Is Friday 22nd the new Friday 13th ?

6am and a mad rush to the garage down the road, £10 of petrol and £10 on the gas card. My debit card is declined, I know this is wrong as I checked my bank balance online before I left the house. Try again, card still declined. Duty manager fills in a ‘no means of payment’ form as I had left the house without my handbag thinking I would just need my bank card. Ok so they can’t cancel either the petrol or the gas so I now have 7 days to pay before they involve the police. (I know this from the time I had problems before at this garage.)

Back at home I write a note to put on the front door for the heating engineer who is coming back today. Now I know that there are about 4 rolls of sticky tape in the house as I have bought them in recent months and we don’t eat the stuff (or at least I don’t). I really want the boys to get up before I go to work so that I can be sure they will be up and won’t miss the engineer when he arrives any time from 8am. I have to wake ET several times to go to his paper round. He still wasn’t up when I left the house at 7.15, he is meant to be there for 7am or they start phoning up to see where he is. OJ didn’t want to get up as he had toothache.

Arrive at work and phone my mechanic and ask nicely if he would mind not banking my cheque until next week as I currently have £31 to get me through until payday (Friday 29th). As I walk into work I meet my boss (she is always there first) but today she is late, she had been feeling unwell yesterday and her husband had decided to give her a lie in. I mention that I am having a bad day already (its only 7.45am by this time). Why oh why did I have to open my great big humongous mouth to utter those words.

The first thing I do in the morning is collect the orders that have been faxed to the office overnight. Very odd for the first time there are no orders, none, not a single solitary one. Now last night before we left for the night Wayne checked that there was plenty of paper in the fax machine. He noticed that it said ‘toner empty’. I boldly told him not to worry as they say that for ages before they really do run out. Just to check we did a copy of an order just to prove there was plenty of ink. How wrong we were! We had only changed the toner a few weeks ago (first time since it was bought a few months ago).

When we changed the toner last time I assumed (wrongly) that Wayne had asked the lady who orders stationery to but another toner. Whether or not this happened we will never know (I think it was around the time her mother (who she lived with) had died. We didn’t have a toner to fit our fax in the office at all. By this time Wayne has arrived, he doesn’t seem to be too bothered that all of us women are running around trying to get a toner for the most important piece of equipment in our office. Boss drags out the old fax machine to set up then we realise that even if we can get that going the faxes that have come through are stored in the memory of the other one!!. A few phone calls ascertain that our stationery supplies cannot get us a toner before Monday. Several supplies are either not open yet or don’t have the toner we require in stock. I get a text which puts the smile back on my face.

It occurs to me that if we are quick we might be able to catch at least one of our reps before they leave home for the day, I can ask them to resend their faxes to the fax in the accounts dept. Wayne just shrugs and says see what Boss says, by this time she is in the directors’ office. I know it will be too late by then. I take the initiative and call one of my reps. He has left home but is staying local today so if needed he can go home and send faxes but he mentions a chain of stores that opens at 8am. A quick call to them discovers that they have one in stock which is put by for us. MD forbids Boss to go out saying one of her staff will go. I quickly volunteer as Wayne doesn’t have his car and if Bob goes I will be stuck in the office with Wayne being useless, it also means that he will have to answer the phones (he avoids that as much as he can). So I fly down the motorway into the city (yes my car sprouted wings for once). Within minutes I was at the store collecting this valuable thing. Without a working fax it not only means there is little work for myself, Wayne and Jonesy. It also means that the warehouse staff, who were up to date with orders would have no work either. I am back at the office just after 9am, as soon as new toner inserted the fax jumps into life and begins spewing paper out. We all get down to work.

As the day goes by it seems to me that nearly everything I touch or have touched in the last day or so has gone wrong. I won’t go into the ins and outs of the rest of my working day but suffice to say that when I tried to phone a customer and ended up ringing Wayne I knew my day was not getting any better.

At lunch time I phone home to see if the engineer has been yet. He hasn’t so I phone the contractors, they tell me it was down for a PM appointment. He finally arrives at the house a t 2.55pm after the boys have been waiting for him since 7.15am. suddenly I remember that JA has his friend B coming to sleep over at our house tonight. That means I have to go buy some food!!!

It’s now 4.40pm and I am driving home (I thought I had better leave on time today to save causing any more problems). I am smiling to myself as I think about the text I received that made my morning for me. I hear my phone go off, glancing at the screen I see who the incoming text is from. I want to pull over to read it but force myself to keep driving, onto the motorway through the road works up the steep hill and along the residential roads to my home. I am reading the text before I have even switched the engine off.

Once indoors I pick up my post, there is one enveloped marked, ‘open urgently’. It is from my bank, you remember the bank that took four months to refund the money that I had lost due to the fraud on my account last May. The letter tells me to phone this number urgently and quote this word ***** and my card number. The fraud dept need to speak to me.

WHAT THE FUCK………….no wonder my card was declined at the garage this morning. After lots of security questions including questions about various transactions on the account I am told that my card has been blocked as it appears there has been a security breach. I will receive a new card in 3 to 5 working days but can use the same PIN as I have now. I tell the man on the phone about the problem I had with my PIN at the ATM 2 weeks ago and that I suspected there was something odd about it but the guy at the bank wasn’t interested. So once again I have no access to the small amount of money I have. Good old mother is going to draw some cash out of her bank for me for the next few days. What would I do without her bless her.

Having gone to collect B I drop both him and JA off at home while I go to buy some food with the £5 I have in my purse. I have just parked my car at the local shopping parade. My mother calls me all excited. My Garden Fairy is getting married in September and we are both invited to the wedding in Norfolk. It is all very exciting and romantic. Apparently mother and her friend White are going to be in Norfolk on some kind of holiday that week. They were due to be coming home on the day of the wedding but obviously not now. White’s husband is going to take me to join them all and we are all to stay at the hotel where the wedding is being held. The last time I saw Garden Fairy was when we all went out for a posh meal the night after White’s daughter got married last year. I have met Garden Fairy’s betrothed a couple of times and he seems to be the perfect man (I know he must have at least one fault but it hasn’t been discovered yet unless its his reluctant son). Whilst talking to mother I am watching people coming and going in the parking spaces opposite me. The spaces are all set out so that you reverse into them at an angle then you can drive straight out. In the minutes I am sat there I see several drivers drive in forwards which means that they have a difficult time firstly getting into the space at that angle but an even harder time getting out again. I am embarrassed to notice that this is mostly women who do this. My question is ………….WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THEM?
Do they not have the brains they were born with?

Eventually I am home, I cook sausage and chips for the boys and begin preparing a nice hot chilli for myself, this will last me a couple of meals. Then I do something that makes me think maybe I am finally becoming a genuine cook. Never in my life have I done this before. All the best cooks do this don’t they?

Yes that’s it I opened a bottle of red wine to drink with my meal, both during the preparation and the consumption. Until a few months ago I was not a red wine drinker, but I am now becoming accustomed to it and as white wine seems to give me headaches this is preferable. So having indulged in a couple of glasses of this cabernet Sauvignon from Chile (rather appropriate don’t you think). I have been writing up my day for you at the same time as doing my bit for woman kind, counselling men on how to have a better relationship with the women in their lives rather than looking elsewhere.

Oh yes and whilst cooking I needed the bathroom, dashed up the stairs as fast as my body allows, only to discover the bathroom floor an inch deep in water. The toilet had flooded again!! Apparently OJ had managed to unblock it but hadn't cleaned the floor. I guess I'm glad he had done the worst bit.

Here is hoping tomorrow will be a better day.