My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

And what it says about resilience.

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

At 7:45 a.m. there is a knock at the front door, just as there has been every weekday morning for five weeks. Still wearing a t-shirt and running shorts, I open the door to admit Chris and Matt, the carpenters remodeling our kitchen, a room which, coincidentally, has been unavailable to us for five weeks.

Today starts a little differently. They need to remove everything from our storage room so the floor can be swept and then painted. We work out that most of it can go to the basement, but the bright pink armoire that once occupied our daughter’s room will have to be moved into the dining room. The walls of that room are already cluttered with boxes of items liberated from the kitchen to serve our short-term needs, plus the garbage can and recycling bins. Oh well, the more the merrier. Happily, Chris and Matt do all the heavy lifting.

Just as I get out of the shower, Eric texts that he will arrive at 8:30 a.m. for his annual window-cleaning service. I also receive a notice that BGE, our electrical and gas utility, will shut off all electricity to our building in 30 minutes.

Eric arrives but can’t find a place to park. Indeed, three trucks from BGE have arrived in our cul-de-sac. Just as I show Eric a legal parking space, my phone rings. “We need you to move your car,” explains the chair of our coop’s building committee. The BGE crew needs that space for today’s project. I get behind the wheel, but that’s as far as I get. The BGE trucks are now fully obstructing the street in all directions. Fifty feet ahead of me, another driver is trying to exit. We sit. We wait. Finally one of the BGE trucks backs up enough to clear our obstructed artery, and I put the car in gear and search for a new place to park.

Back indoors, the power shuts down promptly at 9 a.m. The carpenters can’t do much without power tools, and I can’t do much without my desktop computer. After wandering the house aimlessly for an hour, I realize there is enough sunlight coming through the window for reading a book.

Bad News From the Bank

My cellphone rings again. A regional bank officer who specializes in fraud prevention is following up on an incident I reported earlier in the week (that’s another story). I thought changing all my passwords had resolved the problem. Not so. He suspects the fraudsters have infected my computer with malicious software. Therefore, our checking and savings accounts are frozen, and I must  go to our local branch to open new ones. Immediately. Oh, and clean up the computer. Once it’s free of suspicious malware, the accounts will be unfrozen.

The electricity comes back on at 11:10 a.m. Eric has finished the windows. The power tools are all a-buzzing. I call my local branch and make an appointment for 3 p.m., giving me time to catch up on all the work I missed during the outage.

But that 3 p.m. appointment, it turns out, was a less-than-brilliant idea. Next door to the branch bank sits an elementary/middle school whose students stream out en masse at 3 p.m. Traffic is backed up for two blocks as parents illegally double-park, awaiting their children (many of whom insist on taking their sweet time leaving the school building).

Fortunately, I think, I have an ace in the hole: I know that the bank maintains a small parking lot for its customers only. I inch forward, waiting for my opportunity to turn into the lot, and… Wrong! Barricades block the entrance, because of course the lot is being resurfaced.

I continue inching forward, past the bank. Two hundred yards farther, I find an empty spot to park. I hustle back on foot, arriving for my appointment only five minutes late. There, a well organized and efficient customer service rep gets me squared away with new account numbers, papers to sign, and clear instructions on what to do next.

In celebration, I reward myself with a strawberry lemonade at Starbucks, and return home where construction noises have ceased, the electricity is on, and life has returned to placidly normal.

What It All Means

Two quick observations:

1.      In the distant past, handling this many obstacles would shoot my nervous system into the red zone. This time, it didn’t. I credit the difference to better resilience. Resilience is aging’s silver lining. If you’re still standing, after all life has thrown at you, then you must, by definition, be resilient. Thanks to my years of experience in absorbing shocks, days like this result not in a meltdown, but in an amusing story to tell.

2.      At times during my career, these kinds of chaotic, fast-moving, stress-inducing days were common. In some jobs they were the norm. The rarity of days like this in my current life  remind me why it was a great idea to stop working full-time.

Here is wishing you fewer days of chaos and confusion and, when they do occur,  the resiliency to sail through them, no worse for wear and tear.