Smile-breaks
When things go wrong
It's like this. You wake up in the morning and the sun is shining—or not—and you don't plan for anything to go wrong. You get up, shower and get dressed, and somewhere in there you remember your gardener called last night and said he never got your check so you're going to have to go online to see if maybe you forgot to send it. Even though you're sure you did.
Otherwise, it's a good day and you're not planning for the TV's DVR to skip out on you or the car to refuse to open its trunk and you're for sure not planning to go around breaking light fixtures.
Breakfast is good—cinnamon raisin toast and coffee. The news—not so good. But that's no surprise. A phone call comes in and you pause the TV but when you hit the forward button, ready to resume hearing all the bad news, nothing happens. Frozen in place. Maybe it's the remote's batteries, except you just replaced them. After a major fight with the remote, the TV and the DVR, you give up on what you missed and go to live TV, which thankfully works, but you'll still have to call DISH later.
Checking on the check can wait because you can't call the gardener until this evening, so you and Paul head off to Starbucks, where nothing goes wrong. They make the right drinks and there are plenty of tables to choose from.
Later, back at the house, I decide to brush the cobwebs off the stucco by the patio door. The broom is handy and reaches all the high spots and I'm really careful around the light fixture.
Not careful enough. The broom sweeps across the glass globe and before I can say “STOP!” the globe comes loose and slowly spirals down, down, down toward the concrete. I watch in fascination until suddenly I dive at it, trying to catch it, but of course I'm too late and the patio is now littered with shards of glass. The broom is at the ready—ready for its new job. Patio cleared, I go inside to check on the check. No more clearing cobwebs off stucco today.
Oops! Where's my computer? Oh, yeah. I must've left it in the trunk when we got back from Starbucks, so I go outside and click the trunk open but it doesn't open. I click again, harder—a LOT harder. Trunk lid doesn't budge. Next up: the trunk latch control in the car. That doesn't work either.
I'm kind'a stubborn, so now I get in the back seat and pull on the lever that lowers the seat. Maybe I can reach into the trunk from there. The seat doesn't move after several tries, so I give up. That's what Roadside Assistance is for, right?
He gets in the back, pulls down the lever over the other seat—the one I didn't try. The seat folds down and this big guy disappears into the darkness and pops the lid. Just like that. He crawls back out and tells me he pulled the trunk lid release handle—the one that's there in case someone gets locked in the trunk. Hope I never have to use that one!
I go back inside, computer in hand, to check on the check. Good news—the check cleared my account three weeks ago. I click on the check number to bring up the image so I can show it to the gardener. Message pops up, “Sorry. This image is not available.”
So all in all, it was a great day for things going wrong. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
