Welcome back to the ORANGE ROOM. Pull up a bean bag chair and I'll light some incense. Today's Tale From The Orange Room comes many years after I had left home and by the time of the late 1980's, I had just purchased my own home and was married to my first wife. After college, I worked for four years at Famous Barr in the Electronics Department. It was a pretty sweet job at the time and I worked with some great people, but the money was never that great. During the Spring of 1989. my first wife and I went through one of our first relationship problems.
For the past four years, we both worked for Famous Barr and between our two paychecks, we made ends meet.....barely. However, as I remember, my first wife was let go for some reason and she was offered a job where my Aunt worked. Suddenly, our lives were beginning to drift apart. She was meeting new people and quite frankly, I don't think they were a good influence on her. I on the other hand, decided I wanted to find a better paying job. A career of some sort. I remember going through the want ads, ( no computer then ) looking for companies hiring, making lists to contact, and my wife would be brought home after having one too many drinks after work. There was more than one occasion when she would not come home at all. It was becoming apparent that she was falling out of love with me. It happens. I was no angel either but, I was becoming more concerned about my financial future. The clock was running and the bus was leaving. I needed to grow up and get on board!!! We eventually separated.
It was during this period of living alone, that I ran into an old grade school friend who encouraged me to think about becoming an agent with Prudential Insurance. She got me an interview and I began working on passing the tests to receive my insurance license. Before the end of the year, I was working for Prudential Insurance. My wife and I decided to re unite and life was back to normal.....for a while. I mention all this to paint a picture of where I was at this period in my life. I was growing and the portal from a boy to a man was a rough transition. I was growing and in many ways, growing in a different direction from my wife. I remember writing a song around this time that went as follows:
I ain't living for the future, I ain't selling out
But how you gonna chew the fat when all your teeth fall out.
I was aware that it was time to sink or swim. I was 30 and I needed to stop thinking about "working for the man" and worrying about having a retirement plan and health insurance.
During my time with Prudential, I met several successful people and I was becoming successful myself earning an office and moving out of the cubicles after only one year in the business. On one particular afternoon, three of us decided to car pool to a meeting in Springfield. I had been driving a late model Olds that I had purchased from my grandmother and I offered to drive. In the front seat were three business people, dressed in neat, dark colored business suits and apparel. We looked smart, professional and certainly conservative. After several miles of driving, we slowly approached a construction site. The traffic had converged into one lane and a worker was letting cars pass by him one car at a time. He was using his stop and go sign for each car and as he finally stopped my car, he stood approximately three feet to the right of my Olds. Right next to us. He looked into our car and witnessed three professional business people dressed in their suits in the front seat of the now motionless Oldsmobile. It was a very hot day but I'm not certain if I even had air conditioning so our windows were probably rolled down. we could have reached out and touched the sweating construction worker during our 30- 40 second stop.
Like most of my cars back then, there was usually some kind of weird quirk to them. No air, holes in the floor board, a ducked taped turtle wax figurine on the hood, you name it. On this particular car, I was aware that the window washer fluid spayed out of the drivers side reservoir about 6 to 10 feet to the right and rarely even landed on my windshield. With this in mind, I calmly told my business associates to, "Watch this". The construction worker was dressed in orange and held his stop sign totally oblivious to his surroundings. With a quick flick of my wiper blade button, worthy of JAMES BOND, a greenish blue fluid soared from the drivers side of my car in an impressive arc that not only missed the car completely, but landed DIRECTLY ON THE CONSTRUCTION WORKERS FACE in a steady stream. The three of us looked blankly at the worker, sunglasses on and in perfect professional attire. The stream continued as he gave us the go to move on then..... immediately looked up to the sky to see if he was being hit by some sort of sudden rain storm. When he finally realized he was being sprayed by the car in front of him.... like something out of a JAMES BOND movie, we slowly pulled away, all three looking directly at him in unison, like secrete agents... instead of Insurance agents. I'm sure at first, he wouldn't have put the two together....It couldn't be coming from a car of business people....but it was. Good thing he was wearing shades as it could have burned his eyes out!!!! After putting a few feet behind us, we roared with laughter.... the picture of his confused face etched in our minds!!! So much for growing up!!!
Just another Tale From The Orange Room.
Hahaha funny stuff!