

That Tuesday.

The third worst day of my life. I have been accused of exaggeration before but the saddest component of this post is that it contains none.

While a flag waving non believer in nonsense such as karma, if it does exist it can go fnck itself because what I now refer to as "That Tuesday" was completely uncalled for.

I am not going to go into what the first and second worst days of my life were as they happened many years ago and involved girls.





9.25 AM Woke up. As a meeting had been planned for 9am with an angry client expecting a completed logo design three days ago, I realised the tune playing on my phone was not the alarm but the fourth call from my boss.

Although fully intending to do the logo, I had somehow instead spent the previous three nights on a knitting forum, under the guise of Edna, a 74 year old woman with fourteen grandchildren, making friends and exchanging tips before declaring that I could "hear someone breaking in downstairs" then logging off forever, giving them something more interesting to discuss than fractional stitches and menopause.

Not caring as much as I probably should, due to working in an industry devoid of conscience with a group of people that make retarded monkeys look like fusion reactor technicians, I collated a list of vaguely believable excuses in my head as I made a coffee, lit a cigarette and turned on the shower. Because of the age of the building, it usually takes around five minutes for the water to heat and I spent this time staring at the shower curtain, featuring the periodic table, wondering why I had never heard of Seaborgium (106).

Entering the shower, soaking and lathering my hair with shampoo, my phone rang for the fifth time. As I reached out of the cubicle to answer it, I slipped, fell, and slammed my face, mouth first, into the sink, knocking out two teeth and cracking another.

Through the pain, which was exactly like having your teeth knocked out with a porcelain sink, I realised I now had an excellent excuse for not going to work; stemming the blood with a Mr Men t-shirt shoved into my mouth while searching for a dentist online, I texted it to the secretary.

10.15 AM Confirming an emergency dentist appointment for 11.00am, I discovered the clothes I had laid out, along with half the apartment, were spattered with blood and my only other options were wet in the washing machine from the night before. Figuring I would turn the car heater on high during the drive, I pulled on wet trousers and shirt, grabbed my phone and locked the door behind me before realising my keys were inside. Kicking in a door is not as simple as action movies make it out to be and my first attempt resulted in what felt like a sprained ankle.

Hobbling to a side window, almost blind with pain and frustration, I picked up a potted Aloe Vera plant and threw it through the glass. Climbing into the apartment, now covered in blood and soil, I collected my keys and left.

10.45 AM After driving several blocks, I realised the dentist's address and phone number, written on my refrigerator door with a whiteboard marker, should have been reproduced onto a more transportable media. Turning back, I arrived at the apartment to find two police officers at the premises responding to a report from a concerned neighbour about a possible break-in.

Having established my identity and explained the smashed window, sprained ankle, wet clothing, missing teeth and the blood and soil throughout the apartment, one of the officers stated "You should probably go see a dentist." I am not sure if it was my response to this statement or if they were just sticklers for the rules, but it was at this point I was issued a $235.00 fine for the four inch potted marijuana seedling on my window sill, despite pretending that I thought it was basil. As they left, one of them told me to "Have a nice day."

11.35 AM Taking a photo with my phone of the refrigerator door, I left the apartment. Half way there, while on the phone to the dentist surgery letting them know I was on my way, I heard a siren and looked in the rearview mirror to see a police vehicle with lights flashing. Pulling over and explaining why I was wet, limping and had a Mr Men t-shirt covered in blood held up to my face, I was issued a $218.00 fine for using a mobile phone while driving.

The officer also pointed out that my vehicle was unregistered and had been so for fifteen days. Charged with such, I was informed that the vehicle would have to stay parked on the side of the road until I had paid the registration fees. As the vehicle registration office was only eight blocks from where my car was parked, I decided that walking there, despite my sprained ankle and gathering dark clouds, would be quicker than waiting for a taxi.

12.45 PM Arriving at the vehicle registration office almost an hour later, forced to rest several times, I joined a queue of approximately fifty people pretending not to notice the wet, limping, bleeding person with missing teeth.

Calling the dentist to change my appointment to 2.30pm, I caught a reflected glimpse of myself in a window. Due to the pain and loss of blood, my face was completely white, while the exertion of walking to the registration office had caused my mouth to bleed openly. I looked like a vampire. Not like the good looking one from Twilight though, a limping, pissed off one. I realised I also still had shampoo in my hair.

After what seemed like an hour of waiting in line, and was, I reached the counter and explained my situation to a lady so large her name tag was enveloped by a fold. Several minutes of one finger typing later, possibly due to only one finger at a time fitting on the keyboard, she informed me that due to unpaid parking fines, I would not be able to register the vehicle until I had been to the courthouse and settled the $472.80 outstanding amount. Leaving the motor registration office, I had to duck and run from a bee.

2.20 PM While sitting in the taxi on the way to the courthouse, the bee, which I was sure I had eluded but must have been on my shirt, stung me on the inside of my left arm.

Arriving, I entered the building and joined the queue of approximately seventy other people there to pay fines. Surprisingly, I was not the only person there with missing teeth and blood on my face and he gave me a knowing nod in what I assume was understanding or camaraderie. I felt like saying "No, you have no fucking idea" but simply nodded back as he looked like the kind of person who might have a knife. Underestimating the waiting time, I called the dentist and changed the appointment to 4pm.

After an hour of watching the area on my left arm where I had been stung grow to the size of a grapefruit and listening to the person in front of me yell at his girlfriend over the phone for kissing someone named Trevor, I reached the counter, paid the fines and rang for a taxi to take me back to the motor registration office. While I was waiting, an elderly man wearing a Salvation Army uniform asked me if I was alright and needed a place to stay which I suppose was nice but I was not in the mood for his crap at that moment and informed him of such.

Impatient after thirty minutes and no sign of the taxi, a bus pulled up and I made a split decision to catch it. As I boarded the packed vehicle, I overheard a man tell his offspring not to stare. Explaining to the driver that not having caught a bus in thirty years meant I could not be expected to know about the exact fare rule or their inability to accept Visa, I paid ten dollars for the ride with no change. Pulling away from the curb and turning down a street in the opposite direction of where I was headed, I jumped off at the next stop. Forgetting my sprained ankle, I landed awkwardly and fell. Having seen television shows where they tell you to turn a fall into a roll, the procedure was cut short by the bus stop pole. As I was pulling myself to my feet, the bus driver stepped off the bus and gave me back the ten dollars as the other passengers watched out the windows.

Waiting for another taxi, it began to rain causing the shampoo to run into my eyes. Swearing to never buy Schwarzkopf's 'liquid pepper spray' products again, I used the blood soaked Mr Men t-shirt to wipe the body of foam from my eyes and forehead.

4.25 PM Arriving back at the motor registration office, now with my left arm looking like Popeye's and the top section of my face painted red, I stood patiently in line for another thirty minutes, ignoring the stares and whispers, and playing 'delete everyone I hate this week' on my phone.

After reaching the counter, paying the vehicle registration and attempting to call a taxi but finding my phone battery now flat from its previous lengthy exercise, I walked the eight blocks in the rain back to my vehicle to find a parking ticket for the amount of $72 attached to the window and a missing side mirror where someone driving past had hit it.

6.45 PM Finding the dentist surgery an hour and forty five minutes past closing time, I was informed that they would still see me but an after hours emergency charge of $165 would be additional. As the dental surgeon was seeing another patient at a different clinic, I sat reading copies of People magazine from 2003 for two and a half hours before he arrived. Apparently Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are dating.

Called in by the dentist, I asked for titanium alloy replacement teeth to enable me to chew through a porcelain sink in revenge but neither of us thought it was very funny. Somehow during the surgery, possibly due to walking more kilometres that day than I had in the last ten years, I fell asleep while staring at a poster featuring a tube of Colgate toothpaste wearing an army uniform shooting plaque with a machine gun. I awoke, as the dentist was finishing, with lips the size of armchair cushions, a black and purple bruise from my chin to my right eye and my teeth intact.

As the process took over three hours and involved an excessive amount of large needles, stainless steel pins and drilling, the invoice, including the emergency after hours charge, came to $2,460.18 with another $58 prescription for pain killers and antibiotics.

1.15 AM I arrived home to find the apartment floor covered with a centimetre deep mixture of blood soil and water, due to the rain coming through the smashed window, and my laptop, half my DVDs and the television missing.

Wading through the apartment to my bedroom, I climbed onto the bed, plugged my phone in, and fell asleep listening to messages from my boss asking when he could expect to see the completed client logo and the fat lady at the motor registration office letting me know I had left my driver's license there.

