Wow, make a sandwich. This turned out a lot longer than I had planned when I began.

Today was just… off. It wasn’t an awful day or anything, and nothing went horribly wrong, nor was I in a bad mood. Everything was just off.

I knew today wouldn’t be amazing because I’ve been unemployed for a little over a month, and it takes about two days for my sleeping schedule to return to my body’s preferred sleeping schedule, which is whenever the fuck I want to. I’d been staying up til sunrise for the past week at least, and there was no way I was turning that around over a weekend. Instead, I tried to go to bed “early” last night (2 in the morning) to get up fresh and full of vigor five hours later. Of course, I don’t get to sleep very easily, and when I do sleep, it’s often not very pleasant, but I still managed to fall asleep in a near record-breaking one hour, around 3AM. This was cut short by Faust, the goddamn cat that came with the girlfriend package, who was busy all night working on his audition material for the World’s Most Fucking Annoying Animal awards. He came in second in 2008, so he’s been practicing extra hard this year. Faust woke me up at just before 6:30 with a little medley of judge favorites, “knock all of Nina’s plants on the carpet and spread the soil around,” “get on the computer desk and swat everything onto the floor,” tried-and-true classic “unroll a roll of toilet paper,” and a special routine he’s been working on called “repeatedly jump up by the liquor so all the bottles and wine glasses clink together.” He’s a shoo-in to finally take the crown from that chimp that ripped that lady’s face off.

I’m a master at sleeping through stuff, but it was just too much this morning, so I finally got up — cursing at the cat like an idiot — and put some water on for coffee. I normally sleep in til the last minute, so I tried to convince myself that it’d be nice to have time for coffee and a bagel before work for a change. Once I got a pot of coffee steeping, I hopped in the shower. Nothing to report here; maybe today wouldn’t be so bad. I got out, poured myself a cup of coffee and went into the bedroom to get dressed. I bought a brand new pair of pants last night, which I had washed but was too lazy to put away, so I was digging through a laundry hamper looking for pants that met the following criteria: Darker than my other pairs of pants. I grabbed the first pair of pants that met these requirements, and hopped into them. “Wow,” I thought. “The dryer really did a number on these.” I had some difficulty squeezing into them, was a little miffed my brand new pants had shrunk, then plopped down at the computer to check email, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, blah blah blah. I of course waited until the last minute to leave, so at about 8:35 I pulled myself away and grabbed my cell and my keys. But I was surprised that my cell only fit halfway in the pocket. “What? I didn’t check the pockets when I tried these on at the store yesterday?” Ugghh. I was so pissed I’d bought a pair of jeans with those stupid, useless, designer pockets. Then I got out in the hallway and noticed the ankles were kinda flared around my Converse. I didn’t remember the pants looking like that when I tried them on yesterday, so, right in the public hallway, I opened the fly to check the tag. “Medium waist” is not a men’s pant size, it occurred to me. Afraid I had accidentally purchased a girl’s pair of pants, I went back into the bathroom to scope my butt. There were silly designer swoosh things on the back pockets, which I recognized. These were Nina’s pants! Ugh. I thought they’d felt a little tight in the… you know, everywhere, and I didn’t quite remember the cut on the hips feeling so… gay, but c’mon. I was running on maybe two hours of sleep. Christ. On the other hand, maybe it’ll make her day tomorrow when she puts her jeans on and they’re a little loose in the waist. That’s what boyfriends are for.

Realizing I’m now behind schedule, I run back into the bedroom to dig again for the other pair of jeans that are darker than my other pairs and hurried down the stairs. Oh, I also couldn’t find my travel mug, which was annoying because my workplace requires a mug with a lid. No lid, no coffee. Just like kindergarten. I was really hoping it was in my car, and was relieved to discover it was. I wasn’t so excited to discover that I had left about half a cup of coffee in there over the weekend, and because of the recent cold snap, it had frozen. So it’s like 8:45, probably about 20° outside, I’m supposed to be at work five miles away in 15 minutes, and I’m smashing a frozen mug against the side of my car waiting for a solid coffee cylinder to slide out so I can put new coffee in it. It finally inches its way out, like a seized coffee piston, and there’s an interesting sludge at the bottom: hyper-concentrated, frozen French press sediment. No time! I dump the coffee out of my mug into the ice-cold travel mug. This, of course, instantly lowered the temperature of my coffee to about room temperature, and the four-day-old sediment at the bottom didn’t add much to the flavor. I speed to work, somehow lucking out and getting a parking spot right in front, which allows me to pop in the front door just seconds before the clock turns to 9:01. I almost look like a responsible employee, but really, only on the wears-jeans-consistent-with-gender standard.

The place I work at has a set number of parking spaces out front available for temp workers. They’re numbered 20-83. That’s the first question I get from the temp service representative: “Where’d you park?” as if I don’t know the rules by now.
“Oh, uh… just out front here.” I say.
“Is it numbered 20 to 83?”
For whatever reason, my brain interpreted this as “Is it numbered 2283?”
I know our parking spaces don’t go that high, so I answered “…what?”
“Did you park in space 20 to 83?”
“Twenty-two… *looks out the door at the parking lot, as if it will provide the answer to me* Twenty-two… what?” (At this point, I think this is some crazy new rule, somehow dealing with numbers higher than the parking lot can accommodate.)
“The number of your parking space. Is it between the numbers of twenty. And eighty-three?” She took care to enunciate every syllable for me.
“Ohhh yeah. …yeah.”

Clearly I’m still more or less asleep at this point. She shakes her head and takes me and another last-minute sign-in to the rest of the group in the break room. She gives her standard orientation speech, which I’ve heard five times now, I think. The coffee is starting to work — I can feel synapses misfiring — but I’m only semi-conscious of it, observing myself third-person through a dreamlike haze. There’s the standard walk around the campus, the discussion of what the company does, the pointing out of lounge and restroom areas, testing the electronic ID badges, etc etc. I’m seated in a new cubicle shortly afterwards, while supervisors run from new hire to new hire getting them logged into and set up on their new computers. While the rest of us wait, they gave us wetnaps with which to wipe off our desks, keyboards, and monitors, as they hadn’t been used for a while. I put my travel mug on the floor next to me while I did so. When I finished, I scooted my chair back to leave my desk, but the chair stuck. Confused, I pushed harder, and there was a tearing noise. I look down, and a piece of carpet had gotten snagged in my chair’s wheel well. When I pushed harder in response, all I had done was dug the wheel into the carpet and torn a huge strip out of the floor. It wasn’t subtle, either; it had gone through the padding, down to bare concrete. A HUGE strip. A manager was watching. I started to apologize and stood to lift my chair up to unsnag it, kicking my coffee over in the process. I think at this point, I just paused and looked at the manager. The manager, impressed, left to tell maintenance that somebody had managed to rip the carpet up with a wheel. I mopped up my coffee, then went to refill my travel mug, which had also stabilized at room temperature.

When I returned, they were ready to give me my login credentials. First, the supervisor told me to try my old password. This did not work. She said, “Okay, then your password is ‘welcome.’” I typed in “welcome.” Nothing. “Oh,” she says, “‘welcome1.’” I type in “welcome1.” Nothing. “…with a capital ‘w.’” she adds. Well, as anybody that’s ever worked on computers on a domain knows, you get three chances. It didn’t matter that she had now given me the password I actually needed to log in, my account would be locked out from login for several minutes unless an administrator reset it. She gave me this look like “Wow, there’s one in every group!” and left to tell somebody in IT that they’d need to reset the idiot’s account because he fat-fingered his password over three times! When she returned, she gave everybody that had successfully logged in (as a result of being told the correct password the first time!!!) further directions. She made sure to announce, “Not you, Bill. We’re still waiting for IT.” to ensure that everybody knew I don’t know how to log into a computer. An IT guy came out of the back and over to my cubicle at this point.
“What’s the problem here?”
“Oh, my account is locked out.” I said.
“The password is ‘welcome1.’ With a capital ‘w.’”
“Right, I know, I got the password wrong and now my account’s locked out.”
“You have to mess up three times before it locks you out.”
“…yeah, I messed up three times.” I then added, as if it vindicated me, “I’ve been here before.”
The IT guy, impressed, went into the back to reset my account.

I was pretty sure I couldn’t look any dumber at this point, but now that I was logged into my computer, the supervisor came over to give me the directions she had given everybody else just a couple minutes earlier. I’d done this all before, and I’m pretty sure she knew that, since we interacted on a daily basis for over three months, but there are also a lot of employees. Maybe she really didn’t remember me. She was explaining everything to me as if I had never seen our software before. At one point, she showed me a nifty little trick — that anybody that looked at the program for 15 seconds could have figured out — that if I clicked this specific arrow icon on the side, it would minimize the tool menu so I had a larger workspace. I’ve worked at this place off and on since last spring. I’m well aware of the “click the arrow” trick, so I went to show her I knew what she was talking about and attempted to click the arrow. I missed somehow, and clicked the icon next to it, which performed another function. “No, not that one, this one.” she said, as she took my mouse from my hand and clicked a minimize arrow for me.

What can you possibly do at this point? I can’t say, “No, I know which one.” because I clearly clicked the wrong one. I thanked her for minimizing my toolbar for me. What? I worked at fucking Yahoo before this whole temp thing! Where did I work before that? In networking! I designed and implemented networks for businesses! That IT guy that went in the back and reset my account on the domain? I’m that guy! I KNOW HOW TO USE A COMPUTER! I CAN BUILD THEM! I CONNECT THEM TOGETHER! I CAN BREAK INTO THEM! It didn’t really matter today. All that mattered was today I was the guy that didn’t understand the question about where I parked, tore the strip out of the carpet, spilled my entire mug of coffee on the floor, locked myself out of my login, and, when instructed on how to click a button, clicked the button next to it. And almost came to work in his girlfriend’s pants. I’ve never been so thankful in my life that I was not wearing women’s pants.

Finally, after a quick introduction to minimizing toolbars, we were taken to a training room where we’d learn other useful basic computer skills. There’d been issues with the network all day, which they’d warned us about when we arrived, but it was also preventing any actual training from happening. As a result, we watched this flash video on an introduction to databases… twice. After the second time, the instructor told us that it’d be a couple minutes until we had access to the server we needed, so if anybody needed coffee or a bathroom break to take it then. I was too wrapped up in my doodles at the time and didn’t take advantage. But sure enough, as soon as we actually got to the actual training part of training, I had to go. Bad. Like emergency level, if-I-don’t-go-unload-this-coffee-I-will-pee-my-pants sort of “bad.” So I just got up and left. It didn’t take me long — the bathroom is just around the corner — but I forgot that it locks behind you. So of course, in one last ditch effort to appear like the biggest fucking idiot they could possibly hire, I had to knock and interrupt training to get back in. I’m sure everybody was thinking, “…really?” I thought about justifying it with, “I’ve been here before.” but resisted. I still felt slightly triumphant as I wasn’t wearing my girlfriend’s clothing.

That was about it; the rest of my day went smoothly, since the systems were down for most of it and I had exhausted all scenarios in which I could possibly have embarrassed myself (there was an optional meeting followed by a holiday luncheon, which I avoided, just to be safe). I was paid mostly just to drink coffee and doodle, which I’ll include here. The doodles, not the coffee.