KEY ISSUES

Coo… this blog seems recently to have transformed itself into something resembling an ongoing text…

This is new…

Well, it is around here at any rate, despite being a form that’s probably as old as the hills, and, most probably, what it was supposed to be about all along but somehow managed to side step.

Ah well, I guess that we all end up conforming to a lesser or greater extent in the end.

This week I had another one of “those” working days which seemed to escalate more and more out of control, as things just seemed to keep on going wrong, and it ended up being the sort of day which I suspect, in all my panic and fatigue and worry, I didn’t really deal with very well.

I’m sure that I said and did things that I ordinarily shouldn’t and wouldn’t have done and which I know are already being regretted by me and the poor folk who have to put up with me when I’m having one of my “panic” days…

Still, I’m not going to talk about that in any more detail, not least because it would be unprofessional in the extreme to do so, but I just wanted to talk about the thing that started it all off, which, of course, was all my own stupid fault.

I was trying to make an early start to claw back some of the hours lost to the hospital checkout routine the day before, and so I was sitting at my desk with the first cup of coffee of the day (Hmmm… Just what I needed when I was feeling twitchy, a stimulant to trigger it all off nicely…), when the office landline rang.

Now, in general, there are only ever two reasons that will ring; It’s either someone trying to persuade us that we need to take advantage of a banking offer to reclaim something or other of a mysterious nature, or it’s my mother, and, given that the day was still in the early stages when most sensible office workers are still pouring the milk onto their Coco Pops, I leapt across to the telephone with a panicked air of “re-admission trepidation” coupled with a healthy dose of “What, already??!” drifting angrily across the quiet office air.

It turned out that, in the general dashing about of returning my mother to her home, running off to the supermarket, and trying to get her hot water running again, at one point I had been sent to retrieve the accumulated mail from her pigeonhole in the mail delivery room which had accrued during her latest incarceration.

This requires a key, and is the one key of my mother’s set that I don’t have a duplicate of, so I picked up her set. As there was so much in the way of catalogues, etc. to carry back to her flat, I inadvertently slipped the keys into my pocket and, well I’m sure you’ve worked it out by now…

“Have you got my keys…?”

“No” (rummages through pockets) “I mean, (grits teeth) yes…”

There then followed a series of intense negotiations, held over a smallish number of telephone calls, about whether or not I would swing by her flat after work and deliver them, even though there was, apparently, “No need” and she “Didn’t want to be any bother…” and seemed determined not to accept my assertions that it wouldn’t be any bother, even though, in my head, I knew that it would be…

And so the day began with my evening already looking more complicated than I had hoped it would be, and so I approached the rest of my working day already in a bit of a mood and feeling slightly frustrated by my lot in life.

What I really needed was for the day to progress smoothly along and for me not to find any of life’s cow-pats dropping onto the path my of my day.

Guess what happened…?