My grandfather, Papa D, is not the world's best driver. He's probably not the worst, either, but he's still no picnic. He's in his early 70s and has one eye. And he gets distracted kind of easily. Okay, really easily.
Case in point - just last week, he nearly ran the van into a ditch. Granted it was a tiny ditch that we could have gotten out of, but that's really besides the point.
Last week was our week to run around for four days across Northern California to pick up ad copy from our advertisers. One would think in the 21st Century that everything would be done electronically. Nope. Not in this household. Papa D runs out and talks to a good 1/2 of our advertisers on a monthly basis regarding their ads. Then he'll spend forever chatting with each one of them (but that's a post for another day).
Last Wednesday, on our way to one of the many small towns up here, he needed to pull off to use the bathroom. There's a little glorified port-a-potty provided by the Forest Service at one point and he's frequented it before. He gets back in the van to show me a picture of the bathroom as it was apparently a disaster. I guess he thought I gave a shit what the inside of the bathroom looked like. They're never pretty.
As per his usual, he puts the van in motion on a tiny dirt road and then puts on his seat belt, which pisses me off that he waits until he's driving. Then, he starts looking around for the bottle of antibacterial wipes that was rolling around on the floorboards. I look up from my phone and we're half way in a fucking ditch. I shouted "STOP!" He promptly swerved the van back onto the dirt road, and as the van is swerving all over this road, he tells me, "I'm just looking for the wipes, this one is empty".
The "empty" one wasn't empty - it was new, and the wipes hadn't been pushed through the opening yet. I was rather pissed and annoyed when I finally blurted out, "Just stop and I will get them for you!" The van lurched to a stop and I opened the new container of wipes.
I know he'll never remember to put his seat belt on before he puts the van in motion. But you would think that when he has a person in the passenger seat, that he might ask them to get something for him instead of doing it himself while driving. Common sense, right? It kinda makes me wonder how he never wrecked all those years driving alone.
I survived the rest of the day, although I was a wee bit tense and wound up with a headache. Thank God for Excedrin.
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