First Monday

The Big Ride is over and now it’s back to... what?

I have no job. There’s no first day back, no welcoming party. I don’t have to struggle back to the office, to my old chair, to my old PC. There’s no need to laze away the morning with stories of cycling adventure until lunch and then persuade someone to come drinking. Because…..

There’s.

Just.

Nothing.

I get up at the crack of dawn, despite my neighbor’s alarm clock not jingling me awake through the wall. (Thankyou God). Naturally, I don’t wish her any harm, but moving, dying, developing an alarm clock aversion or simply losing her job and no longer needing to have it trill into redundant life at 6.00am – and then snooze it every 20 minutes until eight o’fucking clock – would represent an improvement to the quality of my life.

Anyway somehow, without my knowledge, a couple of hours vanishes before my eyes. One moment it’s early and the next, half the morning is over, stolen by the Time Bandits or whoever it is whose job it is to make you late for everything.

I do nothing. I accomplish naught. All I gain is a little wonderment that the computer still works. There’s not logical reason why it shouldn’t, of course, but my experience with such things is that a perfectly working PC, tuned off and untouched and left alone, will not function when reactivated. Don’t ask why, it’s a fundamental rule of the universe.

If personal computers had been around in the time of Copernicus, he’d no doubt have discovered their foibles rather than those things he said about the Sun not going around the Earth, which might have saved him an awful lot of trouble. It’s a matter of timing, I guess.

So, despite doing nothing documentable except going to the gym, I still manage to be late for lunch with Francisco, which is not good as he’s buying lunch and the meeting represents my best possibility to get back into employment. It occurs to me, albeit briefly as I cross the parking lot in a flustered rush, to make up a small white lie to cover my tardiness. Something about discovering and single-handedly eliminating an alien hive in Tampa would have done, but sense prevails and I rely on that old chestnut of being a total dick and forgetting where I was supposed to go which, quite by chance, is the truth.

Lunch involves no wine, which must surprised Francisco no end. There’s no point wasting the remainder of a perfectly good day of unemployment by getting wasted, no matter who’s picking up the tab. It’s different when you’re on a client’s site and a little alcoholic stimulation pushes the day towards conclusion, but none of this is good policy to explain, so I order coffee and let him wonder whether I have experienced an epiphany.

Later, with a pleasantly satisfied belly and no little smugness for the lack of booze, I wander across the mall to a familiar place of legal intoxication and get a small Starbuck’s. It’s to sweeten the anticipated trauma of dealing with the insurance company – oh yes, my car got hit sometime during the last 3 months.

It’s actually pretty smooth, which surprises me, so I wander again until an ad for Sears glasses – two pairs for $99 – drags my unwilling body up their escalator. I need new reading glasses, but getting them is worse than buying shoes and paying for them hurts.

If you’re American, you probably think $99 is the deal of the century. That’s because you’ve been conned by everyone in the eyeball business into thinking that glasses should require a second mortgage on your house or, at least, selling off slave shares in your first-born. The usual price of such things here is so high that it would be cheaper for me to buy a plane ticket to England and get half a dozen pairs, than to purchase two at regular price in an optical store in America. Besides, $99 avoids jet lag.

The guy on the desk is insistent that I need an appointment. I can see this (excuse the pun) but first, I want information about the frames and lenses that I can get for that $99 deal. It seems like a waste of time to sit for a fifteen-minute eye exam (which I have to pay for separately) and then to find that the choices comprise styles that only Dilbert’s grandmother would wear.

No.

All he’ll say is that the selection is limited. They can fit me in tomorrow afternoon.

I can already predict what will happen. I’ll arrive on time and ask again to see frames first and, if they agree, there’ll not have time to fit in the eye exam.

I know, there are people of the opinion that I am negative and critical and expect the worst – but these things happen to them too. It’s just that I, unlike them, notice and remember. I have put my hand in the fire enough times to know that it will burn.

I have the scars.

Let’s just wait and see…