My only ever student summer job was as a bus conductor for the Southern Vectis Omnibus Company (IoW) and the worst run was the number 16 to ryde Pier on a Saturday (change over day). Suddenly your bus would be crammed with over seventy passengers and children/dogs/prams/ luggage. Furthermore, most had little idea of where they were going, "I think the hotel’s called ‘Sea View’. Nevertheless one had to get round the bus and collect all the fares before the first lot started gettin off, maybe a hundred yards down the road.
That shift was two hours shorter (6) than any other. It was my first solo shift and a total disaster.
We were driving back from the Netherlands to France, avoiding toll roads and motorways as much as possible.
It was close to 6pm when, driving through a village, we spotted a place that sold takeaway pizza. We picked one up and headed back on the road. About half an hour later I realised I had left my much needed reading glasses behind. Husband was not impressed and neither was I.
An hour after leaving the takeaway place, we rocked up and got my glasses back. It was a very quiet and long journey back home….
I did similar at the start of the month, coming back from Scotland.
We stopped for much at a bistro in a little village just off the A10 North of Poitiers and, when we left, my man bag was still over the back of the chair.
Unfortunately it wasn’t realised until we got home about 90 minutes later. Still, it was a good excuse to go back for another nice lunch the following day.
Gosh, I did that in Derby. We went to a restaurant for dinner and waited for ages to be seated. (The restaurant wasn’t busy and it was off-peak hours.) We then waited ages to get a menu. When it didn’t materialise, half an hour after being seated, we walked out and drove to the Harvester down the road. A few minutes after being seated, I realised that I had left my handbag behind in the previous restaurant. I drove back in a complete sweat, and found the handbag still hanging from the back of my seat. There were still no menus on the table.
Don’t think this was a ‘senior moment’ for my father, he was in his 40s. He was a London cabbie and left for work always at 6.30am, having first filled the kettle, lit the gas, boiled the water, made some tea, gave our dog a saucerful, took a cuppa up to mum in bed, had some breakfast and then would be gone.
He confessed to me that the previous morning he had lit a match, turned on the water tap and doused the match, instead of filling the kettle. The usual sequence hadn’t played out that time.
Can there be such senior moments? My dad’s moment was due to sheer fatigue.
These stories of having to retrace one’s steps reminds me …
I lived in Brazil in the 70s and my brother flew out for a visit. Towards the end of his holiday we went to Iguazu Falls, 1000kms from Sao Paulo where I lived. As we were running out of days we decided to drive back in one journey, taking the driving in 2 hour slots. Middle of the night, having done 2 hours, I pulled into a (closed) garage forecourt and woke my brother, asleep on the back seat. We swapped places and within seconds I was sound asleep. Two hours later, the car stopped and my brother woke me saying “I don’t understand”. In the headlights, there was a sign pointing us to Iguazu Falls. He’d driven two hours back the way we’d just come! Because of course he’d been asleep when I pulled into the forecourt and so had no idea which direction we’d come from. I fell asleep immediately and so didn’t see which way he set off.
We neither of us had the excuse we were “senior”.
The 14 hour journey had an extra 4 hours added to it.
I’m a reasonably intelligent being and, for some things, I can have the memory of an elephant but when it comes to possessions I can be so absent minded.
I once threw my keys into a dustbin with some rubbish as I came home late at night. Unfortunately the only opening in the dustbin was a round opening in the top, so I had to dive into the bin headfirst in pitch darkness. Fortunately there wasn’t much rubbish in there, and I found the keys fairly quickly, but I must have looked pretty funny with my lower body sticking upwards out of the top of the bin, and I was giggling about the thought of it all the time I was searching.
Was breaking for lunch during a week long external examiner’s stint at the Michaelis School of Art, U of Cape Town (the best gig!).
Unfortunately the prospect of a leisurely hour or two with the UCT staff in a fish resto on the V&A Waterfront was immediately forgotten as I suddenly remembered putting my car keys in my brief case (why, I still don’t know) and then putting the briefcase in the car boot - and the spare key was 900kms away.
Fortunately the car and the driver’s door lock weren’t very modern (1984 MB 280 coupe) the lock had plenty of play and so in desperation, I tried to open it with the small blade on my Swiss army knife (which unlike the car key, was usually kept in the brief case). It was an unbelievable success and I was able to get inside the car. This model had a first aid kit sunk into the rear window sill and by unscrewing and removing it (with that Swiss army knife) I could reach inside the boot, find and open my briefcase and very gingerly rummage till I found the car key.
And then made it down to the Waterfront for lunch!
Oh god you’ve just given me a flashback to a similar cock-up I made…
I was photographing a wedding at a church in Essex. The ceremony had finished and I was about to get in the car and leave for the reception, when the groom came over and asked for one last photo outside the church.
I dumped my camera bag in the back of the car, grabbed one camera and went and did the photos.
When I returned to the car, I found that the central-locking had operated and I was now locked out of the car - and my car keys were inside my camera bag in the boot.
Because I needed to get to the wedding reception, there wasn’t time to call a locksmith or the AA etc.
So I found a friendly churchwarden who lent me a club hammer with which to smash the passenger side window. Car window glass is surprisingly hard to break when you want to do it deliberately!
Fortunately my car was a Ford Focus hatchback so I could get into the boot area from inside the car - if it had been a saloon with a separate boot I would have been really stuffed.
Anyway I had to drive to the reception with a howling gale from the side window, and then on to the hotel where I was staying for the night. And then a chilly drive back home around the M25 the following morning… Thankfully it didn’t rain!
Plus a £95 bill for a new side window (which wasn’t as bad as I was expecting actually).
My former bro in law (now ex sister-in-law - surgically converted) and his/her friend were visiting me here in France while passing through the area. I decided to take them for a walk along a nearby river to waterfall and it pool beneath it. We took 2 vehicles to the start point as they were heading off after the walk.
On the way the ex in-law took some photos close to the water’s edge and dropped the mobile phone. No amount of leaning into the water could find the phone. I stripped off and went into the river - and found the phone.
On the way back from the waterfall pool, we took some last photographs near another smaller waterfall. I stood on a rock, put my rucksack down and took a nice photo looking back to the in-law and friend. I turned back to retrieve my rucksack and it was nowhere to be found. It must have slipped into the river! My car keys and house keys were in it.
I stripped off for the second time and lowered myself into the fast flowing area of a small waterfall pool and clung onto a rock for dear life, feeling the bottom with me feet, and then trying to feel around the area, hoping to hook my rucksack. Of course - my much taller in-law didn’t bother to offer to help - I’m 4ft nothing, he/she and the friend area nearly 6ft! No amount of searching found the rucksack.
We headed back downstream, asking walkers along the way if they had seen a floating rucksack, but to no avail. We got to the large waterfall and it’s pool - still no sighting of my rucksack.
We walked back to the cars and got a lift home. We found a ladder and the friend shimmied up to the balcony and managed to get through the door (it has a sticky door so I can’t lock it). The house was opened up and my in-law tried to phone Fiat to see if someone could make me a key for my car. Unfortunately the office had just closed. I messaged my husband who was away, working at sea. He managed to get a wifi signal using the bad crew network, and called the Dutch version of the AA to retrieve the car. Unfortunately there was a complication (too long to explain on here), so they couldn’t retrieve it. In the meantime I looked for the spare letterbox key and found it, and a spare car key! I had forgotten that there was a spare, which my husband had put away with all the spare keys.
Big sigh of relief all round! We went and fetched my car but the in-law and his friend had to spend another night before heading south as it was way too late for them to continue.
