembly in the back. When I arrived home I unloaded the pump assembly and left it behind the vehicle as I needed to get some help to get it into the backyard. As I was searching for help my cell phone went off with an emergency service call and seeing as how I just shelled out $500 I thought

“Great, maybe I can recoup some of the cost!”

So off I went. As I was driving back up the street on my return I noticed the pump assembly still behind the SUV.

“Good,” I thought to myself, “now maybe I can get that into the backyard.”

Just then I noticed the backup lights on the SUV light up and to my horror I saw Angie sitting in the driver’s seat preparing to leave, no doubt going to do something very important that she just remembered. As she started backing up I started pounding on the truck’s horn and screaming in the cab

“Nooooooo!”

Of course, Angie is oblivious to all this just as she usually is to all other things going on around her. The neighbors, however, were not and were coming out to see what the racket was all about. The sight that greeted them was of their usually sane neighbor acting anything but sane in his work truck, laying on the horn and screaming to himself as he watched his wife back up, pushing the $500 pump assembly toward the street. As it hit the gutter of the street it tipped over and the mighty SUV just back right up on top of it. As the SUV rose up over this expensive piece of equipment, I noticed Angie glance up into her rear view mirror.

“Good,” I thought, “she’s going to stop”

But no, that would have been the normal course of action when one realizes that perhaps there was a problem, what with the back of the SUV now obviously sitting on top of something, but then again, we are dealing with a far from normal person whose own universe is solely just that, her own. Angie just did what Angie always does when presented with a confusing situation…. Full steam ahead!

She gunned the powerful engine and rode the pump assembly out into the middle of the street. Then put her vehicle of destruction into drive and dropped down off the now severely mangled box and headed off down the street to destinations unknown, most probably even to her. This left the neighbors to watch her poor husband climb out of his truck and walk over to the battered box in the middle of the street muttering to himself words that are not allowed to be muttered out loud.

I must say that the packing company knows their business. The equipment which I was assuming would be irreparably damaged wasn’t even scratched in spite of the severely battered appearance of the packaging. By now some of our kids were outside due to the noisy commotion made by their father’s excited reaction to the affects of the mini hurricane he refers to as his wife and their mother.

They smiled slightly as I related the experience with “that woman I married! I must have been insane!” they knowingly nodded and patted me kindly on the back as if to say

“Yes, father, we love you and you will live through this. Remember, we are putting her in the care home when she gets older but you, you we will take home”

Their father’s final comment was

“I wonder how she remembers to breathe?”

The kids helped me get the equipment into the back yard and in short order I had it hooked up and working.

 

Several hours later I was working on some paperwork in our office when Angie came rushing in with a concerned look on her face and asked

“Have you seen the new pool pump anywhere?”

I calmly looked at her and thanks to several bottles of liquid medication also known as beer replied

“Yes, I was watching as you pushed it into the street and backed up over it.”

“Oh,” she replied with her normal downward glance of guilt, “I was afraid that was what it was.”

“And when is it exactly you realized this?” I asked.

“Oh, about two hours later when I pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store”.

I had to ask, “I noticed you looked in your rear view mirror when the SUV rose up, why didn’t you stop?”

Her reply was classical Angie, “It wasn’t trash day.”

After further questioning her reply made sense, not to me, nor to any other person with a normal thought pattern, but she was satisfied with it. It seems, unbeknownst to her long suffering husband, that almost every trash day she backs over the trash can. This is in spite of the fact that her husband intentionally puts them nowhere near the vehicles so as to prevent such an occurrence. When the SUV raised up she simply looked up and down the street and saw that the neighbor’s trash cans were not out so it was not trash day. Seeing as how this was the case, it must have been nothing that rose up the vehicle! So off she went. I often wonder how the neighborhood kids managed to survive their childhood with such logic operating a three ton rolling vehicle of destruction.