Crushing Sadness, Then Joy

TunaOnWry · April 9, 2002

(Part One)

Had a truly terrible time yesterday trying to re-set the clock in my ’02 Sierra to Daylight Savings Time. After hours and hours of fiddling with the dials, pulling and then replacing fuses, re-doing a considerable portion of the wiring harness (which went so far as to involve some major frame modifications), I finally had to admit defeat, and just plain-ol’ QUIT. That’s right; I gave up; cut and ran; chickened out.

I figured all was lost, and got to feeling so bad. By 2 am I finally slunk off to bed like a whipped dog. But early this morning, while tossing sleepless and dreading the dawn, I suddenly had a flash of brilliant inspiration. I’ll just haul on down to the local GMC dealer and have them do it! After all, I told myself, I’m still in warranty!! And anyhow, for all I know, the clock might actually be defective.

Well, this is where things really got depressing. I walked into the dealership round about 9 o’clock this morning, and lo and behold, each and every one of the people who work there was in an awful state of depression and confusion. Does the phrase Existential Angst mean anything here? Emotional Trauma? Because, it turns out, none of them had succeeded in resetting the clocks of any of the GMC trucks on their sales lot, either. The sales manager and the lead sales people, the service manager and this staff, even the finance department personnel, had all been working non-stop since midnight to get those clocks reset. None had succeeded.

They were crying and wailing and carrying on something terrible. The service manager was sobbing uncontrollable over in the corner. The owner of the dealership was stumbling around in a state of dazed shock, moaning about how GM was probably going to revoke his franchise agreement. Worst and most pitiable of all was the sales manager, sitting on the roof of their sole remaining Pontiac Aztek, rocking his head frantically from side to side and emitting shrieks and howls of satanic intensity at regular intervals. He had totally lost it, and looked for all the world like Charlie Manson on Prozac. Or rather, Charlie Manson in need of something STRONGER than Prozac.

Ok, I gotta admit here that I’m not always as thoughtful and considerate as I could be. I looked around at this amazing and horrible scene, and at first I felt some strong disgust toward all this behavior. “What a bunch of doofusses,” I said to no one in particular. But the situation was so awful, the circumstances so embarrassing and dire, the human HURT so ghastly, that before long I too was weeping and shaking with the rest of them. Soon other customers wandered in, other GMC Sierra owners who, also defeated in their quest to re-set their truck’s clocks to Daylight Savings Time, had sneaked over there to seek help, and everyone got to crying and feeling just completely emotionally devastated.

You simply would not BELIEVE the intensity of feelings of FAILURE and SHAME that permeated that place.

But just then, I had another brilliant idea!!

(To be continued in Part Two)