Crazy story...

This is an excerpt from an email to a friend... Copied mainly because I'm very busy right now. Finals week... eek!

Last week was stressful. I almost didn’t make it out alive. On top of the last week of classes including a paper written overnight, an exam, and two hellacious homework assignments, I had the biggest event of my future career. On Friday I had an on-site interview at Merck for their vaccine process development department. Let me tell you that this is my DREAM JOB. And my first ever on-site interview at any company. No pressure, you know. So I was told to be at the Best Western in West Point PA by 7:00pm on Thursday night because they had dinner reservations for us at a super nice restaurant. So I rush around Thursday morning (after being awake until 3am the night before trying to finish homework that was never actually finished) filling out applications and petitioning some classes for my audit in Fenske. I get all my shit together and take all my stuff to the car to leave. At this point, it had started drizzling and I remember thinking, “Damn, can anything else go wrong today?? My suit is getting wet,” which, of course, was the all together WRONG thing to ask on such an important day. I hang up my suit carefully, throw my bags in the back seat, get in my car, and leave for West Point (which is 3.5 hrs away) at 2:15pm. So I turn on my windshield wipers.

Quick aside: my wipers were frozen stuck on Black Friday a couple weeks ago but I still tried to use them. “Don’t do that,” my mom said, “you’ll burn out the motor.” Sure enough when they unfroze later in the day something was not right with the driver’s side wiper. The wiper still worked, but it stopped 3 inches shy of the full extension it was getting before being frozen… Aside over, back to story.

So I turn on my windshield wipers… I notice that the wiper is now stopping 4 inches shy… 7 inches… only going up half… wait… flop flop flop… NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! So my windshield wiper motor was indeed burnt out and I was screwed. The rain was getting worse by the minute and I had 3.5 hours to drive to the most important event of my life. Holy shit. So I called Mike. He was no help. I called Valerie; she volunteered her car, but I can’t drive a stick. This whole time I am relatively calm, wracking my brain to see if I could come up with a solution. Nothing was coming to me. So I called my dad.

“My driver’s side windshield wiper is broke,” I explained.

“Mandy, I TOLD you to get that fixed when you were home. You’ve learned your lesson. You can’t put stuff that will potentially cripple you off until they fail. What were you planning on doing? Waiting until it stopped working??”

“NO! It worked fine for 3 weeks!!!”

“Well, you were wrong. Now what are you going to do??? Wait… Why are you crying?!?! That’s not going to HELP!”

At this point I am bawling because I have lost my chance at my dream job. My dad doesn’t realize that the interview is tomorrow. When I tell him he is more understanding.

He exclaims that I will have to learn how to drive stick shift and borrow Val’s car. “It’s not that hard Mandy, you just push in the clutch when you put it into first gear…”

I pulled into the parking lot of Beaver stadium because I can’t see through the rain on the windshield or my tears. Then my dad has a moment of genius.

“Wait, I have a brilliant idea!!! I know what you have to do!!! Get Val to take you to PepBoys and buy some Rain-X. That stuff is amazing… You won’t even need a windshield wiper!”

Yes… YES! I think that will work… I had seen the stuff in action but never used it myself. So I drove to PepBoys (slowly and carefully) because it wasn’t raining very hard at that point and bought some Rain-X wipes. Dude, that stuff is a lifesaver. I applied it and like magic!! No more rainy windshield. So I made it to West Point in time, survived the dinner and subsequent interview, and I think it even when pretty well!

So that is my story. Haha… That was pretty fun to write out. It wasn’t so fun when it was happening though. I was in a serious panic. I’ll have to tell you more about the interview when we visit. That’s a whole other story all together.