The Final Boss of Taxiing [OC]

RANDOM (TRUE) STORY FOR FUN:

For those of you who don’t know––which is probably EVERYONE here, I grew up in a house next to a small dentistry with its own parking lot.

…Given that I ALSO grew up on a street with zero sidewalks, playgrounds, or sense of community, this parking lot and I were TIGHT back in the day. 😤 On days when the dentistry was closed, my brother and I used to ride laps around the lot on our bikes and… uh, that was pretty much it. But it was a GREAT way to burn off energy in our adolescent years.

Anyway, things took a VERY exciting turn one day when a large DUMPSTER spawned in the corner of the parking lot––the kind used for building renovations. As a 10-year-old boy with a deep-seated desire for adventure and an even DEEPER-seated lack of personal judgment, I found this to be the COOLEST thing ever. I remember almost IMMEDIATELY climbing inside the dumpster in search of cardboard and other materials that I could use to… well, frankly, I had no real reason to be in there. I just liked garbage, I suppose.

I quickly made my dumpster visitations a DAILY ritual until––one day, I came face to face with an unexpected third party: a swarm of YELLOW JACKETS. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to build rapport with these things before they decided that I was an enemy who needed to be punished for liking garbage as much as they did.

What ensued was a CACOPHONY of petrified screams that eventually caught the attention of BOTH my dad AND the owner of the dentistry. The thing is: NEITHER of them knew that I had been crawling around the dumpster for the past several days––meaning that they were UNABLE to locate me at first. Once my dad DID find me and yank me to safety, however, he then got REALLY mad at me for being the stupid kid I was.

So yeah, I wasn’t allowed near the dumpster after that. :/