Coffee Wars

Oh my sweet, dear Lord in Heaven. This has been one of those mornings where everything that could go wrong HAS gone wrong. How have things gone wrong, you ask? Oh, dear reader. Let me count the ways.

1. I overslept. I tossed and turned for a couple of hours after going to bed last night, and then I had a really hard time waking up this morning. Then I zoned out in the shower and just stood in there for a lot longer than I meant to. But it was all good, I told myself as I left for work, because technically I would still get there half an hour early, and all of my meeting prep was basically done already--or so I thought, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

2. As I approached the first small town I have to go through to get to work, still making good time at this point, there was a train. A really long train. Slowing to a stop. Fine, I told myself. It's still okay. I can just cut over to the next crossing and pass there. But that one was blocked, too. And the next one. And the next. Two miles later, I found a clear railroad crossing. Time lost: five minutes. Still not a big deal, I assured myself.

3. I got to work twenty-five minutes early. As I tried to go inside, I realized I left my security badge at home. Still no need to panic, I remembered, because I did the same thing the other day and never returned the spare that I borrowed. So I rummaged through my purse, found it, and let myself inside. Time lost: three minutes.

4. I got to my desk by twenty to eight to check my e-mail. These meetings have been known to wrap up on the first day without anybody telling me, so I wanted to make sure nobody e-mailed me to say they were done before I got busy making coffee. I had trouble logging in. When I finally logged in, Outlook was lagging and took forever to download my e-mail. Time lost: about seven minutes.

5. At ten to eight I got to the conference room. My boss was in there, and he told me the tables in the other, larger room needed to be rearranged to fit everybody in there. Then and ONLY then did I remember that we were moving our meeting to the other, larger room today. Here is about where my brain kicked into panic gear. So I calmed myself down, grabbed the coffee carafes and ice bucket and took them to the kitchen, poured a pot of coffee into one carafe, saw another was already brewing, and went to call the building supervisor to arrange for the tables to be moved.

6. I got back to the small conference room a few minutes before eight to see another Project Admin wheeling in a cart full of water and soda and kicking my guys out so she could set up for her meeting. She's irate because I still have pop and water in there from yesterday. I assure her that I'm working on moving it as soon as I find a spare cart, and she grumps at me just to leave it and she'll use it. She's an older German lady with a thick accent who is sweet as sugar most of the time, but if you cross her or get in her way she turns mean and scary. I decided getting more pop would be easier than getting into it with her, so I went to get some.

7. I realized that I also took the set of pop closet keys that I share with CAG home last night and forgot them. So I hurry downstairs to main reception to check out another set. I get there the same time my breakfast order does. I promise the receptionist I'll be back for the food as soon as I get a cart, then head back upstairs to the second-floor pop closet, only to find yet another PA in there loading up drinks for yet another meeting. She's got the last of our carts, so I head back downstairs to the main pop closet. Thankfully, there's a free cart. I load up on drinks, swing by reception and pick up my food, and take it all back upstairs and set it up in the conference room. All I need now is coffee and ice, so I head back to the kitchen to finish filling my carafes and my ice bucket.

8. Sweet/Scary German PA is in there. She has taken my ice bucket and my carafes for her meeting. I explain to her that I left those there for my own use, and she says to me, scarily, "I have a meeting for 15 people starting soon!" I open my mouth, close it, settle myself down, and as calmly as possible explain to her that I have a meeting for 25 people that has already started. She starts gruffly and scarily telling me all the ways that her meeting trumps mine, and I keep reminding myself that it will do me no good to get on this woman's bad side.

So I find another ice bucket, and a decaf carafe that she's not using. I do, however, take back the carafe that I had already halfway filled, and told her that she couldn't have that one because I needed coffee NOW. While she hovered around the coffee maker ensuring that I couldn't cut in and make any more pots for my own meeting until she was good and done, I got my ice and took it and the meager amount of coffee I'd managed to lay claim to over to the conference room. Then I went to call the IT guy and tell him we needed more power strips in our room. By the time I made it back to the kitchen, S/SGPA was gone, so it was just a matter of waiting, waiting, waiting for all of my coffee to brew.

About 8:30, I finished making my coffee, got it delivered, and hightailed it back to my own side of the building, where I finally got to make MYSELF a cup of coffee and sit down and start this post, at which point sunbrae pinged me on G-mail talk and cheered me up immensely. Thanks, sunny.

I'm not about to tempt the Job Fates by hoping today gets better. I'm not going to worry about all of the verb tense changes in this post, either. I'm just going to hide out here and chill and drink my coffee until all of this morning's bad juju has fallen off of me.