2003-01-03 - 11:55 p.m.

3 January 2003

A Bad Day

Today was a bad day, full of trouble and annoyances. At several points I just sort of goggled, wondering what else could go wrong.

The first thing that went wrong was utterly my fault and I discovered it the instant I woke up.

The night before I'd had trouble sleeping, in fact I'd gone to bed after 4 a.m. So I was definitely groggy when the doorbell rang at 9:15 a.m. It woke me up, but I didn't answer it. The doorbell is almost never something worth getting out of bed for. A few minutes later the phone rang, and I hobbled out of bed to get it. It was the Manager, and the minute I heard his voice it all hit me like a rush. It was new comics day, and I had totally forgotten about it!

To be fair, it was a very weird new comics day - the fact that Xmas and New Years were both on Wednesdays, the usual day for comic shipments, meant that for this week only it had been pushed back to Friday. It had utterly slipped my mind. The Manager asked if the comics were in the back of my car, but he was just being kittenish - he must have known that I'd forgotten.

In a rush I threw some clothes on and dashed out the door, only to be met with the second unhappy circumstance - it was snowing. A severe storm had been predicted for later today, but it looked like it was getting a head start - there seemed to be at least an inch already on the ground. Since the Manager was already at the store, he decided to accompany me to Latham. Why not? The drive was slow, but a lot less crowded than usual - mainly because the morning rush was over. D'oh!

By the time we got to UPS the driving was quite bad. The parking lot was full, and when I got inside the building there was a long line in front of the service windows. Because I usually pick up my comics before UPS officially opens I don't usually have to wait in line. Well, that's the price I pay for my forgetfulness.

In the line in front of my was an older guy with a bottle of wine in some sort of gift box. He was chatting with the people in front of and behind him in line, both of which had an "If-I-answer-the-crazy-person-in-monosyllables-maybe-he'll-go-away sort of look on their faces. It was obvious that the old guy didn't have a clue what he was doing. His gift box wasn't in a shipping container and it didn't have any address on it. Obviously he was expecting the UPS employees to do that for him. Lovely. This was not going to make the line move any quicker.

When he got to the head of the line, the lady at the counter patiently explained to him that UPS wasn't authorized to ship wine to most states in the union, which was something I didn't know. The old guy then tried to wheedle the lady into lady into letting him ship it anyway, saying that it wasn't REALLY wine (wink, wink) but she was having none of it. While they were talking I noticed a poster on the wall saying that UPS wouldn't even ship objects in re-used wine or liquor boxes. I guess they're serious about not shipping the booze!

I finally got to the front of the line and got my boxes. It was a light week - only five boxes, which was a good thing considering we were getting in so late. We slowly made our way back to the store, the snow still coming down. Well, that was going to discourage some people from coming in.

When we got back to the store I unloaded the boxes, then ran upstairs to grab some breakfast and get a shower. This was a necessity - I was feeling pretty rough from lack of sleep.

After I went back downstairs I got my third unpleasant surprise. When I turned on the store computer to input the invoices I couldn�t get it to boot up. At all. Uh oh.

It was time to call in the computer expert, Lily. She came downstairs and couldn't get it to boot up either. She tinkered with it for a while, and then opined that the trouble was with the hard drive since she could hear it trying and failing to run.

This was even worse news. I couldn't remember the last time I'd backed up the hard drive. All of the store sales figures and subscription information might be lost. Some of that stuff could be replaced, but it would be a slow, painful process.

Lily took the hard drive upstairs to see if it would work in my computer. She was gone for a while, but when she came back it was good news - the hard drive worked, and she'd done a full system backup. That meant that something else was wrong with the computer, and Lily had a couple of theories on what it was, but we couldn't do anything about it now. Whatever it was, it required the buying of computer parts, and that was impossible with the blizzard that was going on outside.

In spite of this I managed to get my hair cut (it needed it badly) and pick up some last minute groceries before darkness fell. I sent the Manager home a couple hours early so he wouldn't kill himself getting home, and Lily and I spent the last business hours of the day down in the store. After the Manager left we had exactly one customer. That's one of the problems with snowstorms - they're real commerce killers.

We then went upstairs to enjoy the rest of the evening while the world outside was covered by a blanket of white.