Casual Bloggers Find Inspiration in the Dysfunctional Components of Daily Life
Alternate title: Everything Is Broken! Including the link that made up the entirety of yesterday's post!! Thanks for the heads up, Matt, it's fixed now.
But back to the matter at hand. Basically, I’ve found that the material I can glean for a great blog entry tends to be inversely proportional to how great things go on any given day. Like today.
When I got up this morning, I discovered that my iPod was dead. I thought it was charging all night, but instead it gave me the Mr. Yuck face picture and it refused to cooperate. So I decided to take a cd player along for the bus ride. It didn’t work for the first 10 minutes or so of trying, but eventually pulled together all its wits and agreed to spin the disc around and start playing music for a very grateful me.
When I got to work, I was reprimanded somewhat unexpectedly for going into overtime in recent weeks. I understand they’re on a tight budget these days, but the way it came out was kind of frustrating and I felt scolded and underappreciated. And I still wonder how I’m supposed to do 3 jobs in under 40 hours a week. My boss wasn't there today, though, so I'll have to talk it through another time.
Later in the morning, I headed out to jumpstart one of the vans because one of the employees accidentally left the lights on over the weekend and the battery was dead. I rallied Pablo (not his real name) to come help me out. At about 5’2” and somewhere between the ages of 24.5 and 38, he is one of the most reliable and all around good people I’ve ever worked with. So we got the van started and I got a few other chores done. About 15 minutes later I went out to put gas in the van and discovered it hadn’t held the charge. So we went through the whole thing again and re-jumped it. (Kind of a pain, since the parking lot is a few blocks from the office and we needed multiple sets of keys, including a key to a coworker’s trunk to borrow jumper cables.) As we were riding in a truck back to the office, Pablo looked deep into my soul, and as he told me how much he loved my blue-green eyes, the cab of the truck filled with the pungent aroma of dog poop. Yes, the dog poop that I had stepped in. The dog poop that was left at the base of the one and only tree in the parking lot, which happened to be growing directly in front of the hood of the van that we had just jump-started.
When we arrived at the office I proceeded to stomp and skid around in the grass trying to clean my shoe, then it was time to put gas in the third company vehicle: a nice, new, white truck. I drove to the station, and pumped the gas. I had a nice conversation with the attendant that I see there every week, and wondered silently at the news crew interviewing the driver of a milk delivery truck at the convenience store there. Slow day in regional news, I guess. As I got in the truck to pull away from the pump, I was pretty focused on the milk truck and interview participants stationed mere feet from my front right bumper (whom I did not want to run over), and failed to notice the concrete post to my left, which rose to a height several inches below what was readily visible in my left side mirror. The concrete post which was painted bright red – freshly painted 2 weeks ago. The post that dug deep into the side of the truck and left a screeching red gash in the white paint as I turned and pulled forward. Because I hit it. Hard.
I called my boss to tell him but he didn’t answer. Not the kind of thing you really want to leave a message about. But I called 3 more times over the course of the day and he still never answered. He’s going out of town this week to go hunting. Maybe he’s already gone? I don’t know. Wish me luck with that conversation, whenever it happens.
When I got home, I found my iPod still unresponsive after one last vain attempt at leave-it-plugged-in-all-day therapy.
To cap it all off, this morning, as I was leaving my room, on my way to leaving my house to go to work to begin this glorious day, I tripped over my computer charger cord, knocking my laptop off the table and onto the ground. Thankfully, it’s a Mac, so no big deal. [I realize that the brand is pretty much irrelevant here. I just like to think it means it’s better and more durable.] It’s happened before, and it was a low table with carpeted floor. Unfortunately, what I didn’t discover until tonight was that a piece from the end of the charger broke off and is in my computer, and the end of the charger is somewhat mangled and can’t be plugged back in. So I am writing this on literally the last remaining drops of battery energy before I have to take it somewhere at some point this week to hopefully get it fixed.
But back to the matter at hand. Basically, I’ve found that the material I can glean for a great blog entry tends to be inversely proportional to how great things go on any given day. Like today.
When I got up this morning, I discovered that my iPod was dead. I thought it was charging all night, but instead it gave me the Mr. Yuck face picture and it refused to cooperate. So I decided to take a cd player along for the bus ride. It didn’t work for the first 10 minutes or so of trying, but eventually pulled together all its wits and agreed to spin the disc around and start playing music for a very grateful me.
When I got to work, I was reprimanded somewhat unexpectedly for going into overtime in recent weeks. I understand they’re on a tight budget these days, but the way it came out was kind of frustrating and I felt scolded and underappreciated. And I still wonder how I’m supposed to do 3 jobs in under 40 hours a week. My boss wasn't there today, though, so I'll have to talk it through another time.
Later in the morning, I headed out to jumpstart one of the vans because one of the employees accidentally left the lights on over the weekend and the battery was dead. I rallied Pablo (not his real name) to come help me out. At about 5’2” and somewhere between the ages of 24.5 and 38, he is one of the most reliable and all around good people I’ve ever worked with. So we got the van started and I got a few other chores done. About 15 minutes later I went out to put gas in the van and discovered it hadn’t held the charge. So we went through the whole thing again and re-jumped it. (Kind of a pain, since the parking lot is a few blocks from the office and we needed multiple sets of keys, including a key to a coworker’s trunk to borrow jumper cables.) As we were riding in a truck back to the office, Pablo looked deep into my soul, and as he told me how much he loved my blue-green eyes, the cab of the truck filled with the pungent aroma of dog poop. Yes, the dog poop that I had stepped in. The dog poop that was left at the base of the one and only tree in the parking lot, which happened to be growing directly in front of the hood of the van that we had just jump-started.
When we arrived at the office I proceeded to stomp and skid around in the grass trying to clean my shoe, then it was time to put gas in the third company vehicle: a nice, new, white truck. I drove to the station, and pumped the gas. I had a nice conversation with the attendant that I see there every week, and wondered silently at the news crew interviewing the driver of a milk delivery truck at the convenience store there. Slow day in regional news, I guess. As I got in the truck to pull away from the pump, I was pretty focused on the milk truck and interview participants stationed mere feet from my front right bumper (whom I did not want to run over), and failed to notice the concrete post to my left, which rose to a height several inches below what was readily visible in my left side mirror. The concrete post which was painted bright red – freshly painted 2 weeks ago. The post that dug deep into the side of the truck and left a screeching red gash in the white paint as I turned and pulled forward. Because I hit it. Hard.
I called my boss to tell him but he didn’t answer. Not the kind of thing you really want to leave a message about. But I called 3 more times over the course of the day and he still never answered. He’s going out of town this week to go hunting. Maybe he’s already gone? I don’t know. Wish me luck with that conversation, whenever it happens.
When I got home, I found my iPod still unresponsive after one last vain attempt at leave-it-plugged-in-all-day therapy.
To cap it all off, this morning, as I was leaving my room, on my way to leaving my house to go to work to begin this glorious day, I tripped over my computer charger cord, knocking my laptop off the table and onto the ground. Thankfully, it’s a Mac, so no big deal. [I realize that the brand is pretty much irrelevant here. I just like to think it means it’s better and more durable.] It’s happened before, and it was a low table with carpeted floor. Unfortunately, what I didn’t discover until tonight was that a piece from the end of the charger broke off and is in my computer, and the end of the charger is somewhat mangled and can’t be plugged back in. So I am writing this on literally the last remaining drops of battery energy before I have to take it somewhere at some point this week to hopefully get it fixed.
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