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Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Not One of My Better Weeks So Far

This is Steven Petrick posting.

This is the second post for the day. I had the first post almost done when my fingers fumbled and hit some combination of keys that totally destroyed everything I had written in the previous post before I could post it.

Maybe I am still suffering from whatever hit me Monday morning (which was what much of that post was about in any case). That little incident put me to bed on Monday, and honestly I should have stayed home in bed on Tuesday (yesterday). Driving in had already made it very clear I was not firing on all cylinders, as my car's tires ran up against the curb, not once but twice just driving to the office (a thing that generally never happens, but was indicative that I was not driving as accurately as is my norm). I do not claim to be the best driver in the world, I am probably not in the top 200,000 of drivers in the world, but I am reasonably competent and conscientious about my driving. Scraping the curbs was a solid warning that something was still not right.

Not right as in my wallet disappeared.

I had it at lunch because I paid my bill and could clearly remember putting the change, and what the change was, into my wallet. At some point in the office I suddenly realized my wallet was not in my back pocket. The only places I had been since I last had clear knowledge of it was the restaurant, the car, and the office (and of course the respective parking lots). Retracing my steps to the restaurant met with no success, no one had turned in a wallet, and it was not in my car or in the office, and no one else (SVC, Leanna, and Jean) had seen it.

At that point, I was upset and distracted enough that I just went home (having left my name and phone number at the restaurant in the hopes that a good Samaritan would find my wallet and call me).

With my wallet lost, the added stress (apparently) of not being fully functional left me unable to sleep most of last night while I tried to think what had happened. Finally it dawned on me that I had not actually searched all of the office, but at that point it would have taken an hour (round trip) to drive into Amarillo from Canyon to check my suspicion and then return home to go to bed and too much of the night had already passed. I finally managed to get some sleep.

When morning came I headed into the office, and my suspicion proved accurate. While yesterday I would have sworn that I had not been to the back of the building that day, it turned out I had, and my wallet had worked its way out of my pocket and fallen on the floor of the back restroom, where it had sat patiently until I returned (no one had cause to go back there yesterday so no one else had found it).

It is a relief to have that resolved, but it was only one a number of things that all happened yesterday.

A short stretch of the center lane of I-40 was shut down, blocking my route into the office that morning (not a good thing to happen when you are not as alert as you should be). Leaving the office when I did got me almost home just in time to be blocked by police and sheriff's vehicles responding to a "shots fired" incident on my home street in Canyon: they had cordoned off two blocks which forced me to detour around them but did not keep me from my own apartment parking lot.

In all, it has been an eventful week so far, and truth to tell I am still not fully alert from whatever hit me Monday morning. I am, at least, functional.