The most obnoxious day ever

5:25am - My alarm goes off. I get up.

5:35am - I'm ready to leave. But I can't find my keys.

5:45am - I give up and steal my husband's keys.

5:49am - I leave the house 2 minutes after I need to in order to make my train. I hope the traffic lights will be good to me and take off anyway.

6:00am - I park at the Amtrak station only to hear my train pulling away as I shut my door. I open my door and get back into my car and decide maybe I should park like a sane person instead of the skewed angle my hurried parking job ended up being. I turn the key in the ignition. Do I hear the brief ch-ch-ch before my car's engine smoothly begins running? No. I hear an odd beep beep chug eh ch-ch schschschsc beep. My car doesn't even attempt to get the engine going.

6:05am - My forehead makes intimate contact with the steering wheel.

6:52am - I finally board a train to get to work.
Work was going as well as work goes. No problems there.

12:00pm - I take my lunch break as an opportunity to call my mechanic and find out if this was something they could work on or if it sounded like the security system or the computer system was whacked and it needed to go to the dealership. Verdict - dealership. :(

12:15pm - I call the dealership. $135 to diagnose. Of course they can't give me an estimate of what it will take to fix it because they have no clue what's wrong with it. But of course, the shop closes at 5:00pm, but (small ray of light in a abysmal day of obnoxiousness) the tow truck can drop it off after hours.

My work day is somewhat hectic and instead of having enough time to drop off a file box full to the brim with files at the office, I end up having to haul it with me on the train. If I hadn't done that, I'd have missed my train that would get me home at 6:20 in time to deal with the car situation.

4:37pm - I board the 4:40pm train, panting, out of breath, and balancing a heavy box of files on my hip while dragging my laptop bag with the other hand. I sit down, realize there's no way I'm drivign at the end of this train, and buy myself a well deserved chardonnay. We pass the first two stops and it looks like we'll have a timely arrival with no delays and I'll be able to get everything taken care of and be home by 7:00.

Well that would be true if someone hadn't decided today was a good day to set fire to the tracks. WTF!?!??! (Okay so there's no reason to believe this was arson, but could my day get more obnoxious??)

7:25pm - The train is finally approaching my stop. I call AAA to get a tow truck there as soon as possible. I'm so distrcted by the conversation, I keeply miss my stop. I get off at the next stop which is luckily only 7 minutes away by train, but closer to 15 minutes by car. As soon as I realize my mistake, I call a taxi. Because it is a train station the taxi service OBNOXIOUSLY tries to insist there are always cabs. This particular train station has no taxi queue and the only time there are un-called taxis there is drivers smart enough to meet the rush hour trains. Our train was severely delayed so even those drivers wouldn't be there. After some obnoxious arguing, I finally got the stupid woman to send a taxi. I only had to wait five minutes for it to get me.

7:35pm - I get in the taxi. The guy driving 1. Has no idea where the train station is that I left my car even though it is a major transportation hub and 2. Is not that great of a driver. As I instruct him on how the hell to get to the train station, he misses at least one turn, decides the shoulder's a good place to drive on an exit ramp, and then gives me crap for paying him with a credit card.

7:45pm - Explaining that I barely had enough cash to cover the $22 fare and if he wanted any kind of a tip he needs to run the card, I pulled my file box and my laptop bag out of the back of the cab while pulling out my AAA card for the tow truck driver.

I LOVE AAA. The driver was very nice. He looked over my car and determined quickly that I had a dead battery. YAY! So much better than $135 diagnosis to determine what horribly expensive thing the dealership would want to do to it.

8:00pm - AAA guy gets my car started and I call a taxi to meet me at my mechanic's. I drive the car there followed by the tow truck driver who wanted to make sure I got there safely.

Half way there I realized with horror that I had drunk 1.5 glasses of wine on the train with the thought that i wouldn't be driving. A second later I realized that was 3.5 hours ago because my 1.5 hour train ride doubled. I call my husband and ask him to drop a bottle of white into the freezer to chill it before I get home. I drop the car off and pile into the waiting taxi with my file box and laptop case.

This driver doesn't know which was is north.

8:15pm - I open my front door. I hug my husband and greet my tail-wagging puppy.

8:30pm - I drop onto the couch. My husband brings me a glass of wine and a plate of lightly seared yellow squash and ultimate meat loaf.

I determine the difference between a truely horrible day and a merely obnoxious day is what you get to come to at the end of it.