01 14 00

argh

This has been the most screwed up 24 hours I've had in a while.

She hesitates, afraid of jinxing herself and making things worse.

It started yesterday. At about 4:30pm, when I usually run the drivers' schedules for the next day, the computers started fritzing. We were getting an error message whenever we tried to process the files. So we called Tech Support.

I spent the next three hours on the phone, watching him as he dialed in to look at the problem. He couldn't figure it out. I finally managed to print the schedules - one at a time - so that we could have something for Friday.

Of course, while I was on the phone, all hell broke loose. I was by myself in the office, and had drivers needing things and people calling me and passengers getting lost and all sorts of other things generally Going Wrong. I still had to collate the manifests, print out the dispatch sheet for Friday, put away the vehicles, lock up the garage...

Oh, wait. Someone left a bus outside all day. It's been damn cold, so of course the bus wouldn't start. I tried the glow plug trick (flick the ignition repeatedly so that the glow plugs come on more than once before trying to start this bus), but that didn't work. So I sprayed ether in the air intake. (Trust me, it was the next logical step to take for starting a cold diesel. I didn't do anything wrong.) Fooom! Smoke poured out of the engine. Eeek! I called the Maintenance Manger, and he told me to just leave the bus outside. He'd look at it in the morning.

No problem. I locked it up and finished the night.

I was feeling sort of funky, but I wasn't tired at all. I went to bed around 2am (just a little later than normal for me. Usually I wake up around 10 or 11am, since I work second shift.) But my sinuses were killing me. It felt like the roots of all the teeth in my upper jaw were throbbing. I tossed and turned and moaned and groaned, trying to fall asleep. No luck.

Finally, around 4am, I blearily stumbled into the bathroom and took some medication I found in the medicine cabinet. It had a sleep aid in it, and I fell asleep sometime around 4:30am.

My alarm clock is always set to 9am. I don't know if it never went off, or if I snoozed it. But when I opened my eyes, I looked at the clock and blinked. The time couldn't be right.

The clock read 1:06pm.

I was supposed to be at work at 1:00pm.

Sit up. Emit expletive. Roll over, grab phone. Emit expletive. Call work. "Hi, it's me. I'll be there in about 15 minutes."

It brought back a lot of memories of mornings when I worked a 8-5 job; waking up and going from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds.

Bathroom: Pee. Wash hands. Wash face Put in contacts.

Bedroom: Fling on underwear, jeans, bra, socks. Look for shirt. Can't find shirt. Dig ratty old t-shirt out of dresser. Throw baja over t-shirt.

Living room: Brush hair. Put hair in ponytail. Put on shoes while hopping into the kitchen.

Kitchen: Feed cat. Yell at cat for not waking me up like she usually does. Cat doesn't care. Grab can of pop. Hop back into living room while tying shoes.

Living room: Finish tying shoes. Find keys. Put on jacket. Run out door.

I rolled into work at about 1:25pm. (Not bad, eh?) I thought the day would be smooth after that.

Heh. The manifests still wouldn't run. But this time I couldn't even do it one at a time. I called tech support again. I got the weekend manifests printed, and most of Monday's.

While all this was happening, we had a bus run out of fuel, a driver almost faint while running his route, and any number of piddly little annoying things go wrong.

It for days like this that they invented alcohol. It's Friday. I'm going to the City with a friend to look at computers for her tomorrow morning (yes, I WILL have to wake up before 1pm!) I have two days to recover.

Unless something goes wrong tomorrow. (Ick.) All right, I've complained enough. To make it up to ya the sidebar will be happy!

grin

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