Have you ever had one of those days when everything goes wrong from the moment you wake up? You are late for a meeting because your alarm didn’t go off – then you spill coffee on your lap while driving – and when you finally get to work someone has taken your reserved parking spot – kind of day? If you have, then you had what I call a pretty decent day. After reading this post you will understand why. And next time you think you’re having a bad day, come pay a quick visit and read this post again. It should make you feel better right away. You will remember that you could be having a day like the one I had the other day. The day I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Literally.
This is how it all started: my husband got up early to go to a staff meeting and I rolled over to his side of the bed at some point between 6:00 and 7:00 AM. I had been having some trouble sleeping all week because of a bruised – possibly fractured – tailbone from snowboarding the weekend before and it was hard to find just the right position to sleep in, so I must have wandered over to his side of the bed (which pretty much never happens). When I opened my eyes and saw the dog bed on the floor, confusion took over. “Holy crap, I’m in Freaky Friday!” I slowly turned my head to my side of the bed to see if my body was there……nothing but the white comforter. “OK, let me just make sure. Where is the mirror?” My panic subsided when I got up and saw my own face and upper body in the mirror above the dresser. “Good…”. To my relief, I was still me and it was actually Friday – TGIF! What I didn’t know at that moment was that I was about to have my own Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad day. It was going to be Murphy’s Law at its finest.
After confirming that I was still in my own body and laughing at myself for thinking I could actually switch bodies with someone, I proceeded to get dressed and get my day started. I walked by my daughter’s bedroom on my way downstairs and noticed she was in bed, fully dressed, with a blanket covering her face. It was not an uncommon occurrence – this lying in bed in her school clothes, pouting because she is still tired happens at least once a week. Eleven hours of sleep is clearly not enough on a week night, but come Saturday morning, she is wide awake at 7:00 AM, sometimes earlier, ready to play and watch Jack Hannah (have I mentioned I love my daughter more than anything?). So after a quick one-sided conversation, we managed to get down to the kitchen. She asked for waffles, the frozen kind, and a glass of milk. Half way through the waffles, she knocked the full glass of milk all over the counter and didn’t say anything. I didn’t notice because I was too busy filling up her water bottle and getting my to-go coffee ready, which I managed to do successfully without any spillage. I turned around, grabbed my purse, and as I walked past her, I realized my phone was still on the charger. So I quickly put my purse down and reached for my phone. Splash! Yep, it was milk. My fabulous purse was sitting in a giant puddle of milk, which had now made its way down the side of the cabinet and onto the wood floor. I took a deep breath. No need to get upset, I thought to myself. There is no apparent damage to the purse and it is Friday after all. Let’s clean this mess up and head to school.
This was one of the few parts of the day without any incidents. I dropped my little girl off and made my way back home just in time for my first conference call of the day, which was long and boring (I work from home by the way). On my way upstairs from the garage, I had spilled coffee on my white pants, but even then I maintained my composure. In between the first and second calls, I decided to do some laundry. I remembered I had a whole bunch of whites to wash, mostly my kid’s clothes, and figured I’d get it done before the weekend. And I could throw the white pants I was wearing in there too. I also thought it’d be a good idea to use some bleach – make those whites whiter! As I poured the bleach into its dedicated compartment, some of it dripped on my brand new laundry mat. A mat I had wanted to by for months, and finally did when it went on sale. A mat that actually made me smile for a few seconds when I entered the laundry room because it was so cute. I quickly got a wet towel, got down on my knees and started fearlessly scrubbing the bleach from the mat, while at the same time experiencing an excruciating pain coming from my tailbone area. I continued scrubbing nonetheless, hoping I could save the mat, but deep inside I knew there was no way it would ever look the same again. It would now have a big, discolored spot on it, which I made worse by smearing the bleach everywhere as I scrubbed, and it would no longer make me smile every time I saw it. Instead, it would remind me of my daughter’s white leggings, which were so dirty I felt the need for bleach. Dang it! Why does she have to get so dirty at school? (I love my daughter!) Why did I decide to do laundry on a Friday? Sunday is laundry day – Sunday! I finally stood up, almost passed out from the shooting pain that got suddenly worse, and after I stopped seeing stars, I walked back to my desk, almost in tears. As I passed by the glass front door, I waved to the UPS man who had just dropped off a couple of boxes. He waived back awkwardly and turned around so fast I thought he was going to fall over. Then I realized I didn’t have any pants on.
I don’t even remember what that second conference call was about. I didn’t have to be on it anyway – it was “optional”. But there I was anyway, with a heating pad under my butt, pretending to listen when I was actually Googling the laundry mat. Maybe I could just buy a new one…but of course it wasn’t on sale anymore. As soon as the call was over, I made my way back into the laundry room to put the clothes in the dryer. I cautiously opened the door with one eye closed and the other one open to check on the state of the mat. “What?!” I opened the other eye and confirmed that the mat was actually intact! It was a Freaky Friday miracle! The bleach did nothing to the mat! Nothing! Great, let me put these whites in the dryer and get on my third conference call of the day. And this time I will really pay att…..hmmmm, if the bleach didn’t do anything to the mat, then it probably didn’t do anything to the clothes either. Yep, the leggings are still stained. And so is this t-shirt. What kind of bleach is this?! It had one job to do, ONE: make my whites whiter! Unbelievable. That roller coaster of emotions made me a little dizzy, but I carefully walked back to the office for yet another call.
I am going to save you some time and give a quick summary of how the afternoon went. I got on that third conference call and about 9 minutes into it, heard a weird noise coming from the living room. I walked over just in time to watch my dog throw up on the tracks of the sliding doors. Not the floor, not the rug, she threw up on the hardest place to clean in the whole house! If you have sliding doors, you know what I mean. So after 20 minutes of attempting to clean everything, I finally gave up and decided to wait until my husband got home. My tailbone was on fire and I think I even blacked out for a few seconds while cleaning. Then I suddenly remembered: “I was in the middle of a call 20 minutes ago”. By the time I limped back to my desk, the call was over and I had a new email in my inbox with an action item and my name next to it. Probably punishment for not answering when someone called my name. Sorry, folks, I was cleaning dog puke!
I still had two more conference calls that afternoon, but decided to call it a day. I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate anyways between the pain and the thought of dog puke drying out under my sliding door. I just needed to get that heating pad under my butt again and rest. Maybe a quick nap until my husband and daughter get home. As I lied uncomfortably on the couch, sure enough my eyes started to get heavy. I was about to fall asleep when I heard a chirping sound – the chirping sound. The sound that everyone fears: the smoke detector. At that point I concluded that it was time to self-medicate. By the time my husband and daughter got home, I was on my second glass of wine and getting ready to pop a couple of pain pills. An hour and another half a bottle of wine later, I kissed them goodnight and off to bed I went, hoping and wishing that Saturday would be a better day. Not great, not good, just please – pretty please – better than today. But I couldn’t just leave it to chance. On my way up, I grabbed a couple of those foam pool noodles to put under the sheets, right in the middle of the bed, separating my territory from my husband’s. “Tomorrow I am going to wake up on the right side of the bed!”
What will you do if one morning you wake up and realize you are on the wrong side of the bed?
Real, simple, funny 