What stupid irrational superstitious thing(s) ruin your day from the get-go in the morning?
Retail merchants have this thing about their first customer: if their first customer is a return customer, especially having to refund them, they believe that’s bad luck and will ruin their sale for the day.
Mine is I eat one fried over-easy egg with toast and coffee just about every morning; if egg york breaks when I fried the egg on the pan that really chaps my hide and starts the day on the wrong foot.
If my roommate leaves the shower thingy on the “up” instead of the “down” setting, then my arm gets all cold and wet when I turn on the water in the morning. Makes me cranky.
I hate it when I can’t get my tie to knot correctly on the first try. The more tries it takes, the more persnickety I get. I’ve found this to be a quick way to get a bad day off to its proper start.
I wish I could say that this makes my day start off bad, but it happens every single day. If I set an alarm, I’m up within 3 minutes of it. But I’m so worried about being late, that I can’t NOT set it, “just in case.”
Not getting ahead of the emails in my Inbox before I get swept up into the normal day of meetings and such. They hang over me, accumulating, taunting me with the amount of time I know I will need to process them later in the day…
This. The key-gnomes stealing my keys during the night and putting them someplace strange, like the pockets of the pants I was wearing yesterday, is a bad way to start the day.
Two things my wife does. The first is leaving dirty dishes in the sink, especially with caked on food of any type. Rinsing it and putting it in the dishwasher is pretty damn easy. She is a night owl and often goes to bed after I do, so I sometime wake up to stuff like this. The other is piling mail on a random horizontal surface, particularly if it is junk mail that should have gone straight in the garbage. I don’t think two people should have to sort and throw out junk mail from the day before, especially since that’s 95% of it. I’m pretty sure if my wife wasn’t interested in the 20% pedicure coupon, she should know that I (who has never had a pedicure and never plans to) doesn’t need it either.
Then there is the pets. Some mornings I can get some food and relax a moment before I let them out to pee and feed them. Other mornings they feel the need to wake me up before the alarm, which is a great way to ruin my day at the start.
There’s some fish crows in my neighborhood that like to caw and generally be annoying. They normally don’t bother me…except for when one of them pecks on my small skylight at the top of the stairs next to the bedroom. It is the loudest and most distinctive sound imaginable when you’re asleep - the beak against the plexiglass, plus the echo going down the ten-foot square in the ceiling leading up to it.
They may as well fly in an open window and sit on my chest shouting at me to wake me up. Oh wait - that’s what my cat does.
This. For me, it’s often just 5 minutes early. It’s not like it makes a big difference, but I want those 5 minutes dammit! I’m grumpy about it before I get out of bed.
The other thing is finding that the outfit I want to wear is dirty or I can’t find a shoe. It’s not like I don’t have other clothes. But it ruins my plans (which I probably made 5 minutes before finding out they wouldn’t work) and that just sucks!
Huh. This is usually a good start to the day for me, as it means I’ve woken up naturally at the right time. Working shifts, this is far from a given when I’m on earlies, but it’s nice when it happens.
What chaps my hide? Being yelled at because something isn’t working.
It never fails. The computer locks up, the tv is set to antenna input and not cable, the printer doesn’t recognize the new printer cartridge, blah blah blah.
I did not break it. Half the time, it isn’t even broken. I’m the one who fixes it. I’m the one who points out that the computer isn’t locked up, it’s paused because it’s choking on a big download, give it a minute. I’m the one who knows the sequence of buttons to push which magically make O’Reilly (Og help me) appear on the tv again, I’m the one who figured out it wasn’t a new printer cartridge, but an old one.
I understand these problems are frustrating, and that frustration often leads to shouting. However, if you could just modulate the yelling from ANGRY to DESPERATE, I would be so much happier to help. These days, it just feels like I’m being summoned for another beating.
Once I put prescription anti-bacterial goo in my eyes because the stuff came in an identical bottle with green cap as my allergy eye drop bottle. I couldn’t quite wash the stuff out of my eyes and my vision was blurry for hours. That wasn’t funny.