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The Boss started faxing me pages of requests and instructions before I was even out of bed this morning. Then at 8:00 am exactly, the phone rang. I can’t seem to educate people not to call me that early and expect more than grunts and moans. I moaned the name of the company into the telephone receiver and then listened while the Boss asked yet another question that could have waited until I was awake.
I grunted the answer and went back to bed, but when the phone rang again five minutes later, I just got up and pretended to be alert. Sometimes pretending is all it takes. It’s like those fake smiles that turn into real ones. It never worked for me, but that’s probably just because I’m so bad at it. People look at my fake smile and ask me what’s wrong.
That’s how my day started, and that’s how it went, all day long. Or at least, the start affected everything that happened for the rest of the day. I was testy, to say the least. I took it out on the other drivers as I made my way to the bank, and I wasn’t particularly pleasant to the woman in front of me in the supermarket checkout line.
To be honest, I’m always a little irritated with people who want to divide their items into two piles and pay for them separately, and then remember something else at the last minute. The way I punish them is by not making eye contact when they try to look back at me sheepishly. That’ll teach ’em, eh? You want to piss me off? I won’t even let you pretend to apologize! So there.
As usual when I get started too early, I hit a wall in the middle of the afternoon and had to stop for a while. I’m sure if the Boss knew that his badgering me in the wee hours kept me from working during the most productive part of the day, he’d... he’d... Oh, I don’t know what he’d do. Probably the same thing he always does, whatever he feels like at the time and damn the consequences. He thinks he can bend reality to fit his peculiar view of the world, but it’s dark in there and nobody really wants to join him. | 
