I don't fail at many things. Generally, I'm at least decent at everything I have ever done. This includes things ranging from rapping songs to wrapping gifts (God, I love puns). Even though I have been exposed to failures, I never really experienced it before.
There are plenty of examples of failure around us. Fail blog made a website about it. There is a movie made called The Failures. There are even examples in the NFL, in the form of the Washington Redskins. They are an awful team to start with, but their disastrous trick play they tried to pull last night on the Giants brought their atrocity of a season to a whole new level of bad. I actually saw this live last night, and started laughing before the play began. After seeing a few replays, I decided it was one of the funniest attempts and subsequent failures I had ever seen. Maybe that exposure to failure helped cause what happened to me today.
Today, I failed my driver's test. (This would be a perfect FML) Quite frankly, I am a fine driver. I'm probably the only person in the history of Pennsylvania to actually complete the required 50 hours of driving, yet I still failed. How, may you ask? I could tell from the start that it wasn't going to end well.
Jeffrey J. and I rolled up at the DMV looking fresh to death in our brand-spankin' new (read: several month old) Subaru. We both had on suits, since he went to work earlier, and I had to dress up for school, since I'm a basketball manager and all. We were just chilling there, jamming to some Christmas carols to get into the spirit. My test administrator came walking out of the building, and it was then that I had a bad feeling about what would happen next. This guy was really, really old. In fact, he had so many wrinkles, it looked like his face could be a topographic map of San Francisco. Once he stepped in the car, one thing was clear to both of us. He was intimidated by me, since I was obviously the better dressed of the two of us, and he was the one working. The elephant in the room, or car, just wouldn't leave. Fortunately for him, it didn't last long. We were driving to go take the parking portion of the test when we reached a stop sign. I stopped; naturally I didn't want to fail. Then I continued on to go park.
If any of you have ever parallel parked, it really is not that difficult. I am pretty good at it, or so I thought. I started out too far away, and went a little too fast. The old guy riding with me claims that I hit the barrel in the back. It was pretty obvious to me that I didn't come close to hitting it. He was probably just imagining things. I cut the guy a break; he was old after all. He told me pull out and pull down the driveway. I looked at him kind of funny, because I clearly had not parallel parked yet. I followed his instructions and pulled into a parking space. He told me I failed because I hit the barrel. Then he added on that I "rolled" the stop sign. Of course I was shocked, appalled, and very angry since neither of these things happened. It would have been impossible for him to determine whether or not I hit the barrel. Again, he was very old, so for him to hear or see something in the present conditions would have been very unlikely. Come to think of it, he definitely was imagining things. As for the stop sign, the Sobel Soup is a busy man. I have places to go and people to see, ladies and gentlemen, and if he can't accept that I guess I'll just have to ask for a new instructor next time.
He gave me some advice for next time: Stop at the sign, say S-T-O-P out loud, and then proceed. I wanted to ask him what the odds are that anyone has ever done that while actually driving a car, ever. I restrained, because I didn't want to get kicked out of the DMV, and not be able to retake my test. If anything, a person should be rewarded for not saying S-T-O-P out loud. Let's say someone did that out on the actual roads. Can you imagine what the guy behind him would do? I, for one, would lay down the horn. Plus, by concentrating so hard on saying S-T-O-P, a person would lose focus on the roads and might even get into a crash. It annoys the hell out of me already, and I'm just typing it.
Basking in my defeat, I had nothing else to do but to try and make a pun. Unfortunately, the only thing I came up with was Penn-Don't, a play off PennDot which is another failure in itself. I'm just going to stop while I'm ahead.
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One thing that didn't fail recently was Nota, who won the Sing Off title, and the 100 G's that go with it, last night. If you may recall, I predicted this almost a week ago. Sure enough it came true. What else do you expect?
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No one sent in a video for this post (a further example of my failure), so I decided to put in a video I have recently discovered. I used to not like Jared Allen very much, mainly because he has the dumbest sack dance known to man. But since I saw this video, he is instantly my favorite NFL player who is not on the Eagles. I would just like to say before you all watch this, that I have since followed Jared's advice about a few topics. If anyone ever asks me if I want extra mayonnaise, I will indeed say yes. And I will try to shape my chest hair in a heart, to see if it is as tight as he claims it to be.
"Damn, he likes to party. With two r's"
Always Serving,
Sobel Soup
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