One of those days?

It’s just turned 09:30.

I’m in work.

It’s one of those days that would have been best served by pulling up the duvet cover and staying put. You know the type I mean. The type of day I’ve alluded to here before, whereby you are just a little out of sync with the world around you. Everything seems a bit ……..separated from you, and hence everything you touch seems to become alien and cumbersome.

Event 1:

In the shower this morning I opened the shower gel bottle. Unknown to me it had been squeezed until virtually no air was left in it. It was upside down and in my pre-shower semi conscious state I opened it with the cap facing downwards. Yep, as the cap was released the bottle breathed in deeply whilst simultaneously expelling the remaining gel on the shower cubicle floor. I had to leave the shower, still soaking but un-soaped in order to find a contingency bottle. This left the bathroom floor soaking wet. The shower drain is slightly blocked so that on my return the bottom of the cubicle was now looking like a communal bubble bath for the local leprechaun community. That should have served as the first warning that things weren’t quite right.

Event 2:

Breakfast, relatively simple you might think. Pick up muesli box and pour into bowl. Top off with some milk and grapes and eat. Simple - unless you’re me of course. Pick up muesli box, pour into bowl. Try to combine with putting kettle on, drop box, spill muesli over floor. Bollocks, some early morning clearing up to do. Muesli being odd stuff of course spreads into areas that defy the laws of physics and so 5 minutes is lost on picking out bits of oatmeal from under the toaster and other areas seemingly nowhere near the muesli box geographically.

Event 3:

Get dressed. All my shirts are ironed and ready to wear. Hanging neatly on one of those space saver hangers that Betterware sell. But today is Friday, things aren’t going well thus far so why would this early morning challenge be any different? I try on a black Nike polo shirt and decide that as it’s a meeting free Friday I’ll wear jeans. I put the jeans on and then think it doesn’t look quite right. I’ve lost around 21lbs in the last month due to my new “lifestyle choice” as branded by GMD. Clothes that hugged my former fuller figure now look like they’ve been stolen from the Clothes Bank. If I was a woman that might make me proud, but I’m a bloke and that means discarding some favourite bits of old clobber. Anyway I resort to my work trousers, but decide they don’t look right with the shirt. I look like Charlie fucking Chaplin such is the way my clothes hang. This then leads to that terrible affliction……….Clobber Dysfunction Syndrome. The point where you end up in a spiral of not being able to decide what to wear, where nothing looks right and that without Trinny and Susannah you’ve no hope of looking anywhere near sartorially elegant for work that day. Most women I know suffer this 24 * 7, but occasionally on mornings such as this it’s the dressing equivalent of a flame-out uncontrollable tailspin on a jet plane. The only result is a crash landing of clothing styles and the hope that no-one at work takes any notice of you. I’m so anonymous these days within The Company that it’s not really an issue, but I bet today is the day someone actually notices me. And not for losing weight. In the end, it’s a bright turquoise Ben Sherman with black trousers and …..Good god man!…brown shoes?

Event 4:

The 15 minutes or so it took to get dressed have thrown the morning routine out of kilter by several degrees. CarShareMan is knocking on the door and I’m still putting my strides on. Teenager revels in telling me that it looks like I’m late. Still CarShareMan has stitched me up enough this week with his 19:00 finish times so fuck him. But trouble is I can’t think like that, so I rush down, open the door, acknowledge his arrival and try to get my shit together. I pick up my lunch, my heavy Chelsea coat, my new Chelsea scarf and stride to the car whilst collecting the green rubbish bin for the dustmen to empty. I dump the bin on the road and dump my stuff in the car. I get a static shock off of CarShareMan’s A-Class. A real belt as well. This happens every day he drives, both in the morning and at night. It’s like the car is saying Hello in its own vindictive spiteful “I’ll always zap you Jack” way. I curse, climb in and after the obligatory cursory chat I shut my eyes. A good thing about sharing is the opportunity to get a bit of extra kip each way, and thus avoid trying to make conversation. We know each other well enough to be comfortable with falling asleep whilst the other drives. 10 minutes later I wake with a start…something’s wrong. A few seconds of eye-rubbing and I realise what it is. My laptop is still on the futon in the study. In my rush the black laptop bag had cunningly disguised itself against the rustic light brown and beige covering of the futon cushion. CarShareMan was early today and I have to explain that we need to turn back as without that I cannot do any work today. Its meeting free you see, plus no-one has desktop PC’s at work so it s not like you can bunk down on an empty desk and run your stuff from here. Things just don’t improve. He smiles understandingly, but I know that underneath he is masking his annoyance. I know this because I would do exactly the same.

Event 5:

Arrive at work, having gone back to sleep in order to avoid the sideways glances of sub-surface irritation from CarShareMan. A chance to sit down and not worry about any meetings. I boot up and log-on as normal. The first thing that pops up is am meeting reminder! For a meeting that started at 08:00, and one that I had agreed to attend late last evening just before leaving work. I normally sync my phone up to my laptop whenever I accept this stuff as my phone is my main memory annexe, along with my Blackberry. Without these I wouldn’t know where to go or what my days was made up of. Because we’re late due to my laptop mishap, I gather my bits and wander to the meeting – it’s 08:45. I enter the hushed room and my boss, The School Teacher says “OK, thanks everyone, we’ve done well to finish early….Oh Hi Jack….we’ve ……aaaah….hummmm…..errrrrrr….”

“......Just finished?” I say in order to end his sentence closing torture.

“Aaaaah…….errrrrrrr….yes”

And so, red faced I trudge out picking up a “handout” from the PA. A quick coffee with The School Teacher for a debrief on what I missed and I’m back at the desk. I think he understood that for me this was one of those days.

I now sit here writing this in a state of trepidation, carefully trying to plan out everything I do in order to avoid any more mishaps. Perhaps the best thing would be to sit here by my desk all day. But knowing my luck a ceiling tile will fall on me. The picture sums up how I feel perfectly.

Tonight’s Guinness is my only hope of re-synchronising myself with normal life. I may need a big dose.

Later, ClumsyJack