No Good, Very Bad Day

Yesterday I had a no good, very bad day. It started when my beloved overslept the business breakfast he was supposed to attend and woke up cursing. He was so upset, he accidentally set the alarm, which he's not to do every other Thursday because the cleaning people come then. My phone rang first around 10 a.m. My husband was in a meeting. I could hear the 1,000,000-decibal alarm going off in the background as my cleaning person frantically mispronounced my name. "The alarm! It is going off!" she cried. I instructed her to let the alarm people call me at work. They turned off the alarm.

Twenty minutes later, we repeated this process. Apparently the alarm people were not actually disarming the alarm, they were just turning off the noise. Every time the cleaning people opened a door, it would go off again. It occurred to me the cleaning people would have to leave, and they would probably choose to use a door as their point of exit. I looked up the customer service number for the alarm people and called them. They told me it would cost $18 to disarm the alarm for the day. I sighed. I thought about how the expensive cleaning service was supposed to relieve stress, not create it. I conceded the $18. The cleaning person called again. "I am leaving now!" she said. "No alarm, please!" I didn't know if the alarm people had had time to turn it off again or not. I inquired as to the cat's mental health. The cleaning person had not seen her in some while. I remembered the time she got scared and climbed into the crawl space under the bathtub, the time (at seven months pregnant) I'd had to call the fire department to fish her out because I was too huge to navigate the cubby space between the wall and the cupboard. I wondered if the cat had scaled the wall and was currently dangling from a light fixture. I sighed.

After my noon-to-one, no-lunch-provided usability meeting (in which everyone discussed how much everything I work on rather sucks), I was starting to reach a melting point. I was hungry. I was disgruntled. I was receiving toxic e-mails at the rate of 23 per hour. The usability guy was following me around as I attempted to find a depository for my former laptop (I just got a new work one) that I had inadvertantly locked myself out of trying to delete my profile so that the next recipient of the laptop wouldn't be subjected to a screensaver featuring the little angel. I walked into my boss' office, usability guy at my heels. At this point, she reminded me I had a 2 p.m. meeting, which would preclude me from completing the total revision of the 39-page document I had been working on, which is due end of day today.

At this point, I went hot. I felt the tears rising through my nasal passages. My boss, a friend from years past, could handle it, but I did not want usability guy to know. I faced her and tried to talk normally as the tears started rolling down my cheeks. She looked alarmed. "You look a little stressed," she commented. "I think I'm accessing my reptilian brain," I replied, succombing to my meltdown and turning to face usability guy. "I can't deal with you right now, E," I said. E. took one look at me and scampered away. I proceeded to have twenty-minute meltdown.

After the 2 p.m. meeting, I spent a productive hour working on my document, only to hit "No" in response to "Save Changes?" as I exited out of the program. Twenty minutes of looking for a auto-saved copy later, I realized the little angel was going to be the last kid in Oz and scampered out of the building, forgetting my PDA behind me.

When I got to Oz, I could hear the little angel screaming from upstairs, through two fireproof doors. Feeling like the Worst Mother in the World, I ran down the hall and swooped her up. "She hasn't been crying long," said the hapless worker, who is very nice. "I think she just doesn't know me."

I held the little angel close. She had the after-shudders of a good cry going on. She looked at me with huge, crocodile tears puddled in the corners of her little blue eyes. And then she smiled at me. A big, toothless, dimpled smile.

Suddenly, my day was fine.