Setup:

I drove to work yesterday, because I had an 8 p.m. appointment in Mountain View with my (now) old landlady. Generally, I leave work at 5 and it takes me roughly 2 hours to get there, whether I drive or take mass transit - what does that tell you? In any case, this would leave me one hour to take out all the trash and recycling, pack up the remaining "valuables," and wipe surfaces down, vacuum in the dark, and hand over the keys. That's if I got there in two hours.

The experience:

I can never find the 880 South offramp from 80 West. I have tried before and failed, why did I think it would work last night? I always end up on the toll plaza, wondering how the hell that happened. So, I got off at the last random stop before the point of no return, hoping against hope that if I drove around long enough under the freeways (it's called The Maze for a reason), I'd eventually find what I was looking for.

Contrary to everything you're probably thinking at this point, that is if you got this far in the first place, I did find the onramp I was looking for, after driving for only about 10 minutes. Naturally, I was in the wrong lane to make the turn, and had to travel another mile up the road to an increasingly deserted and bad-looking place to turn around.

So I pull up to the light, and sit there, waiting waiting waiting and studiously avoiding looking at any of the semis or beat-up cars gathered around me (can you imagine how innocent and victim-like I appear?), when I hear the door on the semi stopped way too close to my passenger side door slam shut. I turn to look, thinking that he's checking some wires, maybe the tread on his tires, or something equally innocuous, but no. No, he's standing there with his back to me at the spot where the cab joins with the trailer part in that stance that you just know means that he's taking a leak.

Nice.

The rest of the story is rather anticlimactic, although the look on his face as I pulled away was priceless, as he had just lost any semblance of cover he had. Later, I was stressed from a weekend of relocating and organizing people and stuff, I was frustrated at not being able to reschedule this meeting to a more convenient time, and now I was stuck in traffic with too little time to do what I needed to do. It took me an hour to reach the southern bit of Oakland, and another hour to get back to my (now) old apartment. Needless to say, I was feeling very put-upon and put-out and unhappy and frustrated and and and...

And I cried. And then I felt better.

Now it's all over and hopefully I will never have to find the 880 South offramp from 80 West again.