Slippery

It has been, as they say, one of those days. My awareness that this would be the case began to dawn at about 8:00 this morning, when I started to try to leave for work. My wife looked out the window and commented that it was still raining. Sighing then, I pulled off my boots and began unrolling my waterproof pants – riding a motor-scooter, I’m very much more at the mercy of Frey and his friends. It’s not that I mind the rain – once I’m sealed in my riding gear it doesn’t touch me, and my jacket will dry, hanging on the coat hook at work – but it’s a hassle having to negotiate the layers of plastic and carbon-fibre. Still, this is the life I chose when I transitioned from four to two wheels.

Waterproofs on and done up around my boots, I was now ready to go. Again. I just needed my keys. My search for my keys became gradually more irritated and frantic as I checked all the obvious places, and then moved to the obscure – there was no reason for them to be in the shopping bag my wife had taken out yesterday, but I looked anyway. Twice. When a possibility occurred to me, I resisted it for a couple of minutes, continuing to look under pieces of paper and plates. I even lifted my daughter, but she wasn’t sitting on them. It was with a sense of fatalism that I eventually called my manager, knowing she would already be at work, and asked her to look in my desk-drawer. She found a bunch of house-keys, one scooter key, and one key for a wheel-lock. I had caught a ride with a co-worker yesterday, and forgot about them. Spare keys were dug out, and I eventually got to work, late.

The day did not get easier. The volume of calls I took throughout the morning, the printing of new appointment letters, the running back and forth, felt like being sprayed in the face with a high-pressure hose, and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn my head to get a breath. Just as lunch rolled around, and I was settling in for my first bit of peace, a client arrived who needed to be escorted to the shops for some interview clothes. Clamping a lid on my despair (and ensuring it did not spontaneously mutate into a foaming, homicidal rage) I walked through the fluorescent fun-park that is Marion shopping centre, smiling.

I commented to a friend that my day feels like trying to catch the soap in the shower, and each time my fingers begin to close on it, it slips away in a new direction, ricocheting off walls and falling, falling, falling. At least, he commented, it’s not as bad as dropping the soap in a prison shower. Possibly true. On the other hand, I have been so busy I’ve had trouble staying sitting down, so perhaps the analogy holds.