By Chris Cosci

In life, there are certain things you can count on: the sun rising in the morning, 24-hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway, and pop radio stations playing the same twenty songs they played the day before. Then there are things that you assume you can count on, but you eventually find out how wrong you were.

Recently, I had to travel to New Jersey for business reasons. Since this was an all-day occasion, I was able to take a car service from my home on Long Island to the client's office in New Jersey. At 7:30 a.m., I stepped out of my house, ready for the ride. The client expected me around 9:30. Realistically, I figured I would arrive closer to 9:00. But fate had other plans that morning - and fate is something you can always count on.

My driver implied that he had previously driven people to the office where I was going. This is one of those things you assume you can count on. After all, it's his job to know where he's going. Of course, a baseball player's job is to hit the ball, but even the best players strike out on occasion.

Assuming everything was under control, I picked up a book and stared to read. About an hour later, I looked outside to see where we were. After a few minutes, we reached the last major road of the trip. According to the directions I got online, we needed to go to exit 22. But you can't always count on online directions. The driver said exit 21 was the preferred route, which sounded reasonable given that one of my co-workers told me the online directions weren't the most effective.

The first exit we came to was exit 14. With seven exits to go, I figured we would arrive around 9:00, as I expected. I went back to reading. When I looked up again about fifteen minutes later, I noticed something odd: we were approaching exit 2.

My gut told me something was wrong. But then I guessed that maybe the exits would restart after we passed exit 1. Sure enough, five minutes later we came to exit 39. Breathing a small sigh of relief, I relaxed until I saw the sign for the next exit: exit 40. Something was definitely wrong.

The driver seemed oblivious to the problem. So I politely pointed out how the exits were now going up, and the odds of reaching exit 21 when we were already at exit 40 seemed pretty slim. He acted as if I were making things up until he saw the sign for exit 41. So he took the next exit, and turned us around, heading back to the road we were supposed to be on. But it felt like it was taking longer to get back to the road than it should have.

You would assume you can count on a professional driver not needing to stop at a gas station to ask for directions. But this is what my driver did. Sure enough, we passed the road we wanted and had to turn around again. Finally, we made it back to the road, and with the exits now going down, we were back on target. I now estimated arriving just after 9:30. Good thing I left early, right?

We finally reached exit 21 and got off. After a few minutes, I noticed that our surroundings didn't look quite right. Lost again, my driver pulled off to the side of the road and made a phone call. He spoke to somebody who gave him new directions. Finally, we were moving again. At this point, I was thinking that 10:00 seemed to be a more accurate arrival time. You would assume you can count on there being no more problems. After all, a professional driver couldn't possibly get lost three times in one trip, right?

Just before 10:00, we approached an intersection. The driver pulled over to the side, got out of the car, and (I am totally serious) walked up to a random car stopped at the intersection to ask for directions. It was a dark day for professional car services.

I arrived at the office at 10:15. Thankfully, all went well from there. But before I left the car, the driver notified the dispatch office that he finally dropped off his rider. The dispatcher, sounding irritated, asked "what happened, did you get lost?" Sensing trouble, the driver simply stated, "no, we hit a lot of traffic." Ah, the art of using spin control to save your skin. Now that's something you can always count on.