You don't want to hear how bad a day I had, and I don't especially want to tell it. Let me sum it up by saying that it's apparently part of my job to stop, reverse and speed up time. Not all at once, necessarily, but it's my fault whenever anyone makes a mistake, because I can't correct it immediately. It doesn't matter who's to blame, because I'm supposed to fix it. If someone else makes a promise, it's up to me to see that it's kept, without any flimsy excuse like not knowing a promise had been made, or what it was. If the sun doesn't shine and the birds don't sing, I'm a failure.

And on a totally unrelated note, why is that the very things I put off are the ones that catch up with me? But as soon as I take action on something I've been holding off on, I find out it would have been resolved if I'd waited a little longer? Why is that? Is it a natural law, or is it just me?

For the first time in a century, I didn't bother to open the mail Saturday, so when I got a call first thing this morning asking about an insurance form, I had to go to great lengths to uncover information about it, looking through files and making phone calls and begging people to give me something that I needed but didn't have.

Except I did have it, on the corner of my desk, in Saturday's unopened mail. And now what do I do? Admit my mistake and call back all the people I'd talked to earlier about it? Or pretend it didn't arrive until today, and get myself off the hook? Take a wild guess.

We spent days last week, days when I could have been producing real work, dealing with a supplier who claimed he hadn't been paid. When was he going to get paid? What did he have to do to get paid? And I knew we'd paid him. I had his invoice, and it was marked "paid," and how much clearer could it be?

Well, what if in Saturday's mail is the check he said he never got, returned to me because I was using an old address? (And what if he never actually gave me the new address, but I had to find it when the post office returned his 1099 two weeks ago?) What if the check that was returned was postmarked August 30, 2001?

This isn't my favorite kind of coincidence. This isn't serendipity, but the opposite, when I've spent days (days, I tell you) working on tracking down a five-month-old check, only to have it turn up that very same week. Five months late.

Monday. Pfah! I'm supposed to be getting ready for an audit Friday.