Bad days

My day from hell: A broken toilet, a never-ending smoke alarm and a flood in the kitchen.

Everyone has bad days. Everyone. Your Mum, who is so organised and keeps the whole family in check without batting an eyelid? She has bad days. Your Boss, who’s loaded with a smart car and gets to say ‘I’m going to work from home today,’? He/she has bad days. Beyonce, the most beautiful and talented woman with designers begging her to wear their clothes? She has bad days.

I have bad days. In fact, I seem to have more bad days than good days, especially now I’m living on my own and working full time. Well, today I had the mother of all bad days. It felt like everything that could possibly have gone wrong, went wrong.

Last night I went out for dinner and drinks with a friend, had a lovely time with laughs and wine and I got home, actually took my makeup off and got into bed before 10:30. Great, I’d actually managed to have a fun evening and still get to bed early!

But this morning when my alarm went off at 7:20, I didn’t feel like I’d had 8+ hours sleep. I felt like time was playing a cruel trick on me, waking me up when it felt like only five minutes ago I’d closed my eyes. Anyway, I got ready, got on to the bus and went to work.

I had a decent day at work, and I remember thinking at 3.30pm ‘Wow, I’ve actually managed to stay focused today and get a lot done!’ (instead of my usual procrastinating then hurriedly trying to squeeze everything in before five). When I got home I was happy because the maintenance man had been round to fix the toilet, which kept making a funny noise every time you flushed it (I’m convinced it was about a hundred years old). Finally, the toilet was working! I went downstairs to make dinner, watch TV and just chill.

 There I am making dinner (and watching Gilmore Girls simultaneously) and I could smell my baked sweet potato (NOT burning) so I went to take it out. I opened the oven door and the smoke alarm started. Oh shit. Shit shit shit. I’m only 5 feet tall and the smoke alarm is located on the ceiling which happens to be extremely high. I couldn’t reach it! I stood on a stool and still couldn’t reach it. The sound was getting more high pitched and I was panicking. I jumped off the stool and grabbed the broom, thinking I’d out-smarted the idiot who made the ceilings so high/put the smoke alarm there. I tried to press the button about a thousand times with the broom, tried holding it down, tried everything and the alarm still didn’t stop. By this point the noise was deafening and I was in full on panic mode. I opened the windows and doors and cried like a baby and after what felt like hours (but was realistically more like minutes) the alarm stopped. I flopped down on the sofa completely exhausted, ate my sweet potato and watched TV.

After that, I had some washing to hang up so I went over to the washing machine but noticed my feet were wet – the kitchen floor had a big puddle of water. Oh. I thought I’d probably made the puddle myself by washing up and the tap spraying. But as I looked closer I could see the water was dripping from the cupboard under the sink. Please. Not today. Not another one, I thought to myself. I opened the cupboard to have a look…

I was baffled because the top shelf which is right under the sink was completely dry. It was the bottom shelf that was soaking wet and dripping on to the floor. I called up Kevin, the man who came round to fix the toilet, feeling like an absolute damsel in distress who was probably being stupid and missing something really obvious. He asked me to look again and check if the stop tap was at the back of the bottom shelf. It was, and it was dripping.

‘Oh dear. Oh dear.’ Said Kevin. ‘That’s not good. I’ll have to come out and sort it out.’

‘Are you sure? You’ve already been here once today. I don’t mind, is there anything I can do about it?’ I replied.

‘No, I’ll have to come round, because if it goes, my God it’ll go. I’ll be there in an hour.’

So now I’m sat here, waiting for Kevin and hoping there isn’t some kind of water explosion resulting in my kitchen looking like a scene from the bloody Titanic. It’s 8pm and I’m exhausted, wondering why this series of unfortunate events has happened to me and made me feel completely useless?

None of these things that happened were my fault, in fact they were nobody’s fault, yet I’m still sat here feeling awful waiting for the day to be over. I’ve realised that when I have a bad day I shouldn’t be blaming myself, or wallowing in self pity. I should just be glad that I survived today and remember that one (or three) bad thing(s) doesn’t automatically make my whole day bad. But you can bet your bottom dollar I cannot wait to get into bed tonight.