I thought that I might be a little embarrassed, but really I wasn't.

I thought that I would be a little mad, but really I'm not.

I am impressed though.

And thankful, and even a bit in ah.

You see I was at the gas station today, and ended up with no way to pay.

But really I need to backup to the beginning since that is almost always the best place to start..

The other day I pulled my Debit card out of my pocket to find that it had somehow neatly folded itself in half. Of course this totally trashed the magnetic strip and rendered the card all but useless unless you can convince an obliging clerk to punch in the numbers manually.

Like I said, I was at the gas station. The little Conoco on W. Dallas that I always use. I looked all around checking for signs that said �No checks' but none were to be seen.

So I assumed that I would be just fine.

Well, you know what they say about assumed? And it's true. Completely true.

I filled up, the digital display quickly coming to stop nice and evenly at 18 bucks. Walked into the store and up to the cashier where I quickly began to fill out my check.

The lady behind the counter says something about not taking checks, that they �all� bounce. :( UHG. I informed her that I had looked for signs first that said no checks accepted, but did not see any, but she really did not seem to care.

I don't know if she expected me to start pooping money or what.

So I pulled out the remnants of my debit card and basically said something along the lines of

"Look, you can't swipe this but if you will enter the numbers by hand it should take care of the whole thing."

I don't know if she was new or what, but the machine kept giving her error messages. So she just looked at me and restated that they don't take checks.

I'm sure I was staring at her, as if she was the stupidest person on the planet, cause I mean plainly her only option was to let me write the check, or just not to get any money at all for the 18 bucks worth of petrolatum that was now deep in the bowls of my little blue truck.

Luckily my knight in shining armor appeared out of no where on his powerful black steed.

(Ok so actually it was a black Beemer, and really he looked like he had just rolled out of bed after a long and exhausting bar crawl, but hey for all I know Lancelot and Gallahad probably had that not so fresh look most of the time too.)

So anyway, he had stood there long enough to also get the �you must be the stupidest cashier in the world� look on his face too. He even came to my defense saying that it did not say anywhere that they did not accept checks.

So anyway even after my very loud protest he gives the cashier a ten, and tells her to let me right a check for the rest.

To my surprise she obliged and let me write a check for the remaining amount.

Whewww!

Before I could even turn around and thank him, my Knight had disappeared into thin air.

*****

Well I'm back online after a five day ordeal in which I thought my computer was completely fried. I think It may have received a minor zap from lightning or something. Because the monitor finally heaved it's last sigh at the same time that the computer refused to even turn on. Just a black screen would pop up on the New/used $39 dollar kick ass monitor that I found. I stuck the hard drive reformatting disk in just on a whim, and what do you know? It started the whole process. Yeah, so I have a working computer again with a couple of bad sectors on the hard drive, that I'm hoping scan disk and defrag took care of. But needless to say, I lost all of my aol and msn buddy list names, the revision to the first chapter of my novel, I think I have the first chapter and the back story scrawled on some paper somewhere, AND my collection of some 3,000 kickass fonts. Ironically I had all the fonts stored on zip disks too, until about a day before the computer decided to flip. Oh well, I guess someday I'll have hours and hours to waste and surf the web for more cool fonts to download.

Anyway.

HUGS,

Madrigle.