Wow. Today was the shit cherry on top of the past three weeks' shit sundae.
On December 1st, my mother had a car accident. She fudged a stop sign and a guy t-boned her. She was unhurt, but her car was totalled. (Incidentally, the night before I had a big fight with her. In the instant after I learned she had an accident but before I learned she walked away from it, I thought I was going straight to Silent Hill.)
The following two weeks were pretty miserable. She was in a hurry to buy a new car, and she had to go to various medical establishments for insurance reasons; for some reason she felt she didn't want to do all that alone, so she asked me to go pretty much everywhere with her. You know what? I'm not a monster. I went.
The thing is, my mom doesn't trust me to drive. Never mind the fact that I've been driving like a saint for 12 years and have never so much as put a scratch in any vehicle I've ever sat behind the wheel of.
And she just caused a fucking accident. So she drove us around, the first week in a rental car paid for by her insurance company, the second week
in my own actual fucking car. To and from every car dealership in town, to and from specialists doctors and x-ray labs and who knows what else. On top of that I have brutal motion sickness, and my sleep disorder tends to act up in this time of year. It all adds up to me, half asleep, perpetually on the edge of vomiting, being carted all over town so I can listen to assholes try to sell my notoriously indecisive mom a car over and over again.
(By the way, man are modern cars boring. Damn. They all look the same to me.)
Eventually she does settle on a car, and asks me if she can borrow mine to go to work while hers is prepped and all. At this point I'm just glad she doesn't need me around anymore, so I let her.
She got her car yesterday evening. And still, today she wanted to use my car again instead, because a bunch of people at her office were going to a restaurant for lunch and she didn't want to haul people in her brand new car just yet. So I let her. It's just one more day, right? What difference does it make?
Minutes after I woke up late this afternoon, I get a call. It's her. She's at work. She let the lights on the car all day and the battery's dead. Her roadside assistance program only covers her when she's driving her own car. She wants me to drive her new car to her workplace, let her go home, then call the Canadian equivalent of the AAA (of which I'm a member), and pretend that
I let the battery run out so they'd boost me for free. (For a debatable definition of "free" because I only get five calls a year.)
So I drive there, nice guy that I am. First thing she says when I arrive isn't "hello" or "thanks". No, she yells at me because I picked a spacious parking spot about twenty feet from the front door instead of a squeezy little space right in front. Yeah, I'll park your brand new car that I've never driven before into a tiny little space so you can save ten seconds of walking.
Anyway. She gets in her car, drives away. Turns out the front doors to the building are locked. After an hour of waiting outside in snowy -30 Celsius weather, the tow guy arrives and boosts my car. I spent fifteen minutes scraping the frost from the inside windows, drive half an hour more to recharge the battery, and get home.
