A day punctuated by annoyances

Today could have been a good day. Bits of it were quite good. Other bits, not so good.

I was meeting a friend after work today for dinner, and we were going to try to get a photo enlarged at Sam's Club beforehand. So I headed into work early with the intention of leaving early. I was about 18 miles from my house and had just checked the time and was feeling quite good about my morning commute when suddenly I ran into a traffic jam.

The first sign of the traffic jam was the large number of stopped cars on the highway just past a highway off-ramp, which was the last opportunity to get off the highway before the traffic jam. The second sign, as is often the case, was a police car with flashing lights located just past the exit as though it were trying to tell you what a good idea it would have been to take that exit, if only you hadn't just blown past it.

(I would later learn that the accident was caused by an SUV that was attempting an illegal U-turn from Interstate 81 Northbound onto I-81 Southbound through an "Authorized and Emergency Vehicles Only" access road across the median. This SUV struck another SUV, which struck a bus, which fell off the road and partly down an embankment. In all there were about five vehicles damaged plus the bus, and quite a few injuries. The actual accident was entirely on the other side of the highway - the northbound backup was mostly caused by rubbernecking.)

I got off the highway at the next exit after a slow crawl of a few miles and took some of the same back roads that had served me during last week's snowstorm. It probably took me just as much time to make the same progress as if I had stayed in the traffic jam, but it felt better to be doing 35 mph instead of 5 mph.

Work was annoying, for reasons I won't get into here - aside from saying that once you have demonstrated the ability to perform outstandingly, this becomes the new baseline and all expectations assume the outstanding as a bare minimum. This can be very annoying when it comes to customer expectations in the final days before Christmas.

Finally my work day was done and I skedaddled to meet my friend at Sam's Club to enlarge a single picture. Unfortunately, there were several people in line ahead of us at the Picturemaker, including a man who appeared to have suddenly decided to convert an entire album of old photos into digital scans. After more than a half-hour of patient and not-so-patient waiting, we finally gave up and decided to go to dinner.

Dinner was nice. I forgot to bring a copy of my Christmas Card, but I did remember to bring a small plate of cookies - which my friend tore into as soon as I presented them. After dinner we drove back to Sam's Club to reunite my friend with her car, and we noticed that people were still being admitted after the store's 8:30 closing time. "A Christmas Miracle!", we declared, and took a peek inside to see if there still was a line at the Picturemaker. There was, and we were screwed again.

I think if we had just been ahead of this yutz at Sam's Club, we might have had our enlargement in less that a minute. But that wasn't the way the dice rolled today. So my friend will try to get the enlargement done on her own. As for me...well, I'm falling asleep right now. Time for bed.