This week’s nomination for the “I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Been Hit By A Bus Yet” award is a pretty good one.
So Friday night, I was very, very tired. I had been at work since 8:30 stuffing 5,000 care packages for the USO. A rewarding task, but flat-out exhausting.
I managed to get out a bit early by speeding a staff member whose cab never showed to the Burbank airport (and got him there with 12 minutes before his flight took off, an eternity at Burbank).
I was going to meet the fabulous Casey down in West Hollywood, but the traffic was bad enough that I figured I’d wait til I got over the hill to get cash.
Oh, what a mistake that was.
I stopped at the Washington Mutual at Fairfax and Beverly. To park there, you have to turn into an underground parking garage since it’s at a busy intersection.
Now you’d think, if you can’t go in or out that way, they would have, you know, closed the entrance to the garage. But no.
So I park, and I go to get on the elevator. A member of the cleaning crew (who I later realized must not have understood English very well) said, “The bank is closed.” I said I was just going to use the ATM, and he said, oh, OK.
So I went up in the elevator, and ran into another woman with better listening comprehension skills who told me I couldn’t get out this way, I had to go around and walk out the front of the garage to get to the ATM.
Okay, fine. So I went back down the elevator, and when the doors opened…There was a heavy steel door. Locked in place. And the doors of the elevator wanted to close on me.
So I started shouting, and after about five minutes someone finally came and got the guy who had locked the door (same guy who nodded and said OK when I got ON the damn elevator).
We had a poorly translated discussion about what not to say to people when you’re about to lock a heavy steel door behind them. “Oh, OK,” was at last deemed not on the list.
Then I got the fuck out of there, feeling angry and dumb for not just going to the damn branch in Burbank where I knew where everything was.
I went to that bank on Wednesday night but the steel doors were already closed. It didn’t make me feel any less retarded having to walk up the ramp to the street though. Who fucking puts huge metal meat-locker type doors over their elevators?!?
I’m just sad they closed the branch at the Hustler building. I used to enjoy going there to get money quite a bit.
Wasn’t there a Friends episode like this… one where Chandler gets locked into an ATM area with a super-model?
You can still go across the street to get money, although you have to park in an even more retarded garage.
And it’s the Flynt building, technically.
Cooper, yes. He was trapped in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre (or as he put it through his teeth, “Mmm trmmmpd in n mmm vmstmmml wmm Jmm Gmmmdmmmcrmmm!”) beacuse of a giant power outage in New York City.
This was sligthly more claustriphobic than that, though. This was about nine inches of space between the closing elevator door and the big metal door. They had a whole vestibule. Plus, I had no ridiculously hot chick trapped with me.