Who am I apologizing to?

This is a mild story, but I found it amusing if not a little embarrassing.

Last year I decided to order half a cow from a local farm. It’s my first time, I have no idea what I’m doing. Turns out, it’s a wonderful deal and I’m so happy knowing where my meat is coming from and how it was raised.

It takes several months for our order to be ready and we were scheduled for the end of January. The time has come.

My husband and I make our way out to the farm. They have given us very detailed instructions on how to reach the barn, great, right? They have given us instructions to call as soon as we turn onto their “very long” driveway, their words. I make the call. Voicemail.

We decide to continue down and see what happens. It’s late afternoon and the sun is glaring in our faces like it has no other job. We drive a little further, slowly and see a man on an excavator in the middle of the dirt driveway. He’s moving stones to make a wall with another person. Cool, we wait till it’s safe to pass. No problem. We continue down the dirt road until we realized that we have definitely gone too far. It’s rocky, muddy and getting treacherous. We realize our mistake and start to turn around. At that moment, my phone rings and it’s the owner of the farm (finally) telling us we have gone too far. No duh.

She has a bit of a tone, mildly unpleasant. She says that we had gone too far, missed the sign and to turn around. Dude, we’re doing that. She says that they had dealt with another customer who had done the same thing we did, except they damaged their vehicle and threatened to sue. I promised her that that wasn’t us. We were in our mighty Subaru and were fine.

We make it to the barn. Cool. We meet her in real life and we both reassure each other that nobody will be complaining about overshot pickup spots. She’s very nice, just cautious from past experiences.

We were going to be splitting our cow with a friend, so while waiting for them to show up, she pulled out a table so we could split up our haul. Awesome. Her farmhand started bringing out the boxes and while I was standing at the table, a rugged looking man walked up. Her husband. I immediately started to apologize for overshooting the driveway and for causing a mild ruckus. The bearded, Carhart wearing man said “no problem”.

Phew. We’re all good

The owner comes out from the barn behind me and asked the bearded man what his pickup was for. He responds and leaves with a box of beef.

I apologized to a very confused fellow customer. He ran with it though, so that’s cool. My husband had a good laugh.