Dating : The Day My Pants Melted

I try, as a writer, to constrain myself to technical topics — data modeling, programming, that sort of thing. This is not one of those articles. It is rather, the woeful tale of how I found myself dealing with the trials and tribulation of melted pants. Seriously.

I was a senior in college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where I was wrapping up a degree in Physics. This sounds more impressive than it was at the time, as I discovered that while I was pretty good at the math portion of physics, I should never have been allowed into a physics lab. I’d been limping along from major to major, trying to find myself before the meager amount that I’d been making from school jobs finally failed to keep up with the rising cost of schooling. The roulette wheel had finally ended in Physics.

I’d actually wanted to go into mathematics, but the lack of a couple of courses I needed to wrap up that degree and the fact that I could just eke out a physics degree ultimately ended up meeting the obligatory calculus towards the holy grail of graduation (I was sick of school at this point, really sick of physics, and discovered that I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around the concept of infinitely dimensioned tensors). Even a nerd has his limits.

So it was that during Winter of my senior year, after barely scraping by, I decided that I might be better off going into teaching math. Earlier that week, I’d made a plan — go to Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois (yes there is a city called Normal in Illinois … it’s an apt description) and talk with the admissions counselors about getting into grad school there. Friday was my only day without classes, so it seemed like it would be a good day to do so, and hoping to get a good start and be home by dinner, I was up bright and early Friday morning.

January in central Illinois can occasionally get cold. Really cold. Cold enough that batteries won’t start. The car that I had at the time was an old Dodge coup that has been new when bellbottoms were just beginning to come into fashion. I called the car the Blue Dragon, not because it was particularly fast or fearsome, but because it made lots of noise, lots of smoke, and just sat there. It had a dead battery, something confirmed from the AAA guy who’d come out and jumped my car, only to have it die repeatedly. He left, and I was getting desperate because my meeting was scheduled for 11 am and it was an hour drive to the campus.

I was a college student. I took adversity in stride. I was also pretty much broke. So, lacking a car, I took the battery out, carried it with me to the bus, and then took the bus to the nearest Sears automotive. Did I also say that college students are not necessarily the brightest tools in the shed at times? I carried the battery on my lap. Remember that fact.

The bus arrived at the Sears, the Sears technician exclaimed that the battery was one of their older models and was definitely leaking fluids, and I was a bad person for not having replaced eons ago. Then he reluctantly sold me a new battery in its box, which I lugged back home. It was 10 am. I slipped the battery onto its platform, tightened the screws, hopped in the car, and the car started right up. Luck was with me, I thought, and was off on my merry way, well aware that if I was VERY lucky I’d get there just a bit late. If I’d been thinking it through, I should have just rescheduled at that point, but … see note above about not being the brightest tool in the shed.

I pulled into the graduate school admissions at 11:15 am in Normal, having violated a couple of speed signs in the process. I was also beginning to itch a bit on my upper legs. As I was getting out of the car, I was mortified to discover that somewhere along the line the zipper had separated (on the cloth side) from the pants, and was thankful that I had a somewhat longish winter coat on.

I get to the office, only to discover that the admissions officer who I was scheduled to see had canceled coming in due to a family emergency, and this was actually one of the last sessions available before the office closed at noon on Friday, because seriously, what kind of idiot college student goes to the admissions office of a school on a Friday afternoon?

Getting more than a little vexed, I headed over to the campus library, which was open until 5pm that night, took off my coat, and made the realization that my corduroy pants were now sporting significant holes around the crotch area, the zipper was pretty much completely detached, and the catch at the top of the zipper was in the final stages of giving up the ghost.

Now, I was a physics major, even if not a very bright physics major, and I realized that maybe holding a leaky old battery just brimming with lead and battery acid might in fact be directly responsible for the fact that my pants were rapidly turning into swiss cheese.

I left the library somewhat later, my hands in my pants pockets quite literally the only things keeping my pants from falling around my ankles. When I walked out of the library however I had I discovered that the cold skies had also brought with it a snow storm that had already deposited nearly six inches of snow on the ground, with the snow that thin particulate kind that told you that it could go on all night like this.

I carefully drove out to the edge of Normal (which should tell you something right there) until I found a truck stop, where I sidled into the restaurant in a hunched over winter coat desperately trying to keep my pants up as several dozen truckers looked on, apparently finding the situation either very funny or figuring me for some kind of weird pervert.

A cinnamon roll and three cups of black truckers coffee later, I finally decided to brave the elements (and the rapidly diminishing truckers). I paid the bill at the table rather than have to coordinate getting change out of pockets that were rapidly becoming rags, then made my way back to the car.The snow still fell, though not as heavily as before, and I proceeded cautiously down the highway.

Trucker’s coffee is nearly as strong as battery acid, and by the time I finally saw the exit for my apartment, an hour later, I was as bad as a junkie jonesing for a hit. I took the off ramp, hit a spot of ice, slammed on what I thought was the brake but turned out to be the accelerator, and sent a stop sign off to wherever stop signs go when they die, knocking out my right headlight in the process. Getting home, I made a mad dash to the bathroom to wash any residue of battery acid off my legs, threw my pants into the trash, and huddled into bed.

Of course, I’d also had three large cups of trucker’s coffee, and so the sun was actually just coming up before I finally fell asleep, worrying about money, graduating, replacing a light and having the police break in for destroying their stop sign. The next morning I stumbled to a breakfast meeting with a friend of mine, where I recounted my tale of woe, only to have her breaking out in howling laughter by the time I was done. I did call the police and explained about the sign, which they blamed on the icy conditions — apparently the stop sign wasn’t the only signage casualty of the previous day.

Is there a moral to the story? Perhaps only that sometimes even the most dismal day you can have, such as having your pants melt off you, can become a story worth sharing. Oh, and don’t carry leaky batteries on your lap. I’d definitely recommend against that now. Seriously.

Kurt Cagle is a writer, coder and futurist who barely survived college and has occasionally barely survived life, but has learned how to write about it nonetheless. That has to count for something … doesn’t it?