This morning I was awakened to my wife, who was laughing but concerned at the same time. It was barely after 7am so the sun was up, bust just barrrrrrellly. She said, “you have to come see this.”
”See what?”
“The paper guy is asleep in his pickup truck in the middle of the road”.
It took me a moment to digest this. The first thought that popped into my head was, Are you sure he’s not dead?
“Are you sure he’s not dead???”
“Yeah, I checked to see if he was breathing.”
Then I started thinking about his route. Aren’t they usually done delivering papers by 6am.
So my wife began to go into greater detail about her efforts to wake him up. She said she tried honking his horn, shaking him, yelling at him. Nothing worked. I couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking I was going to go out and find a dead old guy slumped over at the wheel.
I threw on some clothes and headed outside, but first I grabbed the camera as I knew that it was good material, if it was true. As I turned the corner and entered the sidewalk, I got a view of the paper “boy” over at his pickup truck. It was definitely a younger man, he was definitely asleep/dead, and the bed of his truck was ripe unto harvest with undelivered papers.
Both of his windows were down and he had some sort of peppy music playing, (somewhere in between “Walking on sunshine” and “Welcome to the jungle”) but a lot of good it was doing. As I stuck my head through the window, I was blasted by a wall of heat. Have you heard that it’s easier to get sleepy when it’s warm?
I grabbed a huge flashlight that he had in the passenger’s seat and flipped it on. It might as well have been the Bat Signal, or one of those spotlights that you see at movie premiers that slice the sky up with a light beam, in a haphazard fashion. You can’t even imagine how powerful this kid’s flashlight was. As I was pelting his head with a hundred thousand megawatts of light, I expected him to at least flinch. Out of my fear of melting his skin, I turned off the flashlight.
I decided that since my yelling and light torture weren’t doing the trick, I had to go with old faithful… shake him like Roseanne Barr trying to get the last M&M out of a wrapper.
That did the trick. The combination of a strange man yelling and violently shaking you, I guess, is enough of an incentive to wake up. He came to and had a horrified, “where am I” look”. I started saying things like, “you’re in the middle of the road…you fell asleep…you didn’t deliver your papers”.
He wasn’t getting it. The poor kid had a huge stream of drool snaking down his face all the way to his shirt. As he started to get bearings on where he was an what century this is, I went around back and grabbed a paper. As I was heading back inside, I finally saw his truck creeping down the street. You could almost tell by the way he was driving his truck that he was trying to do the mental math on whether or not he could deliver 400 papers in 15 minutes.
I have a feeling this kid won’t be on the route next week.
