Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiillllllma!

Bienvenidos a Miami! Sure, it’s all Will Smith songs and palm trees down here. Right? Well, not this weekend.

This weekend, it’s all hurricane aftermath, and I ain’t talking about Miami’s 34-16 comeback victory over the Tar Heels, the reason I’m in town in the first place. No, this is all about power outages, pizza men and general suckitude.

Allow me to recap for you the ridiculous adventures of a little something I like to call Me Covering a Football Game In a Place That Should Be Fun But Isn’t Much Fun When A Hurricane Hit There on Monday. Okay, so it’s a working title. Just call it MCAFGIAPTSBFBIMFWAHHTOM if you insist on being brief.

So, earlier this week I learn that courtesy of Hurricane Wilma, the Courtyard I booked a room in does not have power but could get it back soon. Naturally, I book another Courtyard, this one slightly further away from the airport. Upon arrival, I call the first Courtyard, which does not have power yet. Therefore I cancel my reservation, which is accomplished by the dude on the phone, who apparently hears my last name as Steele the first three times I say it, by crossing it off a list. Remember, there are no computers. So I fully expect to be billed for this room as soon as they’re back on line. But I digress.

From the airport, I call the second Courtyard, informing them that at their earliest convenience, I am ready to be picked up by their complimentary shuttle. They inform me that the shuttle is not running because of the gas shortage in Miami. This results in a $40 cab ride from a cabbie who insists that even though he does in fact accept credit cards, he doesn’t like it. So cash is paid.

In the interest of keeping this from being ridiculously long, let’s just say dinner did not go as planned Friday night, with us being turned away from an unnamed chain establishment (read: Cheesecake Factory) because they weren’t seating anyone else … at 9 P.M! (Side note, what do you do when you want to put an exclamation point at the end of an abbreviation? Period then exclamation point doesn’t look right, but neither does what I did right there. Oh well.) Needless to say, we found a place and traveled all the way to Miami from North Carolina to eat … drum roll … barbecue.

Anyway, on to Saturday. I’ll spare everyone the whole speech about what an absolute dump the Orange Bowl is. It would be like if a piece of shit took a shit, and then that shit took a shit, and then they took that final piece of shit and put orange seats in it … well, you get the idea.

Everything’s fine. Stories are sent. We’re all headed back to the hotel with dreams of hitting up the Cheesecake Factory before it stops seating. Since it’s only 7 o’clock, we figured we were golden. As you can probably guess, if we had actually been anywhere near golden, you wouldn’t be reading this. We were more burnt siena.

We’re denied at the CF. Then at the other restaurant next to it. So we settle on going back to Shorty’s, the barbecue place we went the night before and our final option. The power is out all the way down the street where Shorty’s is located. Even the Burger King was out. At this point, Miami has more outages than a gay-rights parade.

Completely lacking in options, we attempt (for the third or fourth time that night) to engage in constructive meal-planning conversation with our Colombian front-desk guy, who tells us, yes, we can order pizza. After an ordeal that involves four of us making individual orders to Papa John’s over the front-desk phone, we each go to our rooms to await delicious nourishment. N&O columnist and cranky hungry person Caulton Tudor becomes panicked upon receiving a phone call saying the pizzas might not make it. Down at the desk, the Colombian dude calls PJ and tells us, no the pizzas are on the way. Tudes is now just rambling incoherently to Robbi about the Texas-OSU game, losing focus on the pizza.

After numerous calls to PJ, including me translating my own concerns to the guy on the phone after the Colombian dude at the desk unsuccessfully tried to convey what I was saying, we learn the driver is just seconds away! Finally, the pizzas arrive. Never has mediocrity been so delicious.

So now we’re all set. We’re calm, already eating, and all we need are drinks. Robbi says she’ll have a Diet Coke and I figure I’ll have the same. I go to the machine (which incidentally is on the third floor), and start pumping money in.

I hit the Diet Pepsi button.

I get Sunkist.

I hit the other Diet Pepsi button.

I get Sunkist.

Thinking I’ll outsmart the machine, I hit the Sunkist button.

I get Sunkist.

And I start thinking, “This is what I get for liking Sunkist.”

Then I struggle not to crack up laughing in the elevator with the random maintenance dude because I’m pretty sure there is no way he is going to find this whole Sunkist fiasco as frustratingly hilarious as I am.

Luckily, Robbi and Robert (Tudor took his pizza and vanished) did find it funny, a perfect little microcosm for our whole trip.

In short, I’m sick of hurricanes, Hurricanes, and any combination of the letters that spell those words, including “richer anus,” something I certainly won’t have thanks to Papa John’s and Sunkist.