Eirik Stavem – to whom it may concern…

Women… drunk… needing a ride…

I was going to write a summary of my easter vacation, but it wouldn’t be very eventful, since I spent most of the holidays relaxing with Marianne and my family and friends up north. A more interesting story, is something that happened to me on the way home.

I caught a very late plane wednesday evening, it landed in Tromsø at 0030 thursday morning. I took a taxi to my grandparents’ place and borrowed their car to drive to Setermoen. Halfway home (it’s a two hour drive from Tromsø) I was really tired, so I stopped at a gas station to grab something to drink (I wasn’t picky, just about anything containing caffein was good enough).

As I was leaving the gas station, and was about to get into the car, a woman came running out after me. The situation that followed was something like this:
Woman: Where are you going?
Me: Uhm… *why is she asking?* well… *ahhh, she probably wants to get a ride somewhere* Uhm, I’m, I’m going south….
Woman: [Screaming to her friends]: Hey, this guy is going our way! [Talking to me again]: it’s ok that we get in, right?
Me: Uhm, actually…. *come on, you can think of an excuse* well, you see… *cmooooon, is that the best you can do?* I’m in a real hurry, and, uh….
Woman: Great, thank you so much, we live a couple miles down the road! [Getting into the car]

I like to think that if I had been a bit more awake, I would have thought of some good excuse why I wouldn’t let them ride with me, or just said no… but these women were both drunk, tired, cold, and wanted to go home.. need I say more? As far as I could tell, there was nothing stopping them from getting into the car, the fact that they even asked before jumping into the car was more of a courtesy to me than anything else. They were going home, one way or the other.

The morale? There’s no morale, other than that if you ever run into a bunch of drunk women who need a ride home, don’t even try to think of an excuse not to give them a lift.