On the one hand, carpool should really appeal to me. It gives me almost no social interaction except with those I’ve allowed into my car and has many well-inforced rules so I’m not the only one getting mad at people who drive cars.
However, I mostly spend those 15 minutes apologizing, and you might, too:
If your car has not been cleaned in a month or even a week, you will realize other, cleaner, people will see it in car pool so you will pull over in a parking lot and brush crumbs under your car mats while looking for a place to put all your trash and apologizing to the parking lot garbage can for overflowing it.
Once you have arrived at the school, you will have no clue which way to drive in the car pool line so you will apologize for holding up the line, not putting the car in park, putting the car in park, accidentally touching your cell phone while trying to unroll your window to ask where to go and all the replies will be given by megaphone.
Once you reach the megaphone person with your car, you will realize that if your last name is not in the sweet spot between Smith (where 10 kids stand up to get into your car) and Iwashyna (where the pronunciation is so difficult people think you’re choking), the mega phone car pool line leader will make you apologize for not being more thoughtful about where you were born and/or who you married and force you to prove your child is yours in another way — probably by waving and smiling.
However, if your car is not controlled by fancy buttons rather than brute force, the people, who let your child into the car, will stare as though they’ve never opened a door before, and when they walk away, they will leave the door open like your child has just joined the A-Team. As you run around to close your own door, you will apologize to the entire car pool line for having such a sad minivan.
Now how do I use these again?
As you finally pull away from the car pool loop, you will have to stop and park the car 10 seconds later to buckle your kid’s carseat making the entire experience pointless and inconvenient and ending with a final: “I’m sorry kids, but we may just have to use our legs to get in and out of school everyday.”
Are you new to car pool? Do you love carpool? How is it going? Will it get better?
