Stupid People Tricks: The Bipolar Edition

Here’s how kook BPNurse shows everyone she’s a kook: She goes to an appointment in a big building, gets turned around in there but doesn’t realize it, goes out to her car and can’t find it…..then panics and calls the police to report it stolen.

It was hilarious when my mother did the same thing way back when she was in HER mid-50s. Today, not so much. I’m a tad sensitive about my cognitive deficits anyway, and this was a blunder of the highest magnitude. I mean, what fool loses her own car in a parking lot? Somehow, a nondescript medium-blue Ford Taurus of early 2000’s vintage doesn’t seem like a car anyone with half a brain would want to steal….but the only other alternative was that it had been towed, quite possibly because I was parked between two disabled-parking stalls.

My first call was to my husband: “I don’t know where the ^%#*@&! car is,” I told him, the first faint stirrings of anxiety beginning to bubble up beneath the protective layer of medications. “I’m calling the police. I think the people here thought I parked it in a handicapped space and towed it by mistake.” Well, it seemed plausible; I really couldn’t imagine what anybody would want with my elderly vehicle.

It never occurred to me that my directional dyslexia might have been to blame for the car’s mysterious disappearance. I later recalled having gotten lost inside the three-story brick facility, but thought I’d made the proper course correction to find my way back out to the parking lot where my car awaited.

Guess what? I was WRONG. And when I’m wrong, stupid shit like this happens.

So I had the dispatcher checking to see if the car was in the impound yard, the building employees asking other employees if anyone had called for a tow, and while I was at it, I was taking pictures of the parking spot between the stalls that were clearly marked with the blue and white little-dude-in-the-wheelchair symbol. I’m not sure what that would’ve proved since there was obviously no car in the space, but it gave me something to do until the cops got there.

Fortunately, the two who arrived on the scene were VERY nice and quite willing to assist me without making me feel like some dumb hysterical female. I showed them my pictures and went through another lengthy description of the aforementioned Ford, then one officer went one direction while the other stayed with me. A third unit arrived to assist and promptly found the car, which was parked around the corner….right where I’d left it.

Have you ever felt about 17 kinds of ridiculous? Yeah, me too, and never more than I did at that moment, even as I was thanking the Lord above that my car hadn’t been stolen OR towed. I was mortified. All I could think about was the time my mother had done this same thing and how embarrassed SHE’D been—that, and the fact that I felt like I really must be losing all my marbles now. What was my next move, I wondered—the Alzheimer’s care home?

I apologized over and over; I felt terrible that I’d taken three city police officers off the streets to deal with a scared ol’ biddy and a missing car that wasn’t missing after all. But they all told me not to worry, it happened all the time; they even told me some funny stories of similar incidents committed by other folks who made me look like a Rhodes scholar by comparison. These included a tale about a woman who denied that she’d parked her car elsewhere and insisted that “somebody else must have moved it”, even though she had the keys and there were no signs of forced entry into the vehicle.

That made me feel a bit better, and since this little drama made good fodder for the day’s blog post, I figured I ought to use it. Considering the fact that between the brain damage caused by my illness and the medications I take to treat it, I can be QUITE the ditz at times, so we might as well get a few laughs out of it, yes?