Having my own personal chauffeur is pretty cool. The downside to not being able to drive is always having to rely on someone else. When I was younger(this was before Uber. Can you even get a wheelchair accessible ride from uber?) My mom always got me where I needed to go. She would drop me where I need to be, go run errands, and pick me up after. It worked very well unless she was grocery shopping and got stuck in line.(That happened a few times. My mom always sees someone she knows. Every year at Christmas I would go to the movies while she did her shopping for the year. When you are shopping for Christmas is very easy to lose track of time. This was before I owned a cell phone. I had two options I could either borrow someone else’s phone or ask to make a call from wherever I was. Neither option why is really appealing to an independent guy. Most of the time I just waited. Sometimes it was 10 minutes, and sometimes it was an hour and 10 minutes. The waiting was never bad except for the fact that every third person I saw, who saw me waiting, what ask if I needed help or a ride somewhere. They all meant well, but you can only say, “no I’m fine just waiting for a ride” so many times. It was also very hard to estimate how long it would take to do something. There were many times that my mom had to wait on me because I would give estimated time and the movie would start late, or I will see someone I know(or a girl I wanted to flirt with) and mom or dad would be stuck waiting on me. It happened a lot with my dad because if I gave him a time, he would show up early and whatever I was doing would run late. it was a major source of frustration for my family in my younger years.
When I got into college I found a bus service that would come to my house and pick me up, take me where I needed to go, and bring me home. (This worked great until they dropped me off and forgot to pick me up twice)
Needing a ride everywhere made things like dating extremely tough because the length of a date is extremely hard to predict. If it was a good date, my ride was always waiting on me. If it was a bad date, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough and was always waiting for my ride. Things are different now because I have a cell phone and can make a call, or send a text right from my wrist
I also have Jane now. I’m her only focus when she is at work so I rarely have to wait and I am rarely late for anything. However, I think the dating situation might still be a little awkward. I can swing by and pick a girl up now less awkwardly than I could when my parents were driving, but I think it might still be awkward for her to have to sit in the seat behind me, with a third person in the car, who is also driving. Not exactly the best environment for a first date. It might be a little different however if I owned a stretch limo instead of a minivan 🙂
As always thanks to Evie for gracefully putting my life in comics.