Heather Christena Schmidt

I’m thinking about getting a map of a fifty mile radius around my home and tacking it up on the wall, then placing pins in all the places I can no longer go. On the map would be the big Ventura post office, for I would be horrified to experience that whole ‘lady and her bizarre flatus‘ thing again. I don’t go to the Starbucks near the Barnes and Noble because a guy I dated works there, and I’d rather not deal with that. Needless to say, I find a lot of sort of stupid reasons not to go to some places around me, and then sometimes I find myself making such a fool out of things that I would rather not return for fear of more humiliation. Today was one of those days.

Although, to be fair, it was really my 69 year old father that added the Ventura FedEx Kinkos to the list of places I can no longer go to.

Let me back it up a bit. You all remember I declared myself on a vacation from life, so to speak, in preparation of my three week, cross-country trip home for the first time in over a decade. Of course, when I say “home” I mean Chicago – I have never and will not consider California to be welcoming enough to call “home.” Both feeling a little homesick, my father and I decided to take this trip together in spite of all the family vacations that turned complete disaster when I was little. So we are only a few days away from departing on what is sure to be an exciting, educational, and likely insane cross-country trip.

Because we are traveling as light as possible, though, we ended up having to ship out the majority of our clothing for the time we will be in the Chicagoland area. This really seemed like the easiest and most logical decision, particularly because in addition to clothing we had an assload of souvenirs to take back for friends and family.

So flash forward to today and my 69 year old father in desperate need of a hip replacement decided it was the day that we must take our packed clothes and souvenirs to FedEx to ship. Enter the triad of actions that made it such that I can no longer go to my local FedEx Kinkos:

Incident One: Dad took FedEx employee liberties

So we walked into the store and it was a combination of the Kinkos copy shop and the FedEx shipping center. Behind the counter there were a variety of dollies and rollers that can be used for unloading and loading boxes, and there were two employees working. Rather than ask one of the readily available employees, though, my father just stalked behind the counter as if he works there and took a dolly. I started laughing, the employees started laughing, my dad muttered “whatever” and walked out to the car to load our boxes onto the dolly.

Incident Two: Dad dropped the f-bomb

I handed all the paperwork over to the woman working behind the counter and apologized for my father taking employee liberties, and she giggled and began to input all the information into her computer, and asked me the usual questions about what is being shipped, how we want to ship it all, etc. As we were finishing off all the input of the paperwork, my dad stalked back in with the loaded dolly, looking like he was going to fall over. Remember that I mentioned a few paragraphs up that he is in desperate need of a complete hip replacement – an operation he vehemently opposes. So he was hobbling a little and I was of course wondering why he wouldn’t just let me handle the dolly to begin with (we won’t go there), and he walked up to the counter and said loudly “Jesus, it’s like I’m a fucking stevedore.” Enter more Heather-employee laughter.

Incident Three: Dad announced for the entire Kinkos and FedEx to hear that we are not transporting any illegal goods

For absolutely no reason at all, my father then proceeded to announce loudly to the entire store that we were not transporting any illegal goods. I have no idea why, but for weeks prior he was worried that we were going to get in trouble for shipping California souvenirs to other states, or for sending so many boxes at one time (he said it may seem suspicious). I think my dad has been watching too many Columbo mysteries on television or something, because his paranoia seemed a little odd and out of place. In any event, he felt it necessary to announce loudly that nothing was being shipped illegally, in essence heightening the humiliation factor to a level that was beyond my own level of tolerance. I have a pretty high threshold, but this was just too much. So I said I’d wait in the car and left, laughing and simultaneously covering my shame in the process.

My father is quite clearly just as crazy as I am. When he came out he informed me that his devastating charm secured a smooth shipping of the packages. I’m sure that was it, dad.

You faithful blog followers can now begin betting on what bizarre happenings will take place on this trip. With the whole-family dynamic in place who in God’s name knows what will go down. This FedEx Kinkos incident was only the beginning.