Chapter 1: I Can't Make This Up
If somebody wrote my life into a book, most people would say it was too unrealistic. Not because of amazing miracles that have definitely happened, but because nobody could possibly have this many ridiculous things happen back-to-back without a break.
It started, as many modern nightmares do, I was 4 years old. Im playing it was with emails yo silly goose.
Every morning my inbox looked like a crime scene. Some hacker, scammer, prince, FBI agent, or long-lost millionaire relative apparently thought I was the chosen recipient of millions of dollars. According to them, I had fortune after fortune waiting for me somewhere. All I had to do was click a link, send some information, or claim my winnings.
Sure.
If I actually had all the money these emails promised me, I'd own half the country by now.
While I was busy deleting messages promising me fortunes and forwarding the emails to the actual Fbi which I never asked for or initiated real life decided it hadn't caused enough trouble yet.
My husband and I were on the second day of a trip to another state when flashing lights appeared behind us.
Nothing says "welcome to a new state" quite like getting pulled over.
We honestly had no idea what was wrong. We weren't speeding. We weren't driving recklessly. We weren't doing anything unusual.
Turns out our vehicle tag had expired.
Nobody knew it.i had just renewed our tag a few months ths prio for what I assumed was another year.
The officer surely knew it, though.
So there we sat, trying to explain something we didn't even know ourselves. All I could do was shake my head and laugh because sometimes life gets so ridiculous that's the only response left.
Getting the tag fixed should have been simple.
Notice I said should have.
Instead, we got the pleasure of trying to register our vehicle in our home state while staying in a completely different state, then arranging for stickers to be mailed to where we were temporarily living.
What should have taken a few minutes turned into a bureaucratic circus.
Forms.
Phone calls.
More forms.
More phone calls.
At one point I felt like I was participating in some strange government obstacle course where every completed step simply unlocked five more steps.
I kept expecting somebody to hand me a flaming hoop and tell me to jump through it.
Honestly, by then I already felt like Johnny Cash walking through rings of fire.
The whole experience had us seriously reconsidering our plans to move.
When we first arrived, we thought the area might be a fresh start.
By the end of the registration nightmare, we were looking at each other wondering if maybe the universe was trying to tell us something.
And if it was, the message wasn't exactly subtle.
Unfortunately, that was only the beginning.