The Most Stressful 20 Minutes Of My Life

Let me start this story off with how NOT amazing my night of sleep was. Yesterday, I didn’t really have more than half a cup of coffee. No RedBull (I know, I know, crazy, right?) I had a great breakfast and ate a pretty decent dinner. For some ungodly reason, I didn’t get one wink of sleep last night. I actually couldn’t keep my eyes closed hardly at all. I tossed and turned for hours and eventually got up and checked the MySpace and FaceBook world, played some video games, and eventually went back to bed.

I ended up tossing and turning for another hour or so and moved to the floor. Not sure why I migrated down there. I mean, it’s a wood floor... how comfortable can a wood floor be? Turns out, that the wood floor is actually more uncomfortable than the bed. Regardless, I ended up spending the rest of the night down there watching the clock move closer and closer to 5:30am when my alarm would normally have woken me up for work. I couldn’t bare to hear the awful sound it creates, so I turned it off a minute before and just got up.

Work actually went pretty well. It was busy, I learned a few new things, and it was all around pretty productive. Coming to the end of the shift, I was seriously starting to feel the effects of no sleep for more than 24 hours. But when my shift was over, I was assigned to attend a special training class with a few of my co-workers. Not a huge deal. In fact, I was pretty excited to get some serious training so that I can at least fake my way through a conversation with a snooty specialty coffee drinking customer. The plan was for me to meet the other two co-workers back at work and we would carpool to the class which was located at the Vine Street store in Berkeley.

I left my apartment with tons of time to spare, but everything was working against me. I was lucky enough to hit every single red light on the way back to work and still make it there with some time to spare. “Oh, good”, a parking spot that isn’t just barely big enough to fit a Smart Car. I park, grab my bag and race in the store to meet my co-workers.

Wait, they’re no where to be found. I run to the back to ask my manager if they left with out me and of course they did. Apparently they won’t let you into these training classes, not even a second late. Which I’m okay with, cause that always annoyed me back when I attended school, to have the lazy ass kids come in late and disrupt my learning.

I roughly knew where this Vine Street store was so I raced back to my car to find out that some giant bucket of Summer’s Eve decided to park his Prius six God damned inches away from Thug Passion. If you know anything about Thug Passion, you’d know that her drivers’ side door lock is broken and can only be unlocked from the inside. Unfortunately, Captain Massengill was parked so close to me that I had to unlock the passenger side door, reach in and unlock the back door, open it up and try and crawl in. Here comes the best part of the story, right here. This Prius driving tampon had boxed my car in so tightly that not even my skinny ass could fit in the back door that I just tried to open. I had to unroll the back window, crawl in, and weasel my way to the driver’s seat.

“I’m in!” I thought to myself and started up the car, backed out, and started my breakneck journey to my class. Even then, there was a small inkling of hope that I might make it on time. As I was leaving the parking lot, I looked in my rear view mirror to discover that my bag had been left on my trunk and fell off when I accelerated. Luckily no one ran it over, so I backed up and retrieved the fallen soldier. I raced down the street named Shellmound to hopefully turn right up 65th when there was an Amtrak the length of the whole state of California crossing the street where I needed to cross.

I finally gave up and called my boss back and told her that it just wasn’t possible for me to make it in time. Thus concluding the most stressful 20 minutes of my life.

When I got back home I sat down and decided to take this picture. I haven’t felt this crappy in a long time. I’m not sick but I sure am on my way if I keep up this pseudo-insomnia. I think tonight I am going to have to resort to some sort of sleep aid, such as Tylenol PM... or Chloroform.