It was supposed to be so easy...

There were 2 fuck ups today.

Today, and I was at fault for this, I ended up leaving my house later than I wanted to. I was looking for something in my room for longer than was warranted, and I could have just left it until the evening. (In fact I just looked at the one place I didn't look and ended up finding it 5 mins ago). I left the house, and one of the last images in my head was that of a felt wallet on a table top.

I drove to work today, so as to cut down the amount of time it took me to get there. There was a meeting and I wanted to be early for it. As I sped towards the gate of my workplace, the mental image of the felt wallet suddenly popped into my head again, and I was correctly able to interpret it correctly. It was my staff pass, without which I would not be able to enter the office.

I was seething. This was the worst possible time to not have my staff pass. I couldn't call in sick. I couldn't just go up to the pedestrian gate and say, "let me in, use a visitor pass" because I needed somewhere to park my vehicle. My phone did not have batteries. I had been counting on being able to charge the phone when I got to work. I had to get myself down to a payphone and call up - well I had only memorised 3 numbers. My boss's, his secretary's and myself. So I called up my boss's secretary, who told me that I had two choices - either go to the security office to get a temporary pass, or have the headquarters fax a letter to the security post to let me in. So I opted for getting a temporary pass for reasons I will explain later.

I drove over to the security office and asked for a pass. They said that they did not give 2 passes to anybody, so I asked my boss's secretary to send the fax over to the security post. I drove up to the security post, and the policeman there said that they hadn't received the fax. So I parked my car next to the post and waited. I asked if I could borrow a phone but only one there was an emergency phone, so the kindly security guard lent me his handphone. I thought, great.

I punched my number in, and pressed a button I thought was the call button. Instead, the MP3 player came up, and luckily the sound didn't come through the speakers. So I tried to shut it off. Then I pressed a second button. Up popped his SMS, and apparently the last message he received was his girlfriend saying "I love you". No wonder he was in such a good mood. I didn't need to hear that. But on the third try, I got through. Apparently the fax was on its way, and I didn't have to worry. In time, the fax came through, and I was on my way.

The meeting had started without me, and it was my intern making his final presentation. (This was why I could not take leave and say, "screw the pass") I walked in as he was about to wrap up. My boss called me into the room and chewed me up (again).

Lunchtime presented another conundrum. It was a farewell lunch for some colleagues. It was OK, but the food took too long to arrive. I had arranged for the big boss to meet up with the rest of the department to present the farewell gift right after lunch but it seemed as though we were not going to make it back to the office in time. So I SMSed the big boss that we were going to be late. After lunch, I left early to go pick up my temporary pass, and assumed that the presentation would go on without me. Just as I was leaving the pass office, I got an SMS from the big boss asking what the hell was going on. I called up the guy who organised the lunch and he told me that everybody was in the office and the presentation had not started. I was bemused. Did I have to be there to get things started? I told him to carry on and not care so much about me. It was strange but common sense is in short supply.

Rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully. It's strange that I could forget my pass and remember to run an errand in the evening, but that's exactly what happened. My errand at night was to drive to point A, somewhere between work and home, to update my POSB passbook. I would thus find out if a book buyer had paid me. Then I would drive to point B, somewhere out of the way but not too far away from home, to deliver the book.

As a song by The Streets goes, "it was supposed to be so easy"...

I reached the POSB cash deposit machine at point A, dumped my car in a carpark somewhere, and then got out to line up for the machine. The passbook updater next to the machine had failed to work. There was a curiously long queue in front of a machine. I spent 10 mins in line, and then tried to use the cash deposit machine to update my passbook. No go, technical problems.

It got curiouser when I went to point C to have my passbook updated. The machines were not working either! On my way to the bank, I had used the vending machine to buy myself a can of 100 plus. When I took out the can, I found that it was damp. I bought a leaking can! But I thought, what the heck, there are enough preservatives in this damn thing to make this safe for consumption, and any way isn't this the reason why the beverage tastes like shit?

OK, I thought that I would not find another cash deposit machine to update my !@#$ passbook, when it occurred to me that just before I got home I could swing by point D, just to check whether in the ensuing 20 minutes on the road, they had gotten the problem solved. I parked illegally (again), thinking that 10 minutes was all it would take. I was more or less right. But 5 minutes passed, when a car outside, in order to make his way around my illegally parked car, reversed his car into a motorcycle, which collapsed. The girl standing behind me said to the boyfriend, "hey isn't that our motorbike?" Thereupon the guy who was a rather hot headed fellow walked up to the car, banged on his window and yelled at the driver to "get the fuck out". Since I was a little guilty at having precipitated this screaming match, I parked my car at a more respectable place before going back to the bank to find out what I, deep inside already knew all along. THE BLOODY PASSBOOK MACHINE DON'T WORK.

Well this book buyer of mine took a bloody long time to pay me, giving the excuse / reason that he was overseas. Then when I reminded him, he said that he paid already, and thereafter sent me 1 email every day nagging about the book. I think I'll just go tell him that I'm overseas and I'll mail the book out when I get back next week.