A quiet rant

Have you ever had "one of those days"? Today was one for me. I knew when I woke up that it would be a trying day at best. I didn't sleep well because I'm concerned about a personal health issue that recently cropped up from nowhere.

My initial perceptions on the state of the day were confirmed when I showed up at work to find no one there. Why is that a problem? Because I'm a temporary employee brought in to take over for the office manager while she's out on maternity leave. The thing is, we were supposed to have at least 2-4 weeks of training before she left. But her son decided not to comply with my most heartfelt wishes that he delay his arrival until the latest possible moment. In fact, the little angel decided to arrive a month early, and after only 3 DAYS of training! There is a wonderful part-timer who will be working with me in this small two-person office, but as my luck would have it, she was off today and tomorrow.

So there I sat alone all day, juggling two phone lines and a fax machine, all of which felt compelled to ring constantly, and also handling numerous new staffing requests that needed to be scheduled and assigned, resolving six pages of telephone messages and notes, working on a new project and more. My "things to do first thing in the morning list" already has 12 items on it!

And to make matters worse, in my haste to try to use the bathroom between phone calls, I somehow managed to drop my cell phone into the toilet. Needless to say, the phone is history, along with the 50+ telephone numbers that were stored in the phone and no where else. It was then that I realized that I didn't even know my mother's or my guy's phone numbers by heart. How sad is that? A new phone, minus my much-needed telephone directory, should arrive tomorrow. The good news is that I had insurance against the loss. The bad news is that it cost me $70 to replace a phone that I paid half that much for only 6 months ago.

Today I also confirmed that a purchase I ordered 6 weeks ago was "delivered" last week, only I never received it and no one has any idea where it is. I got a bill from my dentist's office saying that my former dental insurer denied coverage on my last dental visit before I got laid off because I wasn't covered at that time, when in fact I was. My appointment with an agent to discuss my unemployment claim has been scheduled for a time that I can't attend because I'm working now, meaning that I may not receive benefits for the time that I wasn't working (and I still don't have a full-time job). And, because my new prescription discount card won't be effective until April 1st, I have $180 worth of meds waiting for me at the pharmacy that I'll have to pay for out of pocket tomorrow. I'm sure there's more, but I can't remember right now and who cares anyway?

I'm too emotionally exhausted to even think eating dinner, much less fixing it, but I think I can muster enough energy to pour myself a very large glass of wine. Then I'll snuggle up on my couch and watch back-to-back episodes of In Treatment to remind myself that as bad as things seemed today, they could have been much worse. Hope your day was better!