Lost Car Keys

I have had one of the worst weeks in a long time and it all revolves around car keys. You know that little (and not so little) key ring that generally holds not only your transportation but also house security and a host of other important items that one just can't do without. Your keys go with you everywhere. Nobody really even thinks about them until they disappear. So here is the story in all it's gory detail...

On Monday I was contemplating a busy work week but a pretty calm school week. So while busy this week should not have been stressful in anyway. WRONG! On the shuttle bus between the parking lot and school I lost my car keys. Of course I didn't realize this until 15 minutes later when in chemistry I go looking for the keys in order to open my lab drawer. So as soon as class is done I try to retrace my steps, but no such luck. Plus the bus driver that I rode with has since gone off duty. I have to wait until tuseday morning to see if they were found on the bus. Enter the next problem...How do I get home from school? and if I do get home how do I get into my house? Now this is where the best family in the world comes in, two phone calls later my mother is on the lost key case and my aunts will come pick me up from school AND lend me a car so that I can go to work in the morning. A quick text to my roommate solved the getting in the house problem.

See I was so smart that I gave my spare key to my sister in Phoenix to keep safe in case this exact thing happened. Of course at the time that I gave her the key I was living in Phoenix so it made sense. 8 months ago when I moved to Albuquerque it never occured to me to get the key from her. So the spare car key is still laying innocently in my sisters junk drawer. I could unlock the car doors because I had the spare clicker, but that doesn't help you make the car go anywhere. So my mother helped me make calls to the dealership to find out how tricky it might be to get a new key and to my brother-in-law to see if he could lay hands on the spare key. At this point there was still the faint hope that the keys would be found on the bus in the morning and all of this would just be a frustrating but short experience.

No such luck. By Tuesday afternoon it was clear that I wasn't going to find the keys any time soon and it was going to be really expensive to have the dealership cut a new key. Car keys these days are programmed to the car, so getting a new one means you have to pay for the key itself ($60) and you also have to pay for the dealership to re-program the car ($80). Which of course means that they need the actual car. So to avoid a bill that was approching $250 I decided it would just be easier to have my sister overnight my spare key to me. (Again the best family in the world strikes!!) So I sent my brother-in-law the shipping label and he dropped the package off and was given a receipt.

Now I understand the mechanics of shipping something overnight, but UPS is still stupid. Apparently their UPS Store locations are not tied into their tracking system. So it is not until the driver picks a package up from a store that the package show up in the system. So of course my key package doesn't show up in their system until after 4 pm on Wednesday when the UPS driver finally gets around to picking the package up from the store. Nevermind that I have totally freaked because they have no record of the package (beyond me paying them, HA!). For about 2 hours on Wednesday I was in a total melt down thinking that UPS had lost my last and final set of car keys.

In a some what anti-climactic fashion the keys were delivered on Thursday at the promised 10:30am, and the moral of this story is...NEVER LOSE YOUR CAR KEYS!! I still have not found the original set. My only hope is that some one finally got around to giving them to Campus Police. As of 1:30 on Friday, no dice. Well I can keep hoping.

The daily life of an average college student...

OK, so I'm not really the average college student. I'm older than most of my classmates and I have more work experience. But one thing that we all seem to have in common is the need to tune out the world around us through headphones. Every person (or at least most of them) on campus from students to teachers walks around with headphones. These headphones can be the standard white in the ear things that come standard with an ipod or they can be elaborate concoctions that cover the whole ear. The one standard seems to be that everybody has them.

I have to admit that it is really nice to listen to tunes on those long walks across campus, when I really don't want to be thinking about class. I just want to veg. Plus if you have headphones on you can tune out some of the really weird people around you.

So when did an ipod become as essential to the college experience as textbooks? My new ipod will even connect to the Internet to download classroom materials like chemistry procedure videos and biology power point presentations. How did anybody go to school with out one of these cool little gadgets?