Life's Little Annoyances

A few years ago, I started thinking about the day-to-day little things that happen that annoy the heck out of us. The copy machine runs out of toner when you're on the last sheet. The guy in front of you cuts you off at the red light. You get a rock in your shoe.  The little things.  I also thought a little bit about how much time in your day is spent dealing with those little things and how most of the time, we don't even notice.

Today was a day where it kind of caught up with me. I got to work and my phone was ringing. I grabbed it and ended up listening to one of my favorite clients yell at me for about a half hour, and literally couldn't get a word in edgewise. So after I hung up the phone, I set up about trying to fix the problem I hadn't heard about before then. With every solution I came up with, someone threw down a roadblock. In the midst of this, the phone is ringing off the hook, emails are flying in by the dozen and people are IM'ing me every 20 seconds.

Meanwhile, I get up to go to the bathroom and go to wash my hands and someone left a huge mess on the sink and I end up drenching my shirt. Then I go to make a copy and we're out of paper. Then my manager calls me in his office and says that my client called him and he proceeds to start yelling at me. Then I spill coffee on my shirt. Then the fax machine jams while I'm trying to fax 27 pages. And then the client calls back and apologizes for yelling at me, and then proceeds to start yelling at me again. I take my lunch break and put my Lean Cuisine in the microwave for the time the box tells me to and it's still partially frozen. I go back to my desk and my pen runs out of ink. Then I'm in the middle of a project and try to save my Excel spreadsheet and my computer crashes and loses all my work. Then my boyfriend calls and says the landscaper we hired still hasn't shown up and he's three hours late. So I call him, he answers, and at the end of the conversation, he calls me a f-ing bitch and slams down the phone.

I'm not kidding about any of these things. It's not exaggeration or an April Fool's joke.  This is literally what my day was like. After the conversation with the landscaper, I packed up all my stuff and said to my boss "I have to leave. I literally can not stay in this building one second longer." and I left. And then I took out my aggressions on some weeds in our front yard since I guess the landscaper no longer wanted to do the job.