I had one of those days yesterday where, if it was a movie, you would have laughed your ass off. Instead, it was real and you came this close to turning off the safety on that AK you keep in your bottom desk drawer.

I came into the office at 7am. Got situated and walked out my door to get a drink from down the hall. As soon as I step outside my office, the woman who ALWAYS bugs me about my ID badge is standing there: "You GOTTA wear that badge." I push out something resembling a laugh, but really, I wanted to cry - the blasted water fountain is fifteen feet from my door. It was the equivalent of the observation that somebody's got a case of the Mondays.

I get back to the office and realize I don't have the keys to unlock the file cabinet under my desk. Crap. I walk to the car, no keys. Check my shoulder bag, no keys. I sit there for a few minutes and decide to break the lock on the filing cabinet. The cabinet is one of those modular deals that slides out from the desk, but it sits on a little wooden frame. So I pull it out from under the desk, and it slides off the wooden frame. Crap. The thing weighs like 80lbs, so I have to squat and lift it fromt he floor back onto the frame. In all the heaving and hoing, I eventually get it back on the base and under the desk. Which is when I realize that in all that grunting, I had COMPLETELY forgotten to pop the lock off. Crap. Again. And it's not even 8:30am.

So, I pull it back out and it of course slides off it's base. Incidentally, it sliced my finger at the cuticle too; insuring that I was indeed completely awake at this point. So I wrap my wound in a napkin and secure it with a little scotch tape (office first aid, I earned that merit badge at the management retreat last fall). I pull the panel off the top of the cabinet, remove the cotter pin that holds the lock in place, punch the lcok core out, and release the lever locking all the drawers in place. With all this racket, I was beginning to draw the attention of a few passers-by.

I lift the heavy bastard back on it's base and slide everything under my desk. I'm sweating. That's when I get a call from one of the nursing units. Apparently a pipe above them in the hematology room had busted, and salt water was leaking through the ceiling onto people, computers, and filling light fixtures. It was like that all day yesterday.

shank