Out of Gas

by Randy Dyess

  “We can still do take out and have pizza night. I might even learn to fire up the grill one night a week and do something. Hell, I might even learn to cook something else once in a while. As long as we all eat together, it doesn’t matter what we eat.”

  “What are you going cook? Toast? You haven’t cooked since college. All you did then was just throw a collection of cans you happened to take from your parents on the weekends into a pot.”

  “I can grill a mean hamburger and hot dog. I’ll make you a bet. I will cook one night a week and you cook one night a week and after a month we’ll determine which one’s dinner the kids like better. And no cheating! You can’t just go buy the food at the store and heat it up. You have to cook the whole thing!”

  “Are you referring to my Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago when I bought it all from Bill’s Deli? That dinner was good.”

  “I know it was,” Mark said, “but on the nights we are supposed to cook, everything has to be assembled and cooked at home. We can save the cheating for the other nights.”

  “Ok, I’ll cook one night, you another, pizza one night, tacos another and we play Friday night and the weekends by ear. We’ll see who wins at the end of July and the loser has to handle all meals during our vacation.”

  “It’s a bet,” Mark laughed and held out his hand for Kelly to shake.

  “Is that it for the family section of our programming?” Kelly asked with a big smile on her face.

  “No. Not by a long shot. I also want to schedule one night each month as a date night, just the two of us. No calls or emails and no cancelling for meetings. The kids can go to the grandparents so we can have our night. I also want the date night to extend to each of the girls. One night a month spent with Cheyenne and one night spent with Dakota.”

  “I get the same deal, one night with each of the kids as well. When you have Cheyenne, I will take Dakota somewhere. And switch the next time. We should also talk to our parents about why we are doing this. They basically raise the kids now and if all of sudden we start taking them away, they’ll get confused and think it is something they did.”

  “I know,” Mark said, “but I think they will understand. Besides we can still go over to their house one night a week and have a group dinner. Your parents one week and mine the next. Anyway, that fits in with the overall plan of getting closer to everyone.”

  Mark and Kelly continued discussing little things they wanted to do to keep closer to their kids and parents. One of the items they came up with was to get a large poster printed from a picture Kelly had of all of them at the beach. They would put this poster up in their room so the first thing they would see in the morning would be a giant picture of their family having fun. Mark decided he was going to set the screen saver on his computers to rotate between pictures of Kelly, his kids, his parents, and even his brothers and sister. He was even going to mix in a few self-made jpegs into the screen saver rotation that had the phrase ‘Remember Your Promise to Us’ on them. That way he would always remember his promise to place his family first from now on. Both of them figured having constant reminders of what they promised would keep them on track when things got busy and they started to slip back into their old routines. Humans tend to fall back into old habits quickly when things became a little stressful or they became tired. Creating new habits and ignoring old ones would be a challenge for Mark and Kelly and they wanted to use every trick in the book they could find.

  After finishing up with all the things they were going to do with family wise, Mark continued, “I want to reconnect with our extended families as well. We see our parents all the time, but just long enough to hand the kids off or pick them up. We have this great place with the pool and other amenities, so I want to throw at least one party a month for the family. Even if it’s not on a holiday, I don’t care. I want to get to know our parents, as well as our brothers’ and sister’s families a lot better than I do now.”

  “Wow, you’re wound up aren’t you?”

  “You bet. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. I’m a little depressed thinking about how little I know about some of the people who are supposed to be the most important people in my life. I want that to end. I want to know what they do, what is important to them, and what they want out of life. I’ve been so wrapped up in myself I have forgotten that this world is full of interesting people and I bet a few of them are related to us.”

  “Ok, let’s start planning a Memorial Day party.”

  “That should come as a shock to them to be invited to our ‘mansion’ as Amber called it.”

  After making plans for a Memorial Day blow-out, Mark wanted to create a family handbook holding each family member’s information, everything from addresses to Facebook account information. Mark and Kelly each opened up their own Facebook accounts and started trying to capture as many family members as they found. They searched through the friend lists of other family members. Several times they had to ask who someone was to jog their memory of cousins and kids of cousins. Eventually, they had captured most of them and figured they would work on the others over time.

  After a few hours of working on their handbook, they took a break for an extended lunch at a small place up the road. Each time in the past they drove by this place one or the other had always said, “We need to try that place out.” They had never stopped before because they just couldn’t see themselves eating at places that were not name brands or owned by famous chiefs. After Mark’s hamburger and fries got to his table, he took a big bite and exclaimed, “Wow! This is good. One of the best hamburgers I’ve had in a long while.”

  “I know, just think this place has been here for as long as I can remember and we have been missing out all that time.”

  “Ok, no more judging places because they are not chains or mentioned in the food columns. No offense to your company but we should start finding more places like this,” Mark said between bites of his burger.

  “I agree. This place is wonderful and the prices are great.”

  “Coming from a woman who spends $50 just eating a salad with her friends at the spa every Saturday, that’s quite a statement.”

  “I have a feeling those days are over.”

  Mark looked at Kelly and said, “I have the same feeling. But I’m not all that sad about it.”

  “Neither am I,” Kelly said as she dug back into her burger.

  After lunch, Mark and Kelly pulled out all the paperwork they found that might have family information on it. Old Christmas and birthday cards, an old invitation list from Mark’s grandmother’s 90th birthday party, and the list someone tried to make the last time the family got together. They spent the rest of the afternoon compiling the information and putting it into their new family handbook with one part for Mark’s family and another for Kelly’s. Both Mark and Kelly worked up until time to go get the kids from school and felt like the day was a tremendous success. After spending all the time putting the information together, they vowed they were going to make use of it to start getting back in touch with their families.

  They left together to pick up the kids from school and take them to the park until dinner time. After deciding their little dinner bet wouldn’t start until the kids were out of school, they decided to go back to the same restaurant where they had lunch. After a nice meal, they spent a little more time with the girls watching a movie before sending them to bed. Having spent all day on the computer, they decided to skip their research for the night. They spend the rest of the evening sitting on their porch overlooking the pool and drinking a few glasses of wine before going to bed themselves.

  “I could get use to this,” Kelly said as she held Mark’s hand by the pool while watching the stars come out.

  “Me too. We might have been selfish in the past, but at least we did make it a habit to have a drink together each night before we went to bed.”

  “Maybe, but if you think about it hard enough, how much time did we really spend together? Both of u
s spent most of the night working. We rarely talked about anything and sometimes drank our wine as fast as we could so we could either go back to work or go to bed exhausted. “

  “Point taken,” Mark acknowledged. “That will never happen again.”

  Kelly just smiled and visually relaxed some more as she sat next to Mark and drank in the moonlight.

  The next morning after dropping the kids off at school, the Turners ate a late breakfast at what they were now calling the “family” diner. Once back home they started to work on the next segment of Mark’s plan. After settling down Kelly asked, “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “You know how we both used to have lots of friends? We regularly got invited to party after party. I want to try to get some of that back.”

  “What do you mean?” Kelly asked.

  “I want to try to make contact with all the friends I’ve had over the years and lost touch with. I know some of them may reject me, but the others I want to try to get back into our lives. I know I blew off a lot of them as we became more successful. I’m hoping some of them will not be too pissed off at me and become good friends again.”

  “This should be easy,” Kelly said. “With Facebook and the other social sites on the web we should be able to find most of those friends fairly quickly. Once we find them, maybe we can start contacting them on Facebook, eventually ask them out to eat, and then bring them here for parties.”

  “Exactly,” said Mark. “I see our holiday parties are going to get a lot bigger in the future. We have the space here for dozens of people, so why not fill it every holiday.”

  Mark and Kelly spent the day making lists of past friends they wanted to get back in touch with. They looked over high school yearbooks, college yearbooks, sorority and fraternity lists. They remembered past coworkers each of them would like to get to know again and current coworkers they would like to know a little better. Once they found a name, they would search through Facebook for the person or through the friend’s list on Facebook of other contacts. They found almost all of the people on their list and sent friend requests on Facebook to many of them and connection request on LinkedIn for some of the others.

  The day passed quickly and was fun to both Mark and Kelly as they remembered things from the past they never told each other. By the time they needed to end their day and pick up the kids from school, they gained a lot of insight on the lives they had while growing up. In the end both Mark and Kelly knew more about each other than they ever had. Both promised they would contact each person on their list at least once a week. Each wanted to care about the response from the friend and not just make the contact to “check-in” and then blow away the response as many people do.

  Chapter 6

  On Wednesday, Kelly called in sick for the rest of the week. Wednesday would be the day they needed to start trying to figure out what they were going to do to help ensure their financial future. With the upcoming, probable loss of Mark’s job, he felt certain things needed to change and change quickly. Mark believed the economy would get much worse than anyone in authority acknowledged. He believed the global economy was on the verge of slipping into a deep depression which would last many decades. Although, he couldn’t tell you when the depression would start and how bad it would become. He was sure over the next few years things would change all around the world. He did not believe in a world without governments or one with large armies of gang members running around slaughtering everyone. It was a popular theme in many of the end-of-world books he had been reading lately. Over the next few years, Mark believed, crime would become out of control. City, county, and state governments would face cash flow issues and would start to disband their police forces. Each one would state they had made arrangements with someone else to protect their citizens, but the protection provided would be nothing like what the public was used to. People would have to start learning how to protect themselves from small gangs of criminals.

  Mark also believed the fuel shortage would affect the price and availability of food in America. Large numbers of Americans would face starvation on a daily basis. The government would try to help. As more people became unemployed, fewer taxes could be collected. Even the federal government would be without the resources needed to provide nutrition for millions of Americans. The American government certainly could not send large amounts of food and monies overseas like we do today to help other countries. Countries would go to war over the remaining world resources. People in those countries would have to live in the aftermath as economies would not be strong enough after the destruction was over. Mark believed what are considered stable countries today, would splinter as people chose not to be governed by others hundreds or thousands of miles away. Americans would want local governments they thought would better to serve their needs than a far-away federal government. Governments would exist, but on what levels he wasn’t sure about.

  Mark planned on trying to convince Kelly about the upcoming global fuel shortage. He also wanted her to start believing in the world-wide depression he saw was looming. He needed her to believe in both those threats, so they could start creating the action list they needed in order to prepare for the next few years. Mark just did not know how to convince her of what he saw as a serious situation facing the family. He knew he might be able to convince her he would lose his job and their income would go down. She couldn’t believe he would not be able to get another job after a few months. Kelly was smart. Convincing her to go from the belief of the infallibility of the American way of life to one of global depression would be difficult for Mark.

  “So how did you want to start this?” Kelly asked as she tidied up from breakfast and came over to the dining room table.

  “I’ve been thinking about this. I think we should write what we believe is going to happen and what we believe is not going to happen within the next few years. We need to think about our own family as well as the future of the world while we are doing this. This will give us a starting point on what we believe is going to happen in the future and how we should prepare for it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘The future of the world?” Kelly responded. “Isn’t this about your job and how we are going to handle the loss? Are you trying to say you believe the economy is about to crash? Why do you think that? What do you know you are not telling me?”

  “I know I’ve had a little more time with this and have done more research than you, but I believe the world is about to take a nasty turn. The research I’ve done on the fuel shortage has led me to believe the shortages will not end. They will continue and continue to get worse in a short time frame. I believe the global economy is about to crash because of the fuel shortage and I don’t think anyone can stop the crash. Our whole way of life depends upon cheap fuel prices. It’s not hard to see what would happen to society if fuel prices sky rocketed. I can image scenario after scenario of how things would change if gas cost $15 to $20 a gallon.”

  “I’ve seen some of this on the Internet,” Kelly interrupted. “I didn’t think you believed in all the conspiracy stuff you showed me?”

  “I don’t believe in most of them. But I do believe in Peak Oil or I should say End of Cheap Oil. I’ve had nightmares on how things will be if a normal person couldn’t buy gas. Just think about how our world is set up and what would happen if you couldn’t drive anywhere without gas costing a large portion of your budget. Or what would happen if fuel becomes scarce and governments decide ordinary people like us are not allowed to buy gas. Some places might be fine for a while, but even large urban areas will suffer. They may be able to walk to work or take a train into town, but all the daily necessities needed to survive are not made there or grown there. Without cheap fuel prices all those large farms will not be able to operate. No farms, means no food. “

  “In fact,“ he continued, ” I’m seeing some of the effects now at Plains and at other airlines. We are not the only ones who have started cancelling flights lately. I know we are making up flimsy ex
cuses to try to cover the real reasons, so I can guess the other airlines are doing the same thing. World Airlines cancelled two hundred flights last week for a mechanical defect, but we fly the same type of plane and we didn’t shut down for the defect. I think they may be starting to feel the effects of a fuel shortage as well.”

  “I have also become aware of the little things lately. I’ve been hearing people at work complain about how their favorite online sites have stopped free shipping. They are finding more and more things at the store either costing more or not being available anymore. I walked in on a few of my DBAs talking about how one of them wanted to ask for a raise. She said the reason was because the prices she pays for food has gone way up. I heard her tell the other girl she thought prices have gone up about 20% over the last few months. Owen told me he was in a meeting in which they discussed raising airfare ticket prices by about 25%. They said costs for everything have started to escalate and they were having a hard time making enough profit. They weren’t just talking about fuel they were talking about all of the supplies used on the planes during each flight.”

  “You don’t think they will figure something out?” Kelly asked. “Isn’t the new plane supposed to be so much better on fuel? Wouldn’t they just switch over to the new plane over the next few years and save enough money to make their profit levels?”

  “Maybe. But think about it in these terms. We have over 2,500 planes that would need to be replaced. How long do you think all those planes would take? If we start shutting down routes, replacing old planes with new ones, and using larger planes instead of the smaller ones, what would happen to our stock price? Remember, the entire American business world only seems to care about stock prices. They would do anything to keep the prices up, including running the business into the ground.”

  “That’s kind of a pessimistic view of American business, isn’t it? Surely, they wouldn’t do that.”