The day this was

Some days are just…I mean, there are times when…you know?, and it’s like…wow…really?

Yeah.

That was today.

First, I missed my usual train. 4:49 came and went without me this morning. So, whatever, I’ll catch the 6:06. {time passes} Oooookay, on my way, I’ll just grab my…keys…keys…keys…where the @^*&@ are my keys…why are my keys not on the hook, GAH!, are they in my jacket pocket…jacket…jacket…OH COME ON ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!...

Missed the 6:06, too. But, I found all my accoutrements, so, you know, ready for the last train. Fold some laundry, make another coffee, la la la…but, just to be safe, I set a timer so I wouldn’t space out and miss The Third And Final Train in all the huff and bother as the Denizens were being pried from their beds and thrown into the merciless grinder of their little lives.

And then the husband called out, “What’s the timer for?” and I yelled back, “Oh, I set that so I wouldn’t miss my train!”, not realizing that it was going off, and furthermore that he was turning it off. (Why it was that he didn’t say something like, “Oh, well, shouldn’t you be going then?” is another rant for another day.)

And then? I missed the last train.

And then I said…well, what I said was…it was kind of…something like…“Gee whiz, I appear to have missed the very last train from Here to There for today. Well! Shuck-y darn! That's rather annoying, don't you know!”

In related news, we’re going to need to repaint the laundry room. The paint appears to have blistered in there. Huh. Go figure.

SO NOW, I’m going to be hitching a ride with the husband – after all the Denizens are safely dropped off at school and the rate determining step, Captain Adventure’s bus, has arrived and trundled him safely off. This is happening over an hour later than it used to happen, which is one of those ‘good news bad news’ deals: On the one hand, the kid gets to sleep in later. On the other, the husband can’t get into the office before ten o’clock.

TEN. O’CLOCK.

It is…not convenient. Important Note: I am smack in the middle of a Very Large Project, with lots of moving parts, and I’m supposed to be testing and so forth, and it’s kind of important and we’re really hitting crunch-time here, and there’s still a lot to do plus I haven’t finished my testing-automation tool yet and I really want to get it done because otherwise the paperwork is going to be a @*^&@ on this thing and TEN O’CLOCK, REALLY?!

So, an hour later, we got in the car and started driving. Where “driving” actually means “parking, with occasional changes in location.” Because that is what 580 is like in the morning. Pretty much from 3:15 a.m. until, uh, well, I assume it clears up at some point.

Never seen it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Over an hour after that, we arrived at BART. Where there was no parking. None. Not a single space, anywhere. So he dropped me at the curb and went off to Starbucks to wait for the 10:00 lots to open.

And I got on a train and headed in.

Somewhere along the way…I apparently suffered a major head injury or something. Because somewhere between Lake Merritt and Embarcadero, I completely forgot that I work downtown, and entered some kind of reality in which I was going somewhere all vacation-y. So I’m sitting there, on the BART train, knitting, looking out the windows, people watching, daydreaming about chai and lemon scones and junk like that, and then…Embarcadero station was behind us and I was all, “WAIT!!!!!! BACK UP! I WORK BACK THERE!!!!!!”

BART train operators, it turns out, are not very customer service oriented. Guy wouldn’t back the train up for me.

Jerk.

So, I got off at Montgomery a fully irritable downtown wage slave. Grumbling to myself all the way, I marched up the long familiar hallway, went through the turnstiles, up the little escalator, down the other little hallway, and slapped my badge against the reader.

{slap!} {thunk!} (<= this {thunk!} noise is the sound the door makes when it is NOT going {click!}, which is the sound it makes when it is saying, “Hi! I see you have a valid access card! Why don’t you come on in, get some coffee, put your feet up, make yourself comfortable!”)

Huh.

{slap!} {thunk!}

Wha…?

{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}

Oh, COME. ON! Now my @^*&@ing badge isn’t working?! SERIOUSLY?! You’ve got to be kidding me, I have a meeting in, like, ten minutes, and this stupid badge won’t work…!!!!!!!

I was standing there rubbing it up and down on the reader like I thought it was a winning scratch-off or something when it suddenly dawned on me that I was in the wrong building.

…oh…

Yeah.

Haven’t worked at One Post for four YEARS.

Ahem.

I’ll just…take my little laptop bag and go, shall I…?

And I did. Right up Montgomery Street, dragging my case behind me and headed for…

…for…

…uh, Tama…?

Yooooooooooou…haven’t worked for MegaBank / SBCM waaaaay up there on California Street since, uh, yes. Well. It’s been a while, babe…

{face-palm}

A sensible person would have gone right back down into the BART system, gone home, wrapped herself up in bed and refused to come out for a few days. But Your Faithful Correspondent is made of sterner stuff than that, ha ha!

…plus I had meetings, and hand-offs, and a mountain of testing still to be done and our tester is still way too green to actually handle it yet so the part of the lead QA tester will be played be me (as well as the lead only data(base) analyst and general ‘how does this work again?’ person) (and the single point of failure information for a hopefully-soon-to-be-retired system and why it does the downright Satanically bizarre quirky things it does), AND I really-really need to corner one of the BA’s and demand answers because the specs outlined in A-BRD-sub(b) do not match what is called for in B-BRD, which is a downstream of A and which should therefore simply be an expansion of what is in A-BRD, but instead it’s like…well, it’s like…

…it’s like A-BRD says, “OK! And for B, we will only give them apples!”, while B-BRD says, “OK! And in terms of what we will get from A? It will only be peaches!!”

This is what we in the industry call, and I hope you will forgive me this highly technical blurb, A Problem. (We also call it a few other things. But the paint has already taken a beating around here so let’s just leave it at that, shall we?)

So I really need to back the BA into a corner and force her to give me a straight answer. Apples, or peaches? Pick one. One of these things is not like the other…

Crap. Now that’s stuck in my head…



GAH!!!!!!!!!

…sigh…

Figures.

That’s the kind of day this was, y’all. One of those missed-train, wrong-way, absent-minded, meeting-packed, apples-to-peaches-and-then-a-brain-worm-attacks-you kind of days…

THEN, while demanding Answers from the BA fixing the BA’s knitting (yes really), my cell phone goes off, and it is the school demanding that we trot straight over to pick up Danger Mouse, who has a sore throat.

So I text the husband, who has finally acquired a parking space and is on his way into the city. And I tell him to turn around, to which he replies…well.

Let’s just say BART has a paint problem now.

To comfort him, I promise I will shoot for the very first train home.

…y’all see where this is going, right…?

Yeah. I barely caught the last train, and only managed that by bordering on being rude to a teammate. (But seriously, DUDE, please to note that I am dripping with heavy bags and backing toward the door with an anxious gleam in my eye. Quick lesson in Social Skills: This is where you say, “OK, obviously you need to go – we’ll pick this up tomorrow, shall we?”. Not, “…just one more quick question…” where ‘quick’ should be pronounced, ‘crazy, convoluted, multi-tiered and otherwise requiring about a twenty minute lecture on the intricacies of account and entity types, and how we assemble them around here.’)

And then I got home. Ah. Peace and relaxation at last…for a little bit anyway, until I got a text from our new nanny (did I even get around to telling y’all that we found one? Bet I didn’t…it’s been That Way around here these last few weeks…) saying she has a sore throat and probably can’t make it tomorrow.

…and since The Husband took one for the team today, it’s my turn to stay home tomorrow…

…which is probably just the Universe’s way of saying, “HAHAHAHAHAHA, heh heh, OK, no, seriously {giggle-snort!} {hiccup} no, really…why don’t you have a nice lie-in tomorrow, say, until 5:00! You’re welcome! And don’t worry, it’s not like I’m {shhhhh! shhhh! c'mon you guys, shut up, she’ll hear you!!!} plotting anything…”

That’s the day it was. And what a day it was. And I’m not that sorry to be putting it to bed now, either.

Good. Night.