In L.M. Montgomery’s [Best part of my workday yesterday was a college friend spontaneously comparing me to Anne of Green Gables. EB, you rock.|text|Anne of Green Gables] books, a Jonah day is one where everything in the world conspires maliciously against you to thwart, enrage and hinder. I thought that was a bit too extreme for my day yesterday, wherein everything in the world conspired to laugh at my expense, so I dubbed it a ‘Dromio day’. I certainly felt I was in a comedy of errors, and kept looking around for the audience I felt certain was laughing heartily at my every mischance. By the end of the day I was monologuing and cursing inanimate objects in a lively Syracusan fashion.

The day began uneventfully. Whilst I had had fleeting dreams of getting in early to begin my task of making namebadges, seating cheatsheets, place-cards, table-cards, and icebreaker clue-cards for 74 people ere anyone else would be at work to distract me, I knew there was no real need, so I trickled in on time. I sat down to my desk, and found half an hour’s worth of urgent registration changes. I did that, and found I needed to pack and send a lot of supplies immediately. I did that, and found more urgent registration changes had arrived. I dealt with those, and found there were calendar changes. I changed the calendar and printed it off, and sat down to begin work on the namebadges.

Just then, El Jefe walked by and said, “Ooh, new calendars! Can I have one?” No big deal, just a few clicks…so I clicked away, dashed to the copy room, and found the monstrous beast of a color copier urgently calling for black toner. So I did the arcane rituals (hitherto unknown) that refill the bowels of the polychromatic machine with a substance neither liquid nor solid. Finally I wrenched the calendar from its grasp, left it for El Jefe, and sat down to work on the nametags.

An e-mail waited, asking me if I could pick something up at reception at the Pete Sampras building. Now, while at this point I really didn’t want to agree to anything, Pete Sampras is the NEXT building over and the person doing the asking was off-campus today; I felt I couldn’t refuse. I started my ACTUAL work at last, and was fairly far into my mail merging and data massaging when I got the call from reception telling me to pick up an envelope…a call from the Mike Schmidt building receptionist. I made some calls. “I don’t know why she said Pete Sampras,” the originator of the documents I was to transport said. “I used to be in John McEnroe, so some people still think I’m there.” Well…John McEnroe is a male tennis player…and ‘Schmidt’ starts with S…I guess…somehow… There was nothing for it, I had said I’d do it and there was no other reliable way of getting the stuff on time. I scurried past about five or seven buildings, down some stairs, by a field and a pool, over a bridge, through a Japanese Garden, past a water feature, under a covered walkway, all the way across campus, to Mike Schmidt. All the way I muttered about being sent to the Porpentine and other errands Antipholus saw fit to send me upon.

Slightly winded, neck sore from craning to find the mocking audience, I arrived back at my building, slung the fruits of my errands into the proper office, pulled off my sweatshirt, and flopped into my chair. I jabbed Ctrl-Alt-Del to log into my locked desktop and summon the many documents I was working on, and the monitor flickered into life. Blue life. Page fault. It’s a good thing the lady in the next cubicle was offsite, and not just because she’d want to know how her namebadges were coming. I wouldn’t want to have to tell her whether I was laughing or crying, because frankly, I wasn’t sure myself.