Soap in the Eye, SOAP IN THE EYE!

This kid puts in way more effort than I ever did as a trainee. That’s probably why it took so long for them to promote me to working days. Also I never complained about it.

Probably I should start being obnoxious if I want to move up in the ranks.

Today’s Exploit:

The other day I was being proactive, and preparing for my trip. I was trying really hard not to procrastinate because I wanted to be on time. (I would have been, if not for the traffic in Fort Worth. I should know better, traffic there is ALWAYS bad.)

I took Starla to the car wash because my she hasn’t been cleaned in 3.8 years. And because it smelled like vinegar and capsaicin from the bottle of hot sauce that broke and dripped all over everything.

First I had to clean all the junk out of my car. Junk accumulates exponentially in my passenger seat. The back seat junk doesn’t so much accumulate as grow and intertwine, rather like the vine on my grandparents’ house. The one that was pulling the siding off.

In the process of removing the junk my fingers came into contact with the dribbly mess on the floor. This wasn’t a problem until I decided that my neck itched. And failed to connect the knowledge that my hands had been immersed in liquid heat, and the skin on my neck is far more sensitive than that on my hands. I spent the next two days fighting a lovely heat rash.

I finally made it to the car wash and spent a small fortune trying to vacuum the grass and hair out of the carpet. Car-wash vacuums are not good for removing hair from car-carpet. The grass was only slightly easier to remove.

Eventually I pulled into the bay to wash Starla’s exterior. She is perpetually dusty from driving the poorly maintained roads to rigs. I scrubbed and washed and sprayed and shined.

I was feeling rather rushed because some dude in a Jeep pulled in behind me and only took 37 seconds to vacuum his car.

I finally finished and was getting ready to pull away when I remembered the floor mats. I had to wash them. They were the vinegary culprits, the entire reason I went to the blasted car-wash-place.

So I made apologetic faces at the dude in the Jeep and stuck a few more quarters in the machine. I decided I could just go with a rinse. Soap probably wasn’t entirely necessary.

Unfortunately “Rinse” does not mean just water. I was spraying the first mat when a fleck of spray rebounded and made a beeline for my right eye.

Ack!

I put my free hand over my eye and doggedly finished cleaning the mats. Then I grabbed them and threw them over the fence to dry and booked it out of the bay.

I sat in the sun and sprayed my face with eye drops. And cried my eye out.

When the mats were mostly dry, I stuck them back in the car and went home to assess the damage. I rinsed my eye with regular water for a while and then tried eye drops again.

It turns out that the drops were actually making my eye burn worse. So I stopped that and refrained from touching my eye more than necessary until the next morning.

The only lasting damage was to my pride and vanity. They suffered greatly as I drove home with mascara running down my face, my eye red and swollen and my shirt drenched with saline solution.