"Reputation," or, "Why You Shouldn't Accept Rides from Strangers"

I live in the Salt Lake neighborhood of Honolulu, which, is probably the best place a person can live if she has to take the bus to her job at the Hickam Air Force Base (and that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it).  The thing I don't like about my commute, however, is that the closest bus stop to work is about a mile-and-a-half away from my lab.  So I walk, which I don't mind too terribly when it's not hot in the mornings.  Occasionally, someone from the lab will pull over and give me a ride.  On other occasions, someone not from the lab will pull over and give me a ride.  This is a story about the latter.

One day I was walking and this tiny white sports car pulls over and a guy in military uniform (fatigues? the camouflage things, at any rate) says, "you work at [institution], right?"*  And I say that I do, and he asks me if I'd like a ride, so I say, "sure."  Two seconds after I get in, it hits me:  Oh my gosh.  I just got into a car with a man I don't know.  He could be a rapist.  Crap...and I didn't even go to the military sexual assault training!**  So as I'm grabbing onto my keys should I need to use them as a weapon, I try to make small talk and verify that he indeed does work at [institution].

"So...where do you work in [institution]?" I ask.

"I'm the D.C.O." (aka the Deputy Commander.  aka someone real important in the Command and I should have known who he was.)

"Oh...."  I reply sheepishly and pray that his high-ranking status allows him to speed so the car ride is over faster.

When I got to work, I told my officemates about it ("Funny thing happened to me on the way to the lab").  They thought it was hilarious.  One of them thought it was so funny that she told one of the odontologists and another one of the anthropologists.  And then they told people.  One of the lab managers approached me in the hallway one day, all 'official,' and I think its about a report that I just turned in, and he says, "so, I hear you've been cruising around with the D.C.O."

This is what I imagine my angry face to look like.

By the way, the lab manager wasn't inaccurate with his verbiage.  This whole getting-a-ride thing has happened multiple times.  I'm starting to dread it!  First of all, it's a convertible sometimes, so my hair gets all blown-around, and also, people might see!  Getting a ride to work with the Deputy Commander is like being in junior high and getting a ride to school with the vice principal.  Also, the door handle is in a weird place so once when it was really early in the morning and the sun wasn't out yet I couldn't see it and it took what seemed like forever to get out of the car.  So awkward.  And to top it all off, it's the kind of car that you have to climb out of, which is extremely hard to do gracefully in a knee-length skirt.

Why I chose to blog about this today, after all of this time, is because the story has apparently gotten around.  As I was leaving work today, one of the archaeologists asked me if I needed a ride.  I thought this was a little weird because I had never interacted with this guy before (i.e., he shouldn't know that I walk to the bus stop) and I was still in the parking lot (i.e., I could have been walking to my car).  But whatever, it's a ride.  I get in and thank him, and he says, "don't worry, I'm not the D.C.O."

How the frack does he know this story?  I demand that he tell me who told him.  He said that he couldn't remember; he'd heard it from a couple different people.

So I guess this is my reputation now.  No matter how many reports or memos I write or by how many more exponents I increase the productivity of the project to which I'm assigned, I will always be the anthropologist who didn't know who the Deputy Commander was.  So lesson learned:  don't get into cars with strangers, and if you do, don't tell anyone, because people will never stop telling that story.



*I'm sure that I've blogged about the name of the place where I work before, but I don't want this particular post to come up in any search engines.
**Wherein the women are taught, "if you leave your wallet on the table and someone takes it, it's kind of your fault."  So far we've come.