I’m typically an hour early for everything. When the family asks “when do we need to leave” I typically built in a 45 minute to one hour buffer. The response is always “why do we need to get there so early?” or “that’s more than enough time to get there.” Yes, but what if something goes wrong, I respond. Last night, something went wrong and I didn’t have that buffer.
Last night was the RUSH show in Omaha. I bought amazing 28th row tickets months ago. My wonderful wife (who, I want to make perfectly clear right here and now, is of no fault at all in this story,) ended up having to work until 6pm. The concert was at 7:30 in Omaha and it generally takes about one hour to get to the venue form the house. I whined a bit at the time but she did say “that’s more than enough time to get there.” I didn’t have much of a choice so I accepted it and crossed my fingers that nothing would go wrong.
So, I drove my car to the library and then we switched to her car for the drive to Omaha. We hit the road at 6:10pm. The conversation was going great until I started shouting profanity at 6:40. I’d left the tickets in my car back at the library! There’s an exit. Get off the highway and head back to Lincoln. For 30 minutes. Then take another 30 minutes just to get back to where we turned around.
My wonderful wife handled this whole situation perfectly. She didn’t say a word about it. She let me kick myself mentally and started talking about other things to keep my mind off of the whole situation. Trust me, for her to have tried to say anything that would be an attempt to make the situation “better” would not have ended well. Especially when it involved RUSH.
In the end we arrived at the show 45minutes late. Out of a 3.5 hour show not a lot but enough. Luckily I did get to hear the complete live Moving Pictures which was the highlight of the how. Here’s one of the photos from my Droid. Click on it to see the rest.
So, next time someone asks me “why are we going to get there so early? they’re going to get this exact story.
