Murphy’s World

Famous last words

One day I got loaded early for about a two-hour ride from the house. All was looking good until the truck refused to start. It took forever to get a service guy out to tell me my batteries were pretty much shot. The company wanted to take the cheap route as the first option, so I sat there for about two hours with the guy trying everything he could think of to jump-start the truck. Nothing worked.
     We had to go through all the telephone games again, wait for the service guy to go get new batteries and come back and install them. He finally got the truck running and in good order several hours after I would have been home.
     Homeward bound at last, dispatch informs me they wanted to relay my load way off in another direction. After all was said and done, my getting home at noon on a Friday ended up getting me home many hours after the sun went down that night.
     That was annoying, but if it's the worst thing I have to deal with, I guess I am lucky.
     Sign me,
     “Lucky and Loving It”

Dear Lucky,
My dog is named Lucky, too, but for a whole different set of reasons we don’t need to go into here. That’s another story for another day. Let’s just say my Lucky has a Ph.D. from the Canine School of Hard Knocks and Tough Breaks, which is why we get along so well. He understands me and this crazy job we do together.
     OK, back to your story. You hit the nail on the head when you said an annoying loss of seven or eight hours is nothing compared to the trials and tribulations many over-the-road drivers go through. That’s par for the course around here. Give it another day and things could get really dicey. And then the day after that, it’s all blue skies and smiles again. As the great jazz pianist Fats Waller used to say, “One never knows, do one?”
     The key to navigating your way through Murphy’s World is to roll with the punches; don’t get too down when things go bad and don’t get too giddy when things go good. Trust me, this too shall pass.
     In fact, the most famous last words in Murphy’s World are, “Everything was looking good …” That, of course, is the signal for the fun and games to begin, so, in reality, those are actually famous first words. See, everything in Murphy’s World is a little bit upside down, inside out, topsy-turvy, a$$ backward or my favorite, just flat out wrong.
     Don’t you just love it?

     Regards,
      Murphy and Lucky Dog