It’s not always easy being me

A couple of weeks ago I engaged a coworker in a discussion about pickles. I had been at a fast food outlet and someone in line had ordered a cheeseburger and asked to have it without pickles.

I never ask restaurants to leave the pickles off my burger, I just pick them off myself. I think I don’t make the request for two reasons: I figure it may take longer to get my order if it’s ‘special made’ and I don’t want to cause extra work for the employees. Both reasons are ridiculous, though, since it would probably take less time to not have to slap on the pickles.

It got me wondering about how many wasted pickles there are in the world. Are the majority of people not ordering them, eating them or picking them off?

On Monday, I found myself, once again, picking pickles off my burger.

And that was the least of my problems.

Monday isn’t a favourite day of the week for many people. It signals an end to the weekend and the start of the school or work week. For us it’s often our busiest and our most pressure-filled day. It’s the day we wrap up production of this newspaper, with a deadline looming down on us.

As I did most weeks, I spent a lot of time on the weekend, picking off where things were left off on Friday, by writing stories, producing page budgets and filing content so as to lessen the workload for everyone come Monday. I probably put in about 13 hours of unpaid overtime that I will eventually recoup with time off. Yes, we were ahead of the game.

And so when the first couple of emails came through on Monday saying the production people were missing content for pages, I shrugged it off. Sometimes document files bounce off the server. No biggie. We just refile.

But the emails kept coming and coming and coming. Something was off.

That’s when things went from bad to worse. When I opened up page budgets to remind myself of what we had filed for certain pages the budgets were blank pages. One after another after another.

And when I opened up files of stories I had written over the weekend – there were at least three of them – all of those pages turned up blank as well, even though the text had been there on the weekend, especially in that allimportant moment when I had hit ‘save.’ I opened more than a dozen pages. All blank. All my work gone.

I had an ‘Oh my God,’ moment. Actually, I kept having it over and over and over again, in between frantic calls to our I.T. department and production department.

“It’s all gone!” I told them, on the verge of tears.

As readers you all don’t want to purchase this newspaper and see blank pages. So now instead of having to finish up two or three stories in a few hours, I had to write five or six in addition since I had to re-do all of my weekend work since no matter what we tried, we couldn’t recover the copy.

I would have gladly eaten 16 jars of pickles instead. And I hate pickles.

Oh well, years ago I adopted a motto in life: ‘It is, what it is.’ And boy was it ever.

It could have been worse, I suppose. The previous evening I could have suffered a painful injury to add to my misery. I had gotten up off the couch and took a step when not only did I trip over my laptop cord, but the cord completely tangled around my ankle.

The next thing I knew I was flying horizontally through the air – while spinning in rotation. Picture a really awkward wrestling move, but with no opponent!

As luck would have it instead of crashing to the floor I made a soft, cushioned landing, on my back, on our brown leather chaise – meaning I had flown a distance of about four feet.

No one was around to witness this, but had they been they certainly would have laughed. I laid there myself laughing for about three minutes.

Definitely not my most graceful moment.

After the day I’ve had today, tonight when I fling myself on the chaise it will on purpose. Hopefully I’ll still feel like laughing.