I stopped a moving car with my hands, y’all. Moving car. My hands. Stopped. In the parking lot at work. Before coffee and 8 a.m.
Joshua slept all night long last night. I, despite getting a full night’s sleep, woke up all foggy-headed and in need of another few hours of rest. Which I didn’t get. So I got up and showered and left the house and managed to pull into the parking lot at work (after dropping Joshua off at daycare and having the daily morning convo with my Mama).
Still in a brain fog, I had a few minutes to spare before going into the building (and it was TWENTY SIX DEGREES outside) (yes, I’m serious.) so I thought I’d just stay in the car for a minute where it was warm and toasty. I took a turn or two on Words with Friends (notsupermom–PLAY ME) and then I saw it.
The car next to me seemed to be moving. Backward.
You know when you’re at a stop light and the car next to you rolls forward just a smidge and you momentarily think you might be rolling backward instead of accepting the fact that they are actually rolling forward and you are staying put?
Yeah. That. That’s what it was like.
I momentarily thought my car wasn’t in Park and that I was actually moving and then I was all “That’s ridiculous, Miranda. THAT CAR IS MOVING. ZOMG. WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO I DO!!?!?”
So, what do I do?
I jump out of my car and grab the door handle of this beater beside me. (And beater this car was…totally.)
I GRABBED THE HANDLE OF THIS CAR TO STOP IT FROM MOVING. And it stopped. And I was all “Wait…what do I do!?!?!”
So I let go to see if I’d permanently stopped the car. (No.) And then I jumped behind the car and rolled it back into its parking spot. (I also tried a time or two to lean off the car and see if I’d managed to get it back into a stationary position. No. No, I hadn’t.)
I called the front office to tell the morning receptionist to page the owner of the blue Ford Escort (two-door hatchback. Do they even make those anymore??) in the parking lot because his car was MOVING BACKWARD.
By this time two or three teachers had driven into the parking lot and zoomed right past me, staring at this crazy person (me) who was leaning against the back of a car she does not own while it is TWENTY SIX DEGREES outside.
I mean, on any other, WARMER day, I might’ve looked like something out of an ad for “Calm, Cool and Collected.” Today? Really? You people really think I want to hang out in the below freezing cold weather? No. No, I do not. Today I only look like an ad for “Crazy Person in the FARKING COLD.”
In the meantime, a teacher friend of mine had come over to see what was going on. His suggestion was to call a janitor and see if the janitor had a block to put behind the tire.
But WAIT!
He got a jack out of his trunk and put it behind the tire!
Just as the owner of the car was running through the parking lot after hearing what might have been the most odd announcement to ever be uttered on our intercom system at work.
(Back to my coworker for a second…what did he intend to do with the jack? Leave it there? Put a post-it note on it telling the Ford owner where to put it when he was no longer in need of it? Wait in his own car until the guy came out, even if that happened to be sometime in the middle of the afternoon?? I have no idea.)
Anyway, the owner finally came out to rescue me from the freezing cold (despite the fact that I’d just rescued HIM from the embarrassment of hitting a parked car…which his car would’ve done had I not stood there and held it into place) and I went on about my day.
Back to being normal. No longer a Superhero.
Just me.
(But I did manage to grade all of my Crucible essays, so maybe there was a little Superhero left in me after the eventful morning. Maybe.)