Barbara Poops Out

One more story about Memphis:

Halfway into our trip, Barbara decided to kick the bucket. She had been indispensable to me, ( profoundly directionally challenged gal that I am), and was always a good sport, stoically putting up with our light hearted teasing.

“I can give you a better route,” Barbara would intone.

“Ha ha, settle down, Babs, we’re just getting off the interstate to get some gas”. I’d laugh.

“Recalculating!”

In case you haven’t already guessed, “Barbara” is our GPS unit, and I love her.

But Sunday morning she didn’t want to cooperate. The Feis didn’t begin for us until 12:00 noon, (very unusual, feisanna usually start at 8:30 on a Sat. morning). I guess they were giving people time to go to church, which was good, because last Sunday was Pentecost, and it was also Memorial Day weekend, and all church going people needed to be in church praying for our soldiers.

So, I got the address of the nearest Catholic church from the Hotel clerk and headed to the van with the girls. I had my oldest daughter give Barbara the address, while I tried to back out, which was really tricky because it was a very crowded parking lot, and I have a bigass conversion van, and there was a truck parked right behind me. And Barbara was saying there was no such street in Memphis, (now I realize this was because we weren’t in Memphis proper). So my daughter rather abruptly tore her off her stand, so she could work with her more comfortably on her lap, but she wouldn’t work off of her stand, and we couldn’t get her to lock back into it.

Tick tick tick….8:55….8:56….8:57….

Things were getting desperate, and the more stressed Nice Deb gets, apparently, the less adept she gets at pulling out of tight parking spots….which didn’t matter at this point anyway because I didn’t know where I was going.

8:58….8:59….9:00 (mass time) …9:01…9:02….9:03…

After fiddling for what seemed an eternity, we got Barbara back in her slot, but she refused to work.

So this is my public confession that I didn’t go to church last Sunday. I felt terrible, but the girls were rather cheerful about it.

My husband thinks he knows what to do to fix her, he has a friend that works for Garman.