Christmas Fruits

People who commute to work know that on the way to the office there will be a traffic jam. They have a rough estimate of how long the traffic jam will be and they will know where the traffic jam will occur. So they make allowance for it by leaving home early and getting a head start. Then there are people who are stuck car pooling. My guess is that car pooling works for eleven months of the year, but not for December. During December there are more people on the road. People headed to shopping malls to buy Christmas gifts. They are the Christmas shoppers.

A few while ago I was stuck car pooling for two week. It was the longest two weeks of my life. It may have been fuel efficient but it was bad for my nerves. I didn’t like my fellow car poolers. They were frequently late and wore way too much perfume. Since they were so late and we had the added number of cars on the freeway, the commute to work for those weeks was hell. I was late everyday. I tried my best to get along with them or to blend in. I didn’t have much luck. They had this annoying game they played in the car. While I worried about being late for work, every three seconds someone would say, “Hey, You know what would make a really Unique Christmas Gift?” and the whole car would start off. Not that I don’t appreciate unique Christmas gifts, it’s just ideas for unique Christmas gifts hardly occur on the freeway while you’re stuck in a traffic jam. But they talked about their Christmas shopping, their Christmas holiday gifts and what not.

Then one day they broke my restraint. The rather plump woman who usually sat next to me brought two Christmas gift baskets with her. She was taking them to work and while the sentiment was very nice, carrying them in my lap was less than pleasant. One of them was a fruit basket and the other had chocolate and wine. We hit a bump somewhere and the bottle cracked and spilled on my brand new cashmere sweater and the pomegranates left a dark stain on my sleeve. I arrived at work looking like I had been mugged. I quit the car pool day and decided I’d sleep in the office before I tried it again.