Let me just tell you about my day yesterday. Keep in mind I caught a respiratory virus last Monday and I’ll be coughing constantly throughout this entire story.

So it started when my phone, my only alarm, didn’t go off and I awoke at 7:40am. I haven’t gone into much detail about this, but ever since I stopped driving to work it takes me about an hour and half to get there: walk a mile to the train, take the train under the bay, then take a shuttle to my office. This means I walk a lot more, read a lot more and have to wake up earlier than 7:40 in order to leave my house by 8am.

Clearly this was not happening on this day since I had to take medicine, find clothes to wear, let my dog poop–which can take anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes depending on if she’s been feasting on my hair or not, anyway by the time I was “ready” (aka had clothes on, hair in a bun and no make up) I knew I would miss the train that would get me to the shuttle on time. I called a Lyft (a taxi but with fist bumps and free candy for those unfamiliar). It took this dude about 7 minutes to get there (in which time I would’ve been halfway to the train station) and then he followed his GPS which told him to take the freeway to get to the only-a-mile-away-destination. By the time I arrived it was only 5 past what I considered the last-chance train, so I still had hope despite the waste of $5 and physical activity.

The first few stops on the train are pretty torturous. I’m talking human sardines packed into a BART can where everyone’s pissed and has morning breath and any words exchanged are snarky ones at best. I usually try to avoid this negativity by pretending that the shoves are love pats and listening to music on my phone, which inevitably kills my battery in about 0.2 seconds. A few minutes into the ride, the train stops and we are told there is police activity at the stop where everyone except myself unloads and I start breathing again (or in this case coughing in peace).

So a 10-minute delay here, a 10-minute delay there; I’ve clearly missed my shuttle and my phone is down to about 60% battery so I used some more of it to call Lyft #2 of the day. This guy found his way there nicely and I arrive around 10am while I calculated the current $22 I spent so far on a one-way commute. I walked into a completely deserted office because everyone had been in a meeting for the past hour and I just lol’d quietly to myself because of course I missed the meeting.

Things started looking up when we had our Thanksgiving “dinner” at lunchtime and I filled my belly with delicious food and red wine, and I even saw a little personal rainbow through the window from my desk that I took to mean, “Things are lookin’ up, Kens,” not, “Obviously it’s raining out there, you fool.”

Now it’s time to go, so I catch the last shuttle out of there and it’s pretty cold and wet but not unbearable outside. I check my phone and I’m all, “Oh look, I have 8 text messages! I’ll answer them all with elaborate photo messages and check every form of social media while I’m at it,” meanwhile my battery is dwindling at about 20%.

I get to the train station and pat myself on the back for getting on the correct train (after getting on the wrong one twice in one week–in fact, the previous day I got on the Fremont train and it somehow went the wrong way bringing me to my destination, but since it wasn’t supposed to be there, they wouldn’t open the doors and I had to watch my stop drift away before my eyes as we rolled backwards taking me 4 stops away from my destination. Longest parenthesis ever.) So I’m reading my book, feeling good about that rainbow and those brownies from earlier, so I spend the last 5% of my battery sending a photo of myself wearing a onesie. I reach my stop and as soon as I step off it’s pouring rain.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely one of those obnoxious people who responds to every rainy day complaint with, “Yo, we’re in a drought and my car is dirty. We need this,” but on this particular day, a day when big fat rain drops, the likes of which I haven’t seen here in the past 2 years of residency, soaked through my sweater and I held my work laptop on my arm, I was pissed. And cold. And umbrella-less. Not a single person told me I could stand under her umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh.

I said a little prayer to the work gods that my Nike laptop case had magical waterproof powers and made it to shelter long enough to try to summon Lyft #3 of the day. My phone allowed me to open the app and hit “Get a Lyft!” before it flashed 1% battery and the black screen of death. So I was phoneless, umbrella-less and carrying an expensive electronic device that didn’t belong to me with a mile to walk before I was home. Just as a recap.

I saw the neon lights of a Subway restaurant beckoning me as I waited for the walk sign and batted water from my eyebrows as I ran in. I ordered a sub and asked the seemingly very confused lady behind the counter if I could have a trash bag to wrap my laptop in.

“You want plastic bag?” she asked incredulously.
“Yes, a trash bag please. My phone is dead. I have to walk a mile. I can’t destroy my laptop.”
“So. Plastic bag?”
“Yes. Please. I’ll pay 60 cents.”
“You want drink?”
“No, thanks. Too cold.”
“You want bag for body too?”
“Uh.. sure?”

She ended up not giving me a body bag, but she also didn’t charge me 60 cents, so I’d call that a win. By the time I finished eating half my sub, the rain calmed down drastically and rendered the makeshift laptop raincoat useless, but I arrived home soaking wet and shivering, so I plugged my phone in to find that I had missed my Lyft and was therefore charged a $5 no-show fee. So now we’re up to a $34 commute for the day. COOL. So I made my way to the shower (with a shower beer, obviously) not realizing I left the front door wide open.

As I enjoyed a long hot shower, Ziggy decided to take herself on a walk and of course the gate was open, so she walked herself right out to the front yard near the road where my wonderful, perfect neighbor herded her back into my apartment while I took my sweet ass time in the shower.

And that concludes my eventful Thursday, November 20th.