Today was the roughest day I have had in quite awhile. But, thinking about it, most of the stuff was actually pretty funny. Here is what happened:

At six this morning, I headed out to my jeep with my hands full of work-related necessities. I had with me, my laptop, One Hundred Years of Solitude, purse, keys, bottle of water, cup of hot tea and a piece of toast with peanut butter and honey on top of a paper towel. Anyway, to my surprise I made it into the vehicle without incident. When I was no more than a half mile down the road, I managed to drop my piece of toast upside down on the center console. No worries; I saved it. But, in the process, I drug my paper towel through my cup of tea, and knocked it over. By this time the honey was dripping all over my hands and steering wheel, but I wasn’t about to give up; I was hungry! So I shoved the rest of the toast in my mouth, and cleaned off my face with a wet wipe from the glove box. Disaster averted. I wiped down the steering wheel, console and I was good to go. Down the road aways, I felt something sticky; turns out I had honey on both of my shirts, and my jeans. Super! I wiped myself off the best I could while going 35 on the freeway, and made it to work without further incident.

Once I was at work, I worked away pretty intensely until noon or so; I am a technical writer/editor at a research firm, and all of the documents must pass by my eye before leaving our hands. That said, I had finished drafts for five different documents, and headed out onto the network to work on a Draft 4 of my sixth document for the day when I opened the folder I needed and only found versions 1 and 2. Hmmm. that was weird. And my logic models folder was gone tool. That was weird. I did a search of the entire network and didn’t find the later drafts or my logic models. Okay, so maybe I was crazy. Maybe Draft 2 was the latest draft. I opened it up, and it was blank; someone went in and deleted all of the text from the document. Okay; let me go to version 1. Version one was rough, and someone had altered the logic model.

Luckily I had hard copies of all 4 of my drafts, and had saved the latest to my Mac and my My Documents folder. But, I wasn’t able to find the logic model folder; all logic models are created in Visio and are just a pain in the ass. So I had to recreate the incredibly complex logic model I had already done once, and incorporate the new information in the Draft 1, and cover my ass. I went to the CEO of the company and told him what had happened. He told me to make a local copy of everything I do in a day and save it all out to the network at the end of the day; this way we can monitor what is going on via backup tapes, etc. Screw that! I know exactly who deleted my files; the problem is, she won’t ever be fired; she is one of the head researchers, who couldn’t cut keeping up with the document workload; that is why they hired me.

After I didn’t have a total meltdown at work, I left at the completely reasonable hour of 4:30 (I arrived at 7:30, worked through lunch). It was drizzly, freezing, just ugly outside. And of course when it rains people loose all ability to drive with any more skill than a four year old. Traffic was horrible! I didn’t make it to the county line until after five (should have taken 10 minutes).

I finally exited the freeway at 5:30, and still had to go to the bank. The bank is open until 6 so I still had plenty of time. There are many Mexican farmworkers living in the area that I do. Like most of the country, the Treasure Valley is experiencing an increase in our Mexican population. The bank that I use caters to the ever increasing clientele,and many of the migrant workers are paid on Fridays and go to my bank, specifically, to cash their checks. I walked up to the door and there was a large group of Spanish speaking men standing around. One of them opened the door for me and said “Habra la puerta (not senorita, not senora, not any other word remotely resembling woman in Spanish, but) ABUELA.” (Or it was something like that; I am certain of the abuela part, the rest, well my Spanish is not so good.)The crowd of Spanish speakers burst out at the man’s joke. It was funny to call the white girl a grandmother. “Fuck you!” I wanted to yell in the man’s face, and add a kick in the crotch for good measure. But I didn’t; I said thank you and walked on by. I have no idea why it made me so mad; must have been that I was cranky from earlier events.

I lined up in the appropriate path, directed of course by the ropes, and waited a good half hour. While I waited one of the male tellers was looking at me admiringly, which was nice; maybe things weren’t that bad. Of course he was the teller that opened up, and I headed up to his station to withdraw forty dollars; I was waiting for a new debit card to come in the mail, and I was out of checks. For some reason, actually I know exactly why, there was a block on my account, making it impossible for me to pull out any money, despite a positive, high balance. The teller didn’t know why the code was on my account or how to remove it. After going through three other tellers, supervisors, maybe even the janitor, someone cleared my account. They didn’t say anything to me except that they were sorry, etc. They hadn’t experienced anything like this before. They did their best.

I however know exactly how the code ended up on my account. On Tuesday, I went to a bank branch near my office. I hadn’t been here in years, certainly not since I had returned from Louisiana. Shit. There was Amy. (Amy is an ex boyfriend’s sister; she never liked me, and has always been at a minimum, unpleasant to me. Things ended very badly between the ex-boyfriend and I.)I almost turned around and walked out the door, but didn’t; I really needed to deposit some money. Anyway, I went to an open teller, and Amy followed immediately behind the teller, and hovered there looking over my documents the entire transaction. She didn’t say anything to me, and I refused to make eye contact with her. I completed my transaction and left. BUT I knew she was up to no good; I am sure she is the one who put some mysterious code on my account, making it incredibly difficult to access my own funds.

Anyway, back to today. Once I was done at the bank, I headed out to my car. I searched and searched for my keys and couldn’t find them. So, I headed past the laughing Spanish speakers back into the bank and the cute teller who flirted with me was about to bring them to me (nice that he was flirty, crappy that I left my keys behind).

I started to head home, but was met with a train. I was trapped in town for a good half hour, while I waited for the train to move on; there are only a few ways out of the town where you don’t have to cross the railroad tracks, so I just waited.

As soon as I walked in the door, carrying all of the same things as I was this morning, save the honey peanut butter toast, Susan immediately handed me pile of towels, telling me to take them upstairs and put them away, and that we needed to leave right now. Not that there was anything urgent for us to do. She had simply come up with a whole list of errands for us to run once I got home. Here is what we did: took dresser, tv, (I managed to smash my thumb between the tv and truck so badly that I am sure it will be black tomorrow),and other horribly heavy goods to the storage place (oh, and it is still raining), dropped off the recycling, stopped for a horrible Mexican dinner (my stomach still hurts), and went on an epic Target shopping trip.

Now I finally am in bed, well my parents’ bed (they are in North Carolina for my cousin’s wedding), because my bed is wet from some leak in the motorhome’s super exterior; I will find the leak tomorrow, because my parents fly in tomorrow night; no more big house sleeping for me! Crazy day, but at least there was some humor in it; I thought so anyway!
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