After rhapsodizing about life in general yesterday, it's only natural that today was a little less divine and a little more like, well, Saturday. Not every Saturday, just this last one that had me reeling.

At least today it wasn't one big monster stomping on my head. It was more like a thousand gnats buzzing around me. It's just as big an annoyance but a lot harder to swat away.

As usual, some of the damage was inflicted on me and some of it I did to myself. The insurance agency didn't need to pick today to tell me that our bonding company was going out of the bonding business, and if we ever wanted to get bonded again we needed to find a way to impress another bonding company.

Why the agency can't just sell us to a new company based on our past performance I'm not sure. We've been in business for almost thirty years and never cost a bonding company a penny in uncompleted or defaulted contracts. We always do what we say we're going to do, but the insurance industry doesn't care about that. They want to see numbers, and so we have to generate a whole new set of numbers, three-quarters of the way through the year. I didn't care for having this dumped on me on a Monday.

My trip to Office Depot was poorly thought out, but it was all on me. I really should have made a list. That way I would have come home with the right kind of printer cartridges, and I wouldn't have to make another trip to exchange them. I really thought I could remember what kind the new printer takes. Guess not.

A list would have kept me from loading up on envelopes, which I already had plenty of, instead of copy paper, which I'm almost out of. I just got it backwards, is all. I knew I needed one or the other, and I was pretty sure I'd remembered which was which. As soon as I loaded it all in the trunk, I had this flash of doubt run through me. Vertically. I knew I either had it all right or all wrong. I was right; it was all wrong.

But I don't know where to sling the blame for the way I squandered the best two hours in the middle of my afternoon. I was looking for a file I needed on a new project. I went through every file box and cabinet in the whole place, several times. I sorted papers and looked through every folder I could find. Nothing.

Then I called the Boss and asked him about it, and he said he'd probably forgotten to send me the paperwork for that job, so I wouldn't have had anything to start a file with. In fact, he'd signed and returned the contract without even making a copy, so there are no papers to be copied and filed. We have to throw ourselves on the mercy of another contractor, asking him if he wouldn't please help bail us out of this swamp of our own making by sending us the copies we should have made for ourselves.

So, is it my fault for wasting all that time looking for something I should have remembered I didn't have? Or can I blame someone else for not following procedure and giving me the copies I need? Yeah, that's what I thought.