They Can Turn Me Off, But They Can't Shut Me Up!

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you wake up two hours early only to fall back to sleep just before the alarm actually goes off, causing you to hit the snooze button more times than you technically should and the only thing that keeps you from blithely sleeping away the morning is not the sense of duty to get up and go to work but the nagging knowledge that there is a child who needs to go to school (not WANTS, just NEEDS – there is a difference).

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you arrive to work after having a been off the previous Thursday and Friday and your residents decide to not recognize the fact that you were not here and expect you to be completely omniscient to their situations (and immediately have the solutions) the exact minute that you rush through the front door of the office six minutes late because of the previous waking up early/hitting the snooze button situation.

(It should be noted here that while YOUR arrival to work was late – the child was early getting to school. Go figure.)

You know it’s definitely a Monday when your computer advises you that it is unable to display your connected webpage – the webpage that includes all the work that you need access to for the current day, as well as to get caught up from the vacation days that you are now wondering why you felt the need to take them.

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you are forced to speak to a machine when calling your internet provider – a machine which does not seem to catch the snarkastic way you reply to it’s automatic questions, nor catches the snide comments made under your breath and which reaffirms to your soul that while these businesses may claim to be customer friendly but they are in fact not, for if they were customer friendly they would spend the minimum wage necessary to allow you to speak to an actual person who actually may know something.

Then again.

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you are finally allowed to speak directly to an actual person at the number you dial for your internet provider and you find that the person to whom you are speaking is in a different country altogether and you try desperately to remain polite, because you really need assistance getting back online, as you turn up your volume and listen as intently as possible and still have to have everything repeated at least three times in order to understand through the accent what is being said, all the while trying to figure out whether the other person is just a genius at understanding your accent or are they just getting lucky at their attempts in interpreting what you are trying to get assistance with or are they simply helping you with a problem which is not actually your problem.

(At this point, the vote could go in any direction, however the odds were heavy in favor of selection number three.)

You definitely know it’s a Monday when the physical person on the other end of your phone call to your internet service provider finally advises you that your number is a part of a “group outage” that began at approximately 9:47am causing you to snort with the insane laughter of one who is beginning to feel the slide over into the land of Insane Monday because you have been attempting to get onto the internet since 8:30am and it is now 10:12am and you were on hold and talking to animated voice machines from other countries for the last 36 minutes of your morning before you even had the opportunity to attempt to decipher the accent from the other end of the planet.

You definitely know it’s a Monday when the physical person on the other end of your phone call to your internet service provider advises you that the “group outage” is expected to be corrected by 2pm and, if it is not connected back up at the time that your day is two-thirds over and you've yet to accomplish anything remotely resembling catching up from last week's vacation days, to please give them a call back and allow them the opportunity to help you further which finally snaps the small modicum of control that you still had in your grasp as you snidely question aloud to the individual around the earth in another country who may or may not be understanding a bit of what you are trying to say the fact that that means that you will not be able to complete any work on your internet based programming, thus causing a standstill in your work production for another four hours and the physical person’s response becomes suspiciously similar to that of the animated voice machine you originally spoke with at the beginning of your phone call when they reply “that is correct however please call us back if your service is not connected after 2pm and thank you so much for calling AT&T and we look forward to continuing to help you in the future.”

Yeah. Right.

You definitely know it’s a Monday when you decide that they may take away your internet for a time but that doesn’t stop the words from coming. You just have to be more creative in getting them down and saving them until they can be posted.

And with the posting of the words, the frustration can be released.

And with the release of the frustration, harmony can be restored.

And with harmony restored, the rest of Monday can be faced.

And you know it’s definitely a Monday when you decide to relax and “go with the flow”, attempting to get other work done that is not internet based but your first post insane conversation with internet provider phone call is from an individual wishing to come visit your building, to see about an apartment for their elderly parent, that is hopelessly lost and needing assistance and they don’t seem to understand the straightforward, simple directions that you have given out for the last 9-1/2 years to everyone else that has been able to follow them without trouble and you finally try to assist by looking up where they think they are located in relation to where you are at that exact moment in order to perhaps give even more specific directions, only to find that they are sitting in the parking lot on the west side of the same church you share a parking lot with on the east side.

You know it’s definitely a Monday when all you can do is lay your head on your desk and laugh.

And laugh.

And laugh.

Oh ... btw ... the internet came back online at 1:22pm, signifying that I should continue to laugh and accept the small blessings. I'm going to need them.