My day

I know that is a boring title for a blog post, but it was any better with exclamation points, so, you know, deal with it.

I had an awful day today. Some good things happened, some bad things happened, but the bad things happened far more consistently than the good things. I'm going to tell you about it, whether you want to listen or not.

To start with, I broke my alarm clock. I set my alarm with an irritating song guaranteed to get me up, just to make it stop. This week, that song was Friday, by Rebecca Black (if you haven't heard it yet, I beg you not to listen to it. Save yourself). Usually, it gets me out of bed, but today I didn't want to get up, so I did what any sane person would do. I threw my phone at it. Now, my phone was alright (thankfully, Nokia haven't changed their design too much over the years), but the alarm clock smashed into the wall and landed on the floor in pieces. I tried to fix it before I realised that my $10 Target clock wasn't worth being late to work, and made myself go get dressed, promising myself that I would get another on the way home from work.

I had to sprint the last 200 metres to the bus (at least it was down hill) which was already at the stop. Luckily, the bus driver knows me, and so waited for a little while for me to get there once he saw me. Because of this, in addition to paying for my ticket, I gave him $5 and thanked him repeatedly (not much, I know, but he seemed pleased that I'd given him money). I reached my seat and messed around with my bag for a while before getting my iPod out. It was flat. That probably wouldn't seem so bad, but a 1hour bus trip into the city with a bunch of suits is far more irritating when I have to listen to the men behind me talk about stocks. I had also, in my rush to get out the door, forgotten my book.

When I got into work (only slightly late) it turned out my boss had gone out for a 'power breakfast', and, because of several other important lunches and meetings, would not be coming into the office today and that, if we didn't have anything important to do, we could leave. There was a special note for me that said I was not allowed to go. A few people had already gone home (making my life hell as I told customers who came to see them that they weren't here) and by about lunchtime, the whole floor was gone.

I have taken to leaving the office at lunch. Today lunch went totally smoothly, until I was about to pay and realised that I needed that $5 that I'd given to the bus driver. I had to buy a muffin instead of a bacon, cheese and pesto toasted sandwich (which is amazing). I was disappointed, but tried to insist to myself that "that's just the way life goes". On the way back to the office, I was fishing around in my pockets looking for my phone when I found another $5 bill.

This is the point in the day where things went from 'a series of unfortunate coincidences' to 'life is just fucking with me now'.

I finished the rest of the work day relatively incident-free. I went out to buy myself a new alarm clock, just like I said I would. I walked into Target, slipped and fell on some water on the ground, and was slapped forcefully by the bag check lady who tried to catch me. After checking my face for blood in the bathroom, I went back and asked her, embarrassed, where I would find what I was looking for. She pointed me in the right direction and I set off. After making a long and hard decision about clocks and having a display fall on me, I wandered over to the check out.

It was then that I looked at my watch, and realised that I had 5 minutes to get to the bus stop several city blocks away, if I wanted to catch the last bus that went by my house. I managed to beg my way through to the front of the line, paid for my new clock and ran the distance to the bus (thank god for my track and field training in high school) and eventually reached the stop to see the bus pulling away from the curb. I followed it until the next stop (luckily the traffic was backed up) and managed to get on just before it hit the freeway.

I tried my bus ticket, only to find that, since I had been an hour longer than usual, it had expired. I scraped around in my pockets for spare change and eventually was offered some by a lady sitting close by. Once I had managed to buy a ticket, I sat down next to a man who smelled oddly of garlic. By now, I was tired, bruised and battered, but the man I was sitting next to kept trying to strike up conversation. I almost missed the boring suits who were usually on my bus. I put up with this man for about 45 minutes, but then I snapped. I screamed at him that I wasn't interested in talking to him, and I got kicked off the bus 3 stops early and had to walk the rest of the way. At least it wasn't dark.

When I finally reached my house, I put my key in the door. But, since I was angry, I acted with a bit too much force and the key broke off in the lock. I called a locksmith, and he said he would come and fix it tomorrow. So I freaked out, burst into tears, and called Shakespeare. He came by to pick me up and we caught my cat (who, luckily, was outside at the time, and perfectly willing to be caught).

Now I'm at his house drinking hot chocolate while he cooks dinner. Shakespeare is very good at putting my shitty days in perspective.

I'm posting this not for your sympathies, but so that you can laugh at my misfortune (although sympathy is good too).