I was thinking of the Maine Humorist Tim Sample the other day. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s something of an institution where I grew up, keeper of the Downeast traditions and, of course, a consummate storyteller. He has a particular joke about tourists getting lost that I won’t try and retell; I wouldn’t be able to do justice to it, anyway. How the punchline popped into my mind is a story unto itself — a tale of frustration, but one one with a happy ending. It began innocently enough one late weekday afternoon as I tried to exit the parking garage beside my office building.
Since I work at a university, I have to be cognizant of the rhythm and flow of the class schedule or risk being that unlucky trout swimming upstream against the current. My colleagues and I constantly try to time it to be at the coffee shop or the food court at the Student Union during those brief slivers of time when students are actually in class; the same goes for the parking garage, for woe be to the unlucky individual trying to exit campus when classes are changing. After nearly twenty-three years, you’d think I’d have it down pretty solidly, but the period I spent working fully remote during the pandemic seems to have deleted most of that experience from my system. I also feel strongly that our flows in life have yet to fully return to pre-pandemic normalcy — either that or I’m still in denial what we have now is the new normal.
Complicating matters immensely, especially when it comes to exiting the garage, is having to also know the day of the week in question; like some sort of weirdly complicated conspiracy plot, our class schedules vary based on that, too. Eventually I’ll draw out the complete chart on my whiteboard and snap a photo of it just to underscore the insanity, but for now, suffice it to say the deck is generally stacked against me when I exit the building and approach the parking structure each evening.
On that particular day, I trundled up the steps to where my car was parked on the second floor and found that the line to get out of the garage had backed completely up to the floor I was on, and was slowly snaking its way toward the exit gate as though it were Los Angeles traffic snarled by a Dodgers game ending. As careful as I’d been to get to my car during that tiny window of opportunity I knew I had each day, it was clear I was going to begin my commute home with devious challenge of backing out of my parking spot.
Fortunately, a kindly individual allowed me into the line, and I returned the favor a few times in the twenty minutes it took to get out of the structure. It wasn’t until I made it to the gates that I discovered the nature of the issue, that being one of the two arms guarding the exit had failed. Staff from Parking & Transportation were furiously working on whatever had gone awry, while simultaneously waving us through the only functional gate as quickly as the street traffic would allow. I didn’t think much of that fact that the arm was up when I drove through, but assumed the machine had read my little RFID box all the same.
The next morning I discovered it hadn’t. And that’s what brings me back to Tim Sample.
Pulling up to the entrance gate is normally something I do on automatic; I know about where the car has to stop in order for the RFID gizmo to be picked up by the machine, and how long I need to pause before the arm starts to go up. When the gate failed to do anything the next morning, I frowned and wondered if the system had gone on the fritz. Glancing over at the small screen on the device — the one I normally ignored since the gate always opened for me — I felt myself frowning at the gobbledygook of an error message that was displaying. Waiting a few more seconds to see if it would clear netted me nothing more than a car impatiently waiting behind me; I became that person and had to back out of the lane and pull around to another, working the assumption that it wasn’t me, it was the system.
When the second gate showed the same error, I bowed to defeat and took a paper ticket so I could actually get into the garage and begin my day. Over lunch, I called Parking and explained what had happened and became even more nervous when they had to put me on hold. All sorts of oddball thoughts began to ping pong through my brain: had the payroll deduction for my pass somehow stopped working? Did I get bounced from the garage for some reason and missed the email? I’d nearly convinced myself that my entire job had been cancelled without my knowledge when the clerk came back on the line.
“What time did you exit the garage yesterday?” they asked.
“About four,” I replied. “Actually, it was well after that. One of the gates was broken, so there was quite a line to exit.”
The long pause at the other end of the phone seemed significant. “There was a down gate?”
“Yes,” I answered. “Techs were working on it, and they waved us through the other one.”
“Was that gate open?”
“Yes,” I replied again, thinking back to how the arm hadn’t been going down between cars. I’d assumed it was because they were trying to clear the clogged traffic, but in that moment, started to wonder if it, too, had been offline.
There was another long pause. “Well,” the clerk said. “There’s your problem. The system never registered your departure last night; you haven’t left yet, so it’s impossible for you to enter again.”
And that was when I heard Tim Sample in my head, delivering the punchline for his joke; in his story, the tourists are trying to find their way back off an island but are convinced they never crossed a bridge to arrive there in the first place. That leads to Tim’s droll answer to their dilemma: “Well, there’s your problem. You ain’t here yet.”
Through some tech trickery, the clerk managed to reset my status and I was able to exit that afternoon without incident. But now each time I see the arm go up, I think of that joke and smile just a little at how life can sometimes throw you in the most unexpected ways.