Rusharound

If you haven’t seen the movie Idiocracy, this post will save you the trouble and entertain you with an “Idiocratic” moment of my own.

The premise of the movie is that in 21st century life, intelligent urbanites have fewer kids or no kids at all while they wait for their careers to blossom or hold out for the ideal conditions for parenting. Meanwhile, the stay-at-home welfare class has more and more kids so that by the year 2505, the population is filled with uneducated, unmotivated, pleasure-seeking good-for-nothings. [Note, this is not what I think of the welfare class, it’s just what happens in the movie]. When two mediocre citizens from the year 2005 travel through time to 2505, they find themselves to be, quite literally, the smartest people on the planet.

Well, today was 2505 in Cambridge and I was the lucky time traveler.

It all went down at the U-Haul branch in Cambridge. Earlier in the day I had spent 43 minutes on the phone with four separate calls to the local branch and regional U-Haul reservation offices booking myself a 5′ x 8′ rental trailer. As I pulled into their enormous and nearly empy garage to pick it up, a woman emerged from the office to shout at me to leave. As she walked up to my car from behind, I told her I was here to pick up a trailer I had reserved. “A trailer? Do you have a trailer hitch?” she barked.

Like I said, she was standing at the rear bumper of my car when she asked this. She could have put her foot on the trailer hitch without even taking a step if she wanted to.

I responded the only way I knew how: “Jeeze. I don’t have a clue. How am I supposed to know if I have a hitch?”

Perhaps thinking she’d found someone who shares her inability to identify a trailer hitch, she reversed her moments-old parking ban and motioned to one of the empty parking spaces.

When I got inside, I saw three people behind the counter and six in line. I went back to my car for the book I had brought with me.

A chapter later, I was at the front of the line and being motioned by the woman I met in the garage. She blankly asked what I wanted, a testimony to either her memory or the amount of time that had transpired since I pulled into the garage. I explained, “I’m here to pick up a trailer I reserved,” as I counted six earrings in her lobes, three on her nose, and two in her upper lip.

“Do you have a trailer hitch?” she asked. My mind quickly published a fictional mental image of the U-Haul training manual, with just a two page spread, printed on thick cardboard slabs and bound with a childproof binding. In it, was a cartoon of a trailer and in 60 point font the words “Ask the customer, ‘Do you have a trailer hitch?'” She must have been memorized that page very, very well. This time, I played it straight and said that I did. She flashed her french manicured fingernails and told me to get back in in line. “I don’t do trailers anymore. 30 bucks, only a week old,” she said as she admired the nails from their backsides.

I started in on the next chapter.

Ten minutes later, I’m finally back in the garage with one of French Manicure’s coworkers. He told me to pull my car around and point it out of the narrow garage door, which I did, except that I pulled a bit to the side so I wouldn’t block the entrance. I shut off the car and got out to help him attach the trailer.

In grunts, he motioned me back to the car. “Thadoor. Point outthedoor.” So I started the car and repositioned it to block the garage door. We connected the trailer without incident and, just as I was going to go back into the office to fill out all the the paperwork and decline their insurance, French Manicure pointed to the line up of U-Haul trucks waiting to come in the door, each now blocking traffic.

“Pull it on to the street,” she said, as she stood at the garage door and motioned outward.

“Is there parking out there?” I asked.

Instead of turning her head to the right to check for spaces, she looked directly at me, lit a cigarette and said, “I don’t know.”

If this is any forecast of the future, 2505 is looking pretty bleak.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.