I am angry at someone.  I have not yet determined who.  No, it probably is not you, so you can relax.

I am angry because I was sent on a fool’s errand simply because someone was too inconsiderate to answer a phone message to let me know it was not necessary.  I am angry because this is the second time this person did this, in very much the same way, with slightly different circumstances, although the first time there was considerably less inconvenience to me.

It goes back to our friend who was in the car accident almost two weeks ago.  We responded to his rather desperate situation by lending him our truck, somewhat hampering our ability to accomplish some of our essential chores.  We left “care and feeding” instructions with it, including that the brake fluid and power steering fluid had to be checked regularly, as they both leak slowly.

On Saturday, we were going to need it; by the time we actually got around to getting over there it was too late, though, so we didn’t take it.  We did move it, though–not I, but someone else involved.  This led to a phone call from them asking where we put it, as they could not find it.

Now, I don’t know where you would go with that, but my thought was that we needed to confirm that it was indeed missing and then call the police.  They, however, found it, and went to the movies and shut off their phones so we could not contact them.  I would have thought they’d have had the sense to call and say, “Never mind, we found it.”  Instead, they left us wondering for several hours until one of them–actually one of the backup people we called, a mutual friend closer to them than to us–got the message and let us know what was happening.  They are fortunate that the police were not making inquiries by then; we were very close to driving over to find out what happened, and that would have given us no more information than we already had.

I have not mentioned that driving over is an hour if the traffic is light.  It was not light on Saturday night.

So here it is Monday, and we get a message–and I do not know how we got the message, but I think it was a voicemail on our phone called in while we were sleeping.  We knew that our friend was not particularly mechanically inclined, but he had assured us that he would keep up on the fluids.  The message said that they could not figure out how to open the hood, and the brakes were failing.

That sounds like a pretty serious situation to me; it sounded like an emergency to the person who actually got the message.  Of course, it is still Monday, and I still had to feed kids and get my mother-in-law to the store.  Plus, it happens to be Memorial Day, so the store was going to close three hours early, pinching my time frame significantly.  Yet I had to add a trip over to check the truck.

Did I mention that this trip is an hour out of the way?  It is also an hour to get to my mother-in-law.  This trip was not the opposite direction, but it was certainly the wrong direction, and when I finished it I would be no closer to my shopping trip than I had been when I started.  I took the precaution of calling to confirm that there was still a problem.  I got a voice mail box, but left a message that I should be called if my information was incorrect.  Then I headed out to solve the problem with the truck.  After all, if they had solved the problem after letting us know they needed help, they would have called us, right?

Apparently, wrong.  An hour later (a bit longer, as I grabbed supper for myself on the road so as not to have to delay long enough to eat when I fed the kids) I am opening the hood to the truck and finding that the reservoir for the brakes is overfilled, and there is a new can of brake fluid (not the one I’d left) in the bed.  Of course, they haven’t kept the power steering fluid full, and the coolant level is low, but I took care of those items and then jumped back in my car and made best possible speed to my final errand.

I saw no one.  It may be that they do not know I was there–although I moved the seat to start the car when I was checking the transmission fluid.  I could have saved an hour of driving, maybe ten dollars in gas, a three dollar bridge toll, and a fair amount of aggravation, had they simply let us know that indeed they had managed to solve the problem after alerting us.

It is not that I begrudge people my help when they need it.  I begrudge them my help when they don’t need it and forget to let me know that they have things under control.  I have enough to do without adding such things to my workload.  I do hope this does not happen again.

–M. J. Young