Drama on the train

This morning, just after breakfast as we pulled out of Kamloops where we’d spent the night, Kara leaned over the back of her seat to have a little tête-a-tête with me. Evidently I’d really offended Erika yesterday and Kara thought I needed to apologize to her.

What was my horrible offense? It’s complicated, but let me try to explain. As I mentioned earlier, this whole trip was put together by Woolrich. Two of their pr reps are on the train with us and yesterday one of them, Michael, who is a very nice guy, divided us into two teams, a red team and a blue team. Then we all gathered in a lounge area in the back of our dome car and Michael would ask a question regarding the history of Woolrich (we had all been given little books on the company’s history that we were supposed to have read by now) and the team that came up with the correct answer would get a prize: a DVD of a movie that had something to do with trains like “Von Ryan’s Express” or “The Darjeeling Limited.”

Well, our team—the blue team—was really lame. None of us had done the required reading. So the red team was kind of cleaning up. In fact, they’d won so many of the DVDs that Michael decided to just let our team see if any of us could come up with an answer but the deal was that if you answered a question correctly, you could chose to either dig around in Michael’s bag for a new DVD or steal one from someone else who’d already got one. So I got a DVD and then Erika finally answered a question correctly and wanted to steal my movie. But I wouldn’t give it to her. And that’s what set her off.

Big drama, right? You’d be amazed. I think the problem stems from the fact that I am just not a team player. And people notice. For instance, Erika thought that, in an effort to show our unity, we should all sport blue eyeshadow warpaint on our cheeks. So she went around drawing two straight lines on blue team’s cheeks, as if we were all Apaches getting ready to go on a raid. But I wouldn’t let her draw war paint on me.

“Come on, David,” she pleaded. “Don’t be an ass.”

Well, I was an ass. No war paint. And that just seemed to set things off. And it got worse when I wouldn’t let her steal my movie. So it came to this: Kara having to pull me aside, like a misbehaving schoolboy, and instruct me to go to Erika and apologize. Now.

So I thought about it. It seemed silly to me. But Kara insisted that Erika was really upset. So fine. I found Erika and apologized and we hugged it out. Ending—for now—the big drama on the train.

Oh, and I also gave her the movie. Which she promptly lost somewhere on the train. Oh well.