Last weekend we were gathered ’round our new coffee table. By “we” I mean Lister, Whimsy, HB, Gin, Nik, myself and Eggman. By “new coffee table” I mean a cast-off from HB and Gin’s spare-room-turned-exercise-room that I nicked while helping HB muscle an oversized TV into their bedroom. Our motivation for being around a coffee table was to play Nik’s new party game, Loaded Questions, which involved asking pseudo-personal questions, secretly writing down the answers, reading them aloud at random and trying to get the question-asker to guess who answered what.

One of the questions was to name the most over-used cliché which caused a bit of consternation to our group since we’re all smart enough to know what a cliché is but some of us had trouble coming up with one. Of the six answers given I think only two were what would readily be identified as clichés in the traditional sense of played-out platitudes. Since then I’ve been taking a more marked notice of instances where clichés get thrown around. Today, for example, I was tempted to write at the top of this post, “When it rains, it pours” An obvious cliché, true, but the reason these sayings get repeated to the point of reducing them to triteness is that there must be a nugget of truth buried within. Or at least a common enough situation to warrant their application.

This week started off in fairly normal fashion. I had visited Bosslady over the weekend to pick up some assignments which would keep me busy and occupied throughout the week with contract work. As I came in to my day job I was thinking there would probably be plenty to do there as well, considering the fact that we were getting ready to power down the server room in less than ten days to do some serious clean-up of systems and wiring that had gotten out of hand through new hardware installations, maintenance work on the room, an upgrade to Active Directory, etc. But busy is okay. Busy is not bored, after all.

I should have known things were headed in a grim direction when Nik called after visiting her Pain Management specialist. She’s been having trouble with her back for a couple of months and they had gotten to the point where she’d gone for an MRI to see what might be the cause. It turns out she has a herniated disc in her lower spine, which is a not exactly a comfortable condition and is, apparently, an unusual condition for someone Nik’s age. The immediate impact is that she was forced to resign from her job at the grocery store because the list of limitations her doctor placed on her was unacceptable for the management. This, in turn, has had a pretty profoundly negative impact on Nik’s mental state because, frankly, she really liked her job.

It’s a sort of tricky situation to navigate as a husband because, just as frankly, I thought her job was basically pants from various perspectives. It required odd hours, limited income, a commute, schedule interference and—of course—manual labor. But regardless of the negatives from my perspective, she really did like working there and that’s something that one can’t readily dismiss. It’s not that I have trouble concealing some secret glee or anything, more that she’s pretty shaken up and while I can be supportive, I can’t really muster up a load of sympathy because my head doesn’t compute the idea that this is a particularly negative development. From where I sit it just sort of seems like, “Well, there you go: It’s not a good job for you to have.” Then she sits there, morose and unhappy and I’m left feeling (deservedly) like a heel because I don’t comprehend.

While this is going on, I woke up Tuesday morning feeling very out of sorts. My body had that deep-bone exhaustion that portends some sort of influenza, and it was only my even deeper loathing of calling in sick that forced me through the motions of my morning ritual. When I arrived at work my primary task was getting a replacement development server set up, and by 11:00 it was becoming rather obvious that it was going very poorly. A splitting headache had decided to join the party and frustrated that I couldn’t get any consequential work accomplished, not to mention that progress was being actively stunted by my growing incapacity for rational, pain-free thought, I made a command decision to go home for lunch and simply not return.

I secretly hoped that by fudging a sick day with a half day I might manage to weasel out of a full-blown illness. Instead I woke up Wednesday feeling even worse than before and at Nik’s urging, called in sick for a full day of recuperation-based moping. The one thing I must note about being sick in modern times is that while only a decade ago the temporarily impaired were forced to suffer through the drudgery of daytime TV, there is no shortage of quality entertainment options available to modern man, when you take into consideration the expansion of cable programming, TiVos, DVDs, wirelessly connected laptops and video game consoles with long controller cords that can reach a couch located across the room. Still, being sick is still accompanied by an annoying series of sensations that can only be described, mildly, as unpleasant. When your very skin feels like an affront to your otherwise perfectly rational nerve endings, it’s hard to enjoy the trappings of modern life to their fullest.

This morning I woke feeling only marginally, if at all, better than yesterday. I groaned from beneath my mound of blankets and pillows until far later than strictly necessary, weighing the relative merits of using another nine hours of sick leave. In the end I let work itself be the deciding factor and checked my email. The crushing weight of what seemed like an endless stream of urgent requests for web-related intervention roused me into a sort of unwilling action as I tried to pull myself together to make the six-minute commute and avoid being buried from another day of stagnation, work-wise. I wasn’t feeling the whole thing to begin with, which made me quite crabby and I moodily sulked downstairs to my car.

You know the sinking, wash-of-cold sensation you get when you discover something extremely unpleasant has just occurred? It turns out when you couple that with an already miserably hot sensation of lingering illness, you get something that I imagine were possible to successfully bottle and load into a syringe would render all other methods of torture instantly obsolete. The pile of glass around the passenger side door of my car spoke a volume of what had taken place in the cold of the previous night. The seat that was now covered with bluish shards of shattered safety glass no longer held my nicest jacket; the floor before the seat that had only a few hours earlier been home to my gym bag was now also barren, save the irregular shapes of sharp edges, refracting the blazing morning light. My glove box also lie open, empty except for a single fast-food straw I keep in there, just in case.

I spent a good portion of the morning getting further behind in work as I waited in furious silence on hold with the insurance company, glass repair shop and police department. By the time I finally made it to work I was in what may best be described as the foulest mood of my entire life. As the day went on my mood got a little better as I managed to pull the perspective of the day’s events into their proper context. It did little to soften the wrenching annoyance of the whole process, but it did make me less apt to physically assault any co-workers who might have attempted an ill-advised joke at my expense.

My only response so far has been to craft the following post, which tomorrow morning I will affix to the mailboxes around our apartment complex in an attempt to take the proverbial wild shot in the dark. Plus I think putting my thoughts out there for all to see will give me a sense of extremely self-important and uncommonly smug satisfaction:

Are You the Irresponsible Baboon Who Broke into a Saturn Outside of Building 20 on Wednesday Night?
Then congratulations! You’re now in illicit possession of:

• My Gym bag containing an iPod shuffle, a pair of stinky gym shoes, a Master Lock, my gym shorts and T-shirt, a pair of sweaty socks, my favorite pair of earphones, a half-used container of raquetballs and a first aid kit.
• My jacket.
• The contents of my glove compartment.

I’m not sure what possible use the proof of insurance, registration and the car’s manual could be to you. I don’t know what you want with my rank gym gear nor why you needed a jacket so badly as to swipe mine. I really don’t care since your intelligence is not under question: I’m completely convinced of your status as a Class-A ignoramus.

If it was really worth the effort, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt as to what your motivation was, other than selfish mayhem. In any case, consider the iPod shuffle my gift to you. Consider it a reward, of sorts, for being a particularly primitive neanderthal.

What I really want is the bag, jacket, headphones and glove compartment contents returned. They have no obvious value to you, so returning them should be of no particular consequence, you soulless twit.

If you return these items to the office, you are free to keep the iPod shuffle, no questions asked, although I will wish that the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpit hair. Don’t take it personally, I wish that on anyone with loose enough morals to steal from others without regard for what, exactly, they may be depriving them of.

Should you muster a few spare brain cells with which to clumsily operate the iPod, also be my guest to listen to the included music, which is likely of far superior quality to your own inebriated musical taste. The ancillary benefit of decent tunes may be looked upon as a secondary reward for your oh-so-clever felonious actions.

May their dulcet tones lull you in to a pleasant slumber in which you dream of a world in which thievery is punishable by the sharp removal of a hand.

Sincerely,
Your friendly neighborhood Saturn owner

Anyway, I’m going to bed now. I’ve pretty much had it with this week. And the uncomfortable thing that keeps running through my head is that It’s only Thursday.

For the love of all that is pure and true, there’s still two more days of this. It’s a good day the waiting period for firearms is three days. That’s all I have to say about that.