1. You recall turning your alarm off. You close your eyes for 1 minute to roll over. You open them 75 minutes later at 8am. Faaaaaaaaaark!
2. You get to the shower to find NO hot water. And only enough cold water to wet a face clothe. While you are grateful for any water, the cold water does seem to have been piped in from the foothills of Iceland mountains.
3. You speed to work only to hit a traffic jam. At 8.45?? You realise you’re in a roadblock. And suddenly you recall receiving a letter about a week ago from a traffic department demanding you pay for going 12km over the William Nicol speed limit. THIS you do not need. Nonetheless you check where you have stashed your cellphone – not on your lap, and you edge through. Luck kicks in for a split second that morning and you are waved through unscathed.
4. You turn on your computer to discover your entire Microsoft Office has crashed. Thanks to your boss’s “doctoring” attempts the evening before. You have no email. No PowerPoint. Your Word only starts in Safe mode. You are too scared to open Excel.
5. The IT company cannot send anyone over until tomorrow afternoon. At the exact hour you will be boarding a plane to darkest Africa. All they can help you with is to install one free programme, which will allow you to work on the ultimate task of boredom and pain – data inputting. You struggle to ooze gratitude over the phone line to them.
6. You have to drive to Pretoria during your lunch hour.
7. You have to drive to Pretoria because you are doing one gigantium favour for your boss. This favour involves obtaining a non-existent emergency visa to darkest Africa, through visiting an embassy and using your most sickly charm & pidgin French on their top dodgy bureaucrat. You feel slightly dirty by the thought.
8. Your tomorrow morning just looks like one hour on top of another of stressing and racing. You must get back to that embassy by 10am. Collect YOUR BOSS’S visa. (Your own visa having been obtained all in good time!). Get back to Jozi to drop off your car. Collect your bags and broken laptop. Get to the airport on time for an early early afternoon flight.
9. You suddenly realise you have forgotten to start the course of malaria tablets you are meant to be on.
10. You must get through the next morning of stress and pace while your nation is on the largest public strike.
11. You have to be at the Oli Tambo airport on a Friday. The most chaotic of weekdays. On the day that its nation is experiencing its largest public strike. With your boss who is a complete airhead when it comes to travel.
And your only joy is that your arrival in darkest Africa will allow you to have the first hot shower in two days!
[Bad Day Update: Data required for inputting is (was!) saved in Outlook. Even that task cannot finally be commenced. Not sure whether this falls into "moment of luck" or "bad day" category.]
9 comments:
oh god champs.
wish i could say it will only get better from here, but...who knows?
Malaria Tablets aren't all they're cracked up to be. You can still catch malaria while taking them. Plus there's all the kak side effects. Take lotsa tabard, use a fan and drink lotsa G&T's ;)
So much good luck to Champers! Hope you have a great time and come back safe hun!
HPF - ha ha, I know! While I am beyond excited about Cote D'Ivoire, I have NO IDEA what to expect from that place. I just know I am loading up on bottled water & immodium before I leave.
Chewwey - These ones are the shit. They are known to be BRILLIANT. They are the newest - Malanil. No side effects AND they do really work.
Which means they cost a pretty penny. Which means, obviously my med aid doesn't pay for them. When I was told this, I fired back the question, "yes, but then will med aid be happy to pay for when I get malaria!". I hate short-sighted people who have power over policy decisions!
No G in that T for me!!! And I am HOPING that these guys will have electricity for a fan!
What a day! It makes me suddenly grateful for a mediocre day at work…
OK, that is bad. Wowza.
now all you need is to drive through a mini taxi war on the way to court :)
hope your day improves and tom is friday, if that helps at all. x
All that free alcohol on the plane and you on the bandwagon...hahah
Life is soo cruel isn't it??
faaaaaaaak is a term I am most familiar with. In fact, it is frequently my favourite first word of the day.
Got a new home...more friendly to the blogplanet...come and have tea!
I've had plenty of bad days. Almost equal to my good days. Not sure if that's a good sign or no, but...
I've had three awful days, work related, and maybe head-related,
and most diffifently migraine related.
First migraines I experienced weren't work at all, I think the earliest ones were when I was in my teens.
But it was only later, when I experienced what felt like the Dark Lord of Mordor tapping his finger-tips inside my brain, tenderly (for a dark lord), but still...
This wave, cold, quick, squirming...
Being the paranoid Jew I am, I took lots of anti-parasite pills, but went to a specialist. Turns out I was just a paranoid jew. No tumour, no tapeworm...
But true awfullness came later, when I experienced the shutting down of all my senses, completely, while a vestige of consciousness remained.
I fought against it. I reawoke. But with this really hectic feeling that if I gave in again, I would... not exist. This with the whole exhaustion thing...made it happen again, and senses went out, vestige of conscious again pulling me out, and it happened a third time, til I was sitting, quivering on my bed, mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, almost hoping to die, cause it was Tuesday tomorrow, and fuck that leaves the rest of the week to deal with...
And I dragged myself downstairs, drank beer meant for the guests, and passed out...
Emotional wreck and work the next day, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open, as they quivered relentlessly the entire day. When to "olddecrepitfool"'s page, cause I respect him as both a gentleman and intellectual (blogger) and he pointed out a friend went through a similar experience many many
(those still following)
many years ago. Migraine. Wow. Found it hard to believe him at first - migraine's seems more like the movie Pi than what I experienced. There was no drill and jack hammer vibe, for example. Or hot Indian whore living next door, so I felt kind of cheated. But my doc confirmed it. Turned out, migraines aren't the most intuitive;y deductive headaches.
Anyway, of all the migraines I have had, there are three categories, mild, which I sneer off, not pleasant, which I deal with with a Noddie Batch the following day, and FUCKING EXTREMELY AWFUL I DIE IF I LOSE ONE MOMENT OF CONCENTRATION!@!
in which case, the next day is what I describe merely, in understated tones, a Hell Day.
Word.
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