Mini Rant III — I Don't Like Mondays

by Marko Peric

Let me get one thing out of the way right now. I don't really hate Mondays in general, or any day of the week for that matter. Hating one particular day of the week is silly, as it's going to come up once a week, and who really wants to spend one seventh of their life in a day that they hate? That said, I really hated this Monday. So much in fact that it's taken me until now, early Wednesday morning, to sit down and write about it.

It all started on Saturday evening, when the car was making an odd noise, which turned out to be the radiator trying to suck coolant from the overflow tank, which was low. After topping it with antifreeze the noise went away, so it was assumed that it was just that the coolant had gotten a bit low, no real problem. Wrong. On Sunday evening the car quit about a block from home, and wouldn't start again. Thankfully a neighbour was around and helped up push it to his driveway for the night (the car would naturally decide to quit at the bottom of the hill). In the morning a tow truck was required to haul the car to a garage, where it was discovered that the timing belt had broken and the water pump needed to be replaced. That was over 400 bucks with the labour.

But that's far from all the badness of the day. As the car was in the shop, I had to walk to work, which is a half hour walk, not so pleasant when the temperature is well below freezing. Then there was work. Don't get me wrong, I like my job, and quite frankly, I'm good at it, but some people are hard to make happy. Especially people who buy computers, but know absolutely nothing about them, and refuse to call the tech support line when they have difficulties, and then call in their friends who are allegedly "experts." Said people then manage to completely mess up the computer and decide to return it for a refund. So I was hit with the largest refund I've ever had. Throw in a nosebleed and you've basically got a summary of my day.

Am I upset? Well, I'm not thrilled about the day I had, but it could have been much worse. As I say, there's nothing that can't be made worse by the addition of several thousand army ants and a Michael Bolton CD (with the possible exception of being buried in sand to your neck and being eaten by army ants while listening to Michael Bolton, that simply doesn't get any worse). I can take comfort that I have a roof over my head, enough food to eat, a job I enjoy, and enough money in my bank account to pay my bills. I really don't have much to complain about. Still, I must admit I'm not particularly looking forward to next Monday.