A totally bizarre five minutes

this has been my day. wake up. feel crappy. pull covers over head and oversleep.

skip breakfast and making lunch to get ride into work with best roommate ever.

manage to be early to work, get a bagel at the little coffee shop in the building for breakfast. plan to go out to lunch since a- don't have a lunch today and b- need to get a gift certificate to the lunch place for my assistant as a christmas present.

then someone brings out leftovers from yesterday's office holiday party for lunch. i didn't feel like going out anyway.

around 3, i realize i do still need to get the gift certificate, and a hot chocolate from dunkin' donuts might be good, since i have a cold. if the little coffee shop in the building stayed open past 2 in the freaking afternoon, i might not have had these bizarre five minutes.

the rant about the coffee shop not staying open past 2 is another post.

so, i pull on my coat and brave the cold. have i mentioned that i'm sick?

i go to saladworks. it's empty. 3 in the afternoon is a good time to run errands.

of course, it's so empty that no one cares that i need to buy something. i finally get someone to wait on me and i should have realized the bizarre was in the air when the person behind me asks 'chicken tortilla soup. what is that?'

umm... chicken tortilla soup. i know i may have asked about it when i first had chicken tortilla soup. TWENTY YEARS AGO. doesn't everyone have it now?

(okay, 17 years ago. nearly exactly, even. the first time i had chicken tortilla soup was with lisa, at the hard rock in nyc. she had come to visit me at rutgers, because she got out for christmas before i did, and we went to nyc to christmas shop. i remember the chicken tortilla soup because it lives in both our memories as the best chicken tortilla soup ever, and i therefore order it nearly every time i see it on a menu, but it's never as good.)

anyhow. then i go to dunkin' donuts. also empty. there is one woman in front of me at the only open register. then i realize that she and the clerk are having an intense discussion of the difference between boston cream, vanilla cream and some other kind of cream donut.

seriously. another clerk joins in, and he tries to sway her with the manager's special. this goes on for at least three minutes. the woman trying to buy the damn donut is obviously a community college student, and she sounds like an idiot. just pick a donut, woman.

they finally settle on boston cream, and here comes some crazy. the clerk takes out a donut and breaks it in half to show her the cream. the customer says okay. the clerk throws away the donut.

keep the donut. be really nice and give the customer the donut for free. but don't throw it away and then get another fresh donut out. it just seems wasteful to me.

while this is happening at some point, the guy trying to distract the customer with the manager's special (whatever that was) , asks what i want. a large hot chocolate. he goes off to make it, but doesn't take my money. evidently the clerk on the register is the only one who can take money. fine. it's not busy.

but then the stupid customer is counting out change. and THEN she has to ask how much the cookies are. babe, i just want to pay for my hot chocolate. could you stop this meaningless freaking conversation about cookies and donut cream and go away?

in another bit of bizarre, i do not get hot chocolate at the dd often enough to know how much it costs. i see that it is 2.09, but i figure there's tax, so i don't count out any change until she says how much it is. 2.02. i had to check the sign again that it said 2.09. whatever. i gave her two pennies.

(is there tax on things like coffee and hot chocolate? there's tax at resturants, right? is there tax on prepared foods?)

i finally have my hot chocolate and i can return to the office. as i approach the building, there's a guy leaning face first towards the door. like, ten or twenty feet away, where smokers stand. not far from the door, in other words. he's got a cigarette in his mouth, and he looks out of it. we have out of it guys around here all the time, but they're basically harmless.

but he's facing the wall, which is weird. i wonder for a second if he's peeing. nah. because his hands weren't anywhere near his crotch.

as i walk by- yeah. you guessed it. peeing.

what is the world coming to?

i go into the building and consider telling the security guys about peeing guy, but the security guy at the desk is one of the really inefficent ones, and what's he gonna do? say 'don't pee here?' try to get him arrested for indecent exposure? (not that i saw anything. not that i was looking.)

i just get on the elevator and hit the button for the second floor. another guy gets on in the basement with me and gets off on the first floor. as he steps off, he almost smacks into a woman who is reading something and trying to get on. she steps back, lets him off, gets on the elevator. 'i'm going down,' she announces to me. 'is this going down?'

'no,' i say. 'it's going up.' which she would have known if she was paying attention to the little lights outside the elevator, i think to myself.

'fine,' she says, getting off. 'i'll get off and wait my turn.'

you do that.

i come back to my desk and my id is sitting there. because somewhere in my travels it fell off my pants, where i clip it to my pocket.

then, as i'm writing this, something else bizarre happened- the computer guy came to install stuff on my hard drive. stuff i've been asking for since october. if that's not weird enough, i give him the cd for the Palm software and my cd drive is busted. obviously i never use it.

when the computer guy asked if he could shut down all my programs, i had to admit that i was blogging, so i posted this half-done and hopefully editing it will put it up in its entirety. because i probably should have just closed it out, but dude. i'd done a lot of ranting!