Yesterday morning, I had a similar look on my face, after having to rise at an indecently early hour.
Unnecessarily.
Early appointments are not a problem for me, except when my driver forgets to tell me that he has an appointment, on the same day and 30 minutes later, 30 miles away.
He was supposed to call and get it changed, as mine could not be. But this he remembered late on Saturday.
As an upshot of this, Grant would drive me to Clifton Park, dropping me an hour ahead of my appointment in order to rush back to Cambridge for his.
Then I would await his return.
So we programmed this plan into our Monday morning advance thinking and set our clocks for 0515.
It was as I pulled my shoes on that I heard my pal ask:
“Will you kill me now or later?”
Lacking the energy for violence I merely asked:
“Your appointment is on another day?”
Indeed. The conflicting appointments are next week.
Rising early ought not to be a problem for someone who for years, voluntarily selected an early shift.
To get paperwork sorted without interruption, I used to arrive an hour before my 6 am shift and this meant rising at 0330. I did this for years and I loved being the only person around.
Should I have been afraid, hanging around a dark parking lot, waiting for the bus? Perhaps, but I wasn’t.
My only concession to security was that I obtained my first cellphone, but the only time I had a problem, I didn’t use it.
That was the morning I wrecked my car.
I had just returned from my mother’s funeral and perhaps I was a little preoccupied, or maybe my eyesight was already going screwy.
Somehow, I didn’t quite manage to navigate the round-a-bout that led to the parking lot access road.
There was a sickening crunch as the car bounced over the curb and stalled. At least it brought me into focus.
Re-starting my poor old Mazda, I gingerly urged it to convey me the rest of the way to the lot, where I parked and got on the bus as usual.
Halfway though the morning I suddenly had a meltdown, wailing “Oh my God! I wrecked my car!”
It was totaled. One of the chaps from engineering went with me to look at it and pronounced it dead.
A new car was not part of my plan or budget and I loved my hatchback. It may have been old, but it still functioned perfectly till I killed it. That car was so me.
But I had to be grateful I wasn’t injured myself and also that the Mazda dealer had a new car they could lease to me right away.
They had stopped making hatchbacks, though and it felt like having my identity changed when I drove off in a gold Protege.
It was 1997. The following year, I turned 50.
We were getting a new security system at JFK which involved us all having to have our fingerprints added to our ID so we could swipe and get doors to open by applying a finger tip.
It turned out that I didn’t have fingerprints anymore. The Port agents tried and tried, but it was no use. They told me I had “old lady fingers”.
Maybe that was when I began to feel middle-aged!
The very nice Rheumatologist I saw yesterday told me I didn’t look 73. I laughed and said that sometimes I felt like 103.
It was amazing to find yet another health specialist who actually seemed interested. She appeared shocked that no-one had ever bothered to chase up the wide selection of symptoms in my file.
So then I went off to have 12 vials of blood drawn and xrays taken of every part of my body.
It turned into a busy morning.
In truth, though, I don’t think rising early has anything to do with my current fatigue.
It’s the Internet Service Provider.
They make me feel as if I have been crashing my head into a brick wall.
They are very nice and even speak coherent English, but each tells a different story, contradicting the last.
On Sunday, when I called to see if a technician was coming, I was told he would be here at 6 pm and that the cable burying chaps would be here June 1st.
The previous fix-it man had told me his version of what was amiss and said he would send a message to a different sort of technician who should come on Sunday. Which is why I had to check.
In fact, one did, but not at six. He turned up at about 2 pm, fiddled around in the outside box, made no contact with us and disappeared, whereupon the system went off again. Maybe he had come to help a neighbour, in which case our chap did not turn up at any hour.
Meanwhile, when we got back from yesterday morning’s excitements, the cable burying boys were waiting for us. May 17th, not June 1st.
These guys are sub-contracted for the job and they have no words of praise for the organization!
My theory was that the cable being exposed all this long while has been the problem.
Yesterday it got buried. Today, so far, we’ve had service.
So we await further developments…..
Is it any wonder a person gets tired?
I often wonder where all the customer service training went!
My feeling is that they expanded too quickly without the people they needed to make it work. One hand doesn’t know what the other does and communication is nil. Reminds me of a company I once worked for!