Driving Dilemma

Talk about a rude awakening, yesterday I had a big one!

I'd gone up to the local grocery store with the intent of posting one of our posters advertising our upcomng Fall Bazaar at our church and realized after I got there that I was going to have to go in the store to see if I could bum a couple pieces of scotch tape from the cashier in order to get our poster up. Seems the bulletin board there is an extremely hard, metal-type, substance that you can not use thumb tacks or items like that to hang announcements with.

So, since I had to go in the store, I figured I would also get change from the cashier so I could pick up a copy of yesterday's current newspaper too. No big deal -or so I thought.

However, when I reached into my purse into the zipper compartment where I normally keep any cash along with my bank card and a few other very important pieces, I realized the cash I thought I had was no longer in there!

What the heck? (No, that isn't exactly what I said to myself, but rather it is the clean version.) I hadn't been anyplace where I needed to use what little bit of cash I had and by my calculations I figured I should have had at least $7 in cash or maybe, as much as $12. But instead, I had nothing. Zilch. Nada.

So, I figured, much as I hated to do it, I was going to have to write a check so I could have some cash.

And that's when I realized I couldn't even do that because I had used the last check in that book on a recent purchase and had forgotten to put a new book of checks into my wallet.

Those few little events were nothing though compared to my reaction when I put my hand in my zipper compartment and realized that something besides cash was missing in that secluded little area of my purse.

Missing was my driver's license and my health insurance cards!

Say what?

Oh yeah, you read that right -my driver's license, which is a photo id (and which I HAVE to have in my hot little hands too next Friday when I am scheduled to have a very important job interview and which item I had just renewed a week ago as well.

The only time I had occasion to pull out my driver's license and my insurance card, simultaneously, was last Tuesday when, immediately after renewing my license and getting my new photo id, I had gone up to the hospital to register for some lab work. And, to do the registration there, one has to show their driver's license along with their insurance cards so I know that I had both of them then at that point in time.

But now -where the heck were they? Both missing and both having been displayed at the same time the last I saw them made me think perhaps the clerk at the admissions desk had forgotten to return them to me or that maybe I might have laid them on the counter and forgot to put them back in my purse. Or, another scenario could have been that I had just stuck them in my jacket pocket, in a hurry, and forgot they were there.

So I came home and went on the first of several search and destroy missions in the house -checking jacket pockets for openers and then, emptying and cleaning out my purse and my wallet, not just once, but twice! I even called over to the hospital in hopes that someone had found them on the floor there and turned them in to "lost and found" only to have the person who answered the phone tell me she didn't know who to give my report to as she was a "newbie" in that department and didn't know if they even had a "lost and found" area or if she should perhaps contact Security!

That wasn't exactly the response I was hoping to hear!

So now, I have paperwork filled out to take over on Friday to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Clearfield to get a new photo id processed there so I won't be driving illegally and will have it then too for my interview as well as having it if some fool on Election Day decides to ask me for a photo id -even though the state has now said photo ids will NOT be required of the voters this November after all.

But you know what the real irony of this whole mess is?

That photo ID I had just purchased a week ago just so happened to be the first time since Pennsyvania started doing driver's license with a photo id that my picture on it was one that was actually relatively decent!

Now that does figure, doesn't it?