I had an interesting Sunday. It started out as a walk through the local park walking with my two teen age kids. As we walked along the seawall. I observed a wallet on the ground and pointed it out to my kid to pick it up. I called the credit card number found in the wallet, to have them call the owner of the wallet to arrange to pick it up. Four or five hours later. I still had not received a call about the wallet. The wallet belonged to a collage age girl and being along the seawall my mind started to think about maybe something bad happened. So I called the sheriff dept in the next county from where I lived. Because this girl lived about an hour away from my location.
I asked if they could do a wellness check after explaining the situation. They said they would. About 30 minutes later I get a call from the girl’s father. And I suggested we meet at a local Mc Donald’s. As I pulled into the parking lot my car horn started to randomly honk. I gave the girl her wallet and talked a few minutes with this horn randomly honking every 10 seconds or so. My kid said hit the horn to maybe dislodge a stuck switch. I did so but with no luck. So we said good bye and started to drive down the road about 10 miles from our home. We plan to get pizza for dinner, so my kid called the pizza place, so we could pick it up on our way home. The horn stayed quiet on this section of the drive to the pizza place, until we pulled into the parking lot. Then it started to honk uncontrollably. I turned off the keys and it stopped. We laugh as I hit the horn area in hopes to de-activate this embarrassing horn blowing. My kid walked in to get the pizza and when he came back I started the car. I pulled to the edge of the parking lot ready to pull out into the street waiting for an opening to do so. And then we hear honk honk honk. There was a bar with people sitting outside who saw what was going on who waved as we drove by. My kids are yelling dad pull over, stop the horn from honking. I said we are only a mile or less from home. I will just try and time the lights so not to get stuck right behind someone. Well of course that plan didn’t work out as planned. So here we sit horn blaring every 4 or 5 seconds. I’m trying to push & pull at anything that I thought would stop the f--king horn from sounding to no avail. Finally we get home and get inside laughing about the situation. My kid start describing how embarrassing the situation was and what am I going to do to fix the horn problem.
So this horn honking situation put me into an embarrassing, out of control place. My mind raced around what are other people thinking? Is there someone around me who might be a hot head with a gun having a bad day and this person might shoot first and ask questions later?
Some feelings I had at the moment were. Worry, confusion, fear. All this over a horn blasting.
This was a nice reminder for me in dealing with control. Obviously dealing with people is a lot different than my horn honking problem. But there are some similarities feelings that I have in either case.
