My Horrendous Morning

Just the other day, I had a truly horrendous morning. On a personal scale, this actually nearly reached epic level, because it was just the perfect storm of numerous things seemingly going wrong all at once.

I was off from my main job (I work overnights), and so felt well-rested, when I had to get ready for my substitute assignment for the day. The call had come the night before, and apparently, I was half asleep and not fully focused when that call came in, as will become obvious later in this post.

In any case, I like to write a little bit before going to work in the morning on my nights off, but the writing was very lethargic on that day. I prepared lunch, showered and finished getting ready, then turned around and saw that my early start had somehow shifted to a slightly late start instead.

Not to panic, because I had left this late before. In fact, it was relatively normal. But when I stepped outside and went down the stairs, it felt like I pulled a muscle in my calf. Out of nowhere, suddenly, there was pain, and it felt like I might have an injury, and nothing makes you feel old quite like being in pain like that, right?

After testing out some steps and seeing that I could still walk - slowly and carefully, admittedly - I began to walk towards the car once again, then got in the car, and finally headed off.

Two minutes later, things went still further south. Once I reached the intersection between the local road I live off of and the main artery, it was clear something was different. I do not remember ever seeing that much traffic at that time of the morning. It made the going slow, and it continued like that all the way to work - and I have a long commute.

It seemed that I got stopped at each light, and the lights in this town, Rahway, NJ, are really, really bad. So, the waiting grew.

Eventually, I got to the school, and with five minutes to spare! Not exactly comfortable, but not all that bad, given all of the delays and such, right?

Well, as it turns out, this was the wrong elementary school. Apparently when called the previous night, I was either half asleep or something, because the message was not clear.

That meant getting back into the car and going to the other side of town to get to the right school, which obviously now meant outright being late.

What was worse was that when I finally arrived, the secretary was not there, which is a problem, since substitutes need to pick up the folders and schedules there. After waiting around, going across the hallway once to ask the other secretary, who apparently was too busy to help, someone finally came in and questioned why the classroom I was assigned to was still locked and dark.

At least I knew which classroom to go to now, but then, the doors were locked, and no one had the key. They called the custodian, but it was taking an extraordinarily long time for him to arrive, and by then, the entire class had gathered. Worse still, the principal and other apparently high ranking members of the school picked that day, and that time, to walk these particular halls, which cast me in what was probably a bad light.

Just a nightmare! And it took some time for things to finally smooth over. By the time they finally did, it was well into the day.

It was just one of those mornings, like the perfect storm, where everything has to be just so for so many things to go wrong all at once. It did, and that made it perhaps the most memorable morning in recent memory going back many years, although maybe the silver lining was that since that, I have seemed determined to not repeat the mistakes made then that at least contributed to the morning being a disaster on quite that scale!