The Inanimate Object Conspiracy

I am having one of those days. You know the kind where you wake up in the morning and your slippers are subtly moving away from your feet as you myopically try to find them to put them on. Then you end up tripping over the rug on your way to the bathroom because a little bump mysteriously appeared right before you walked over it. As you puncture one of the blisters that holds your birth control pills, the pill shoots out of your hand and does a frantic counterclockwise spiral around the sink headed for the drain. Sleepy reflexes mean you catch it the second before it goes down. Once caught, you spill water down the front of your PJs as you are trying to wash the delinquent pill down. Once in the shower, various items resist being used and are dropped repeatedly. Getting dressed is like wrestling with a limpet-like two year old who has gripped you around the ankles and twists your pant legs into a knot. Next moisturizer drops on your clothing, making a nice stain that cannot be removed in the amount of time needed to finish the morning routine before heading off to work. Spilling the milk and OJ is next on the agenda. As the spoon heads for your mouth, it misses, tipping cereal and milk on your just swabbed off clothes (or new clothes if you changed after the moisturizer incident). Getting your hair caught in the back of the hairdryer is an especially delightful high point of the morning, not to mention if you have longer hair and it gets tangle-wrapped in the round brush (you know, the one where all the bristles go all the way around). Applying mascara is a nightmare in of itself and it ends up on your eyelids and cheeks as well as causing your eyelashes to clump together in an attempt to resurrect the Tammy Faye Baker look. Finally, you think you can get out of the door safely and make your way to work. Not so… your purse/bag strap catches the doorknob effectively pulling you up short. As you disentangle yourself, your other bag slips down your shoulder onto you arm, knocking over the spray paint cans nicely balanced on the ledge (coz you can’t be bothered to transport them down the 8 steps to the basement) and the bug repellent. Your fingers brush against small dust bunnies as you try to put the cans back while shoving the bag back up your arm and over your non-existent shoulder. Once the door has been shut and locked (after dropping your keys in the puddle outside your door), your purse/bag strap catches the screen door latch, again pulling you up short. Swearing your way to the garage, you miss the garbage can because the bag of cat turds and pee clumps falls short thus ensuring you must bend over to pick it up, causing your bag to slip off your shoulder yet again and swipe you in the head. Successfully tossing the “bag o’ turds n’ pee” into the garbage; the door to the passenger side of your car does not open up all the way because the night before you parked in your garage unevenly. Jamming your bag, lunch, purse, and other items into the car onto the passenger seat, your car door doesn’t close all the way and you have to shut it at least 3 or 4 more times before it decides to stay closed. In your car, you start it, back out of the driveway, and before you can get on the main road, the OUTSIDE of your car windows fog up, FOG UP! (Because the inside of your car is colder than it is outside of your car – go figure.) You spend about five minutes with the defrost on super high, swishing windshield washer fluid repeatedly, and then a small unfoggy part appears which allows you to be a “peephole” driver. With the fog finally under control, the rest of the way to work is relatively uneventful, except for potholes that appear out of nowhere and having to stop at every stoplight. Once at work, your bag/purse/lunch refuse to leave the car and try to tangle their straps up with each other to make it next to impossible for you to get any of them over your shoulder. The car door needs to be slammed shut several times before latching to. Hands full, you can’t get the building door open so you use a foot and a hip, knocking bag off shoulder for the umpteenth time. Climbing the stairs, you go thru the door exercise again with the office door, luckily you can just push it. As you drop your stuff on/under/near/around your desk, your phone is ringing. You miss the call, the one you’ve been waiting for, of course. You put your stuff away, organize your desk, fire up the computer, retrieve your phone message (thus beginning the round of phone tag for the day), and begin typing a Microsoft Word document. After about a half hour’s worth of typing, the Blue Screen of Death occurs, “beginning physical dump of memory now”, and you lose all your work because remembering to save every 3 seconds is not easy or viable. Turning off the computer, you lay your head on your hands. It is only 9:00am in the morning. My co-workers suggest I just go home. I think they are worried the fire alarm, building security alarm, door locks, fax machine, printer, copy machine, and their computers will malfunction if I continue to stick around. I am firmly convinced, inanimate objects, despite not having brains or a central nervous system, do have the ability to have feelings, or at the very least have likes and dislikes that translate into bad or good days for a human.