I Hate Mondays

And I owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Davis’ Garfield.

Monday, just over a week ago, I had a series of unfortunate and horrific events. They all started Monday morning when I went to work and forgot to take my benefits documentation with me.

I started a new job at the beginning of last month. As with most companies, they gave me about 30 days to make a decision with regard to my opt-in benefits. However, my wife and I have been incredibly busy this last month. We had not taken any time to consider our options, and, despite an email reminder the Friday before, I forgot to look at the documentation over the weekend and bring it to work Monday morning.

Regrettably, to help me recover from this three-decades-premature “senior moment,” my wife came home from work 2 hours early so she could also look at the paperwork and help me make a decision. The major challenge there was that her vice president had flown in that morning to meet with her and her team. His trip was scheduled for only 2 days. I was embarrassed to be the reason for her leaving work early under those high-pressure circumstances.

That evening my wife and I went out to dinner with her mother. On our way back, we stopped at her mom’s office and chatted with her while sitting in my car in the sub-zero weather. While chatting, I noticed the car’s thermostat climb ever higher. After only a couple of minutes, the temperature rose dangerously high.

I turned the car off, but the cooling fans did not continue to run. Either the belts had broken on the fans or something serious was wrong with my car’s cooling system.

So, after letting the car cool down via the cold winter’s night air, we took the car to my preferred auto repair shop and left the vehicle in their parking lot. My wife would stop by and drop off the keys to the car in the morning.

That evening, I got to borrow my mother-in-law’s “grandma car” to travel home. I hoped I would only need to borrow her car for a day. As it turns out, I needed to borrow the car for more than a week. More on that later.

The next morning I went out to the borrowed grandma car and started putting my bag into the trunk. My neighbor’s garage door opened, and out came my neighbor’s little white fluff-ball-of-a-dog, followed closely by my neighbor. The fluff ball started to bark furiously at me—as she regularly does—and started toward me. She was on a leash, so I assumed that my neighbor would prevent a potential mishap. He didn’t.

That stupid little noisy cotton ball ran up and bit me on the calf! I pushed her away with my foot and wished that I had booted her across the yard. Rather forcefully and a little slowly:

“Oww!”

And my neighbor responded with a chuckle:

“She got you, eh?”

Really? Is that all you’re going to say when I could have your dog put down for biting me?

Sheesh.

Oh, and my car? Because it was in the shop I decided to get a full tune-up and have a lingering leak repaired. The shop did the tune-up really quickly. But the leak was a different story. After a couple of days trying to get a spare part to my car from their normal suppliers, they admitted defeat. Apparently my car is extra special, and no after-market manufacturers are willing to manufacture this particular part. My mechanic has never seen that before. I had to buy the manufacturer’s replacement part at more than twice the cost of a generic brand part.

I finally got a call last night that my car was repaired. So the next morning (this morning), I awoke bright and early to brave the icy roads that resulted from last night’s storm. I returned the grandma car back to its rightful owner, and she dropped me off at the repair place. I arrived just in time to hear the news that my car wasn’t starting. Apparently some other part had failed between last night and this morning…And my mother-in-law had just left.

After a half-hour of fiddling, the mechanics still hadn’t fixed the car (which ultimately needed a new distributor cap). So they gave me the keys to the owner’s car--a late-eighties or early-nineties Chevy Cavalier. That dinosaur looked a lot like the mid-eighties Toyota Camry that I used to drive before I got my current car.

Safely in the driver’s seat of the prehistoric beast, I headed to work. Unfortunately, because of the repairs, the icy roads, and the reckless driving of a pickup truck owner towing a trailer filled with lumber—which conveniently rolled across multiple lanes of traffic just before I got to the area—I ended up being an hour and a half late to work.

I hate Mondays, *especially* when they bleed into Tuesdays…