EN ROUTE

Came across this word today, and it made me think of a situation, a humorous situation, from my college days. For your amusement (or maybe for just a few of my readers' amusement), let me recap:

My roomate and I are sound asleep on a Friday or Saturday night, and our phone rings around 2 or 3 in the morning. Eric, my groggy roomate, creeps to the foot of his bed to answer the phone. In my sleepy stupor, I hear portions of the conversation: "Yes," "That's my car," "Really?," and "I'll be down in a minute" all stand out in my mind. Eric asks if I'm asleep, and I respond "Yes." Although I don't really remember what happened, or remember much of him doing anything from that point. What must have been just a few minutes seemed longer, and the phone ringed again. A voice on the other line states "This is Eastern Police... Is this Eric?" "No." "Is he en route?" I reply "Yes," even though I really didn't know what the heck was going on. I fall back to sleep shortly. Minutes (hours?) later, Eric returns, and I hear him grumbling about something or other, and he crawled back into his bed.

Late the next morning, I find out what happened.

The campus police had received a call from students (football players for EIU, most likely) at 2 a.m. because someone's car horn was blasting, constantly, right in front of their dorm building (literally, about fifteen feet away from a three-story dorm building where the student-athletes were housed). Somehow, due to the cold of the night, the contacts for Eric's car's horn had expanded just enough to cause his horn to honk -- constantly for who knows how long until EIU police called Eric, and he went down to his car to see squad cars around his car, and he disabled his horn. To be honest, he's lucky to still have a car! Those football dudes coulda (shoulda?) broken his car in half!

En Route! What a great term!