Murphy's Law

Since my husband and I had yesterday off (long holiday weekends are what I live for), we'd originally planned to go fishing, but we thought it was going to be kind of chilly so we decided to run some errands instead. I returned a couple of books I'd bought over the weekend at Borders (one I'd already read and forgotten and the other was part of a series and I hadn't read the previous book), and my husband decided that he wanted to see if B&N carried a book he was looking for, so we went across the street. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, I could tell that something was wrong. The transmission wouldn't stay in gear - it was stuck in neutral. My husband spent the next few minutes frantically placing calls to our mechanic and the shop's towing company, and trying to track down anyone we knew who could drop him back at the house to pick up his truck. My sister-in-law was able to help before she went into work, thank goodness. I rode to the shop with the tow truck, and it took a few minutes for the mechanic to temporarily fix the transmission linkage that had snapped. He ordered the parts, and offered to keep the car overnight to do the full repair instead of trying to schedule a time later in the week (we had just had the car there on Saturday for an oil change and to repair an a/c vent). We expect the repair to cost at least $300. Money we really don't have since my husband's part-time radio job was put on hold by management. We even cancelled our vacation this summer because we don't know how our finances will fare through this year, and we've started to cut back on a lot of non-essentials. Not to mention that our couch broke again last night - we'd already fixed it once, so we're probably going to have to bite the bullet and just get a new couch. Which, of course, we don't have the money for right now.

So today, as I'd mentioned last week, I am babysitting an office other than my own. How this agreement transpired, I'm still not entirely sure, but I'm even less happy about it today than I was when my boss told me about it last week. When I got here, I forgot that the new restaurant that just opened last week in our cafeteria already decided to change their hours so that they aren't open until 10:00 am. I really wanted coffee first thing, and that annoyed me. Then, I walked over to the office I was assigend to cover, right at 8:00 am on the dot, and the door was locked. The department is considered "secure", meaning that the doors have to be unlokced by card key access. I couldn't get in the building until one of the regular staff members opened up the building. Which, you'd think, they'd be timely about considering someone was taking time away from their work to be here to provide office support. So I walked over to my building, on a mission to find coffee, where I saw that the old boss's assistant wasn't at her post, which meant that there would be no coffee there, and met up with my boss at the elevator. She told me to ignore the email she'd just sent about wanting me to shepherd the new member of the budgets team around on her first day, because she *forgot* that she'd agreed to have me work in the other department today. I went up to the CEO's suite in my continued search for coffee, only to discover a full pot that had been left to sit the whole extended weekend. I was now 0 for 3 on the caffeine front, so I went over to my office to check my email, then at about ten after I wandered back downstairs to see if the doors were unlocked at the CCC. Nope. So I decided that I needed to heed the commands of my stomach, and opted for junk food from the vending machines in the break area (I wonder why I have a hard time losing weight :eyeroll:). When I walked back over and tried the door again, it was a quarter after, and it was still locked. I had started to walk away when the new supervisor opened the door for me. I'm pretty sure she saw me wave my arms in frustration a second before in the universal sign for "WTF is the deal here, people?!". Good. I was in a pretty sour mood by this point, and I was only fifteen minutes into my day. I'm just here so that someone is fielding phone calls, so the phone has been quiet (except for a call from the regular receptionist, and a personal call for the regular receptionist), and I'm watching the inaugural festivities that the company is streaming on the network from the CNN broadcast (holy crap - look at the teeming masses just packed into the capitol) while I play catch-up on a huge accounts receivable database. My life is so action packed and exciting, I know...

I don't have access to my email today, because I'm logged into another workstation down here, so I just checked my messages during my "break". Boy am I sorry I bothered. Talk about cluster - let me lay the scene for you: two months ago, during a recruitment drive, our PR and Marketing department offered iPods as incentives. I was appointed the task of purchasing a silver shuffle for the raffle winner, and Marketing would ship it to the winner. Well, at the time I was in the middle of a huge project with strict deadlines, not to mention the lectures my current boss gave me every time I took on a task that should have been given to another, less busy, member of the staff, so I forwarded the request from Marketing to my supervisor explaining that I needed that job to be assigned to someone else who didn't have giant financial project deadlines looming. I never got a response back, but I got busy and pretty much forgot about it after that. Fast forward to late last week: I got a voicemail from someone in Marketing following up on the status of the raffle prize. I found out today, after receiving three more calls and one email about it, that the boss never reassigned that project (he probably didn't even open the email I sent) and the shuffle was never ordered. Just now the executive assistant grilled me on what needed to be done, saying that Marketing said that I confirmed I had ordered the item. This is patently false - they would have had the shuffle to mail to the raffle winner well before now if I'd ordered it. I'm going to be pretty pissed if this relatively trivial little thing becomes a giant issue. Which, knowing Marketing, it will.