From Comedy to Farce

As I was walking Buster this morning, I stopped by my mom's house with him. Much to my surprise, she was awake. Normally on days when she doesn't work, she prefers to sleep in until 11 or so, and it wasn't even 10 yet. At any rate, she asked me if I'd help her get a file cabinet into the choir room at church if she went and bought one. I shrugged and agreed to help, so I drove back over after getting Buster back to Dad's house. Then we went back to Dad's house to get the pickup, and I followed in my car as Mom went to Office Max to get the file cabinet. So far so good. Soon after, the farce began.

Mom picked out the cheapest, large cabinet, and went up to pay for it. I asked her if she wanted me to wait for her or meet her at the church. A light dawned in her eyes. She'd forgotten to grab keys to the church. So she sent me back to her house to get the keys, or at least the briefcase containing the keys. Since we were short on time, I then headed directly over to the church to wait. And wait. And be puzzled. Unfortunately, my cell phone was nearly dead and the charger was sitting on the entry table at home. I tried to call her anyway, and apparently she could hear me, but I couldn't hear her, so I still didn't know what was going on. When she tried to call me back, the phone died for good.

So I waited some more. Finally I got fed up, dug the keys out of the briefcase, and decided to find a working phone. I lucked out on the keys: the first one I tried opened the back door. Then I had to find a phone. Back when I was still going to the church, there had been a public phone just outside the fireside room. Nope. Bare wall. I wandered back, and spotted a phone in the Oelwein room (don't ask me why it's called that; it just is. Mostly it's used to serve coffee and cookies). This phone did actually work, so I called Mom again.

She was still at Office-Max. It turns out that the model of filing cabinet she'd chosen was due to be "updated", so they didn't have any in boxes and were extricating the floor model for her. The good part about this was that they gave her a $50 discount. The bad part was that we weren't going to have time to deliver the thing before her dentist appointment. So I went home and let Mom know that her briefcase and keys were in the passenger seat of my car.

The rest of it isn't particularly farcical, unless we were in the episode with the neighbor desperately trying to sleep. After the dentist appointment was done, we made it over there, located a handtruck, and I took the cabinet down the steps into the choir room. It boomed on every step, as Mom needed to hold a door open at the bottom and couldn't also steady it down each step. But it's in the choir room now.

It seems to me that if we combined my yesterday and today into a single episode, with the calls to help with the filing cabinet coming at the worst possible moments in the muffin-making, we'd have a fairly typical disaster-sitcom-episode. *wonders what genre tomorrow will be*