Vzzt-vzzt-vzzt!
It was 7:58 a.m. The phone was ringing.
I shoved my hand underneath the couch pillow from where I lay in bed. The phone had time for one more vzzt! before I was able to answer it. The word that went “Hello” in my head came out sounding more like “Hrmmvm.”
Let me be straight here. I was not ready for this. Today was my day off. I arranged to at least get Tuesdays steady off so that I could be home for housekeeping/extermination inspections. Today that was especially important because my fridge is acting kind of stupid. So it was with considerable irritation that I listened to my supervisor explaining that she’d really like it if I came in today.
I’d had a two-day stretch of 16-room clipboards. That meant a minimum of 12 hours in two days. That sounds good, but anyone who’s done it before knows that housekeeping in seriously grueling work. I explained my situation—that I’d need another day this week to rearrange my fridge fix, and that since she’d called right on top of the 8:02 bus, I’d have to wait another half hour before I could actually leave.
“I’ll be there in an hour and a half,” I concluded after a little more “rrgl-rrgl-mrrgl-mrrgl”-ing. I raided the fridge, threw some random but wholesome food into my lunchbox (actually, it’s a small cooler), threw my iPod and ‘phones on my head, and got outside just in time to see the bus pulling up.
The commute’s most interesting feature? A cocky guy behind me with a lisp who was griping at his girlfriend misunderstanding directions loudly enough to hear through noise-cancelling ‘phones. I was happy to get off that bus. I tromped through the snow and into the building, put away my food, and found my supervisor.
“Um, what are you doing here?”
Um…what? “I made it here, like I said I would. Just waiting for my marching orders.”
“I said I didn’t need you today.”
No, she didn’t. “No, you didn’t.” I recounted the phone record.
“You said yes at first, then you said something else.”
“Yes—that I’ll be an hour and a half before I got here.”
“But you weren’t clear about it.”
“What I said was—” And this went on for about fifteen minutes before I gave up and went home, after asking the odds of getting called in/off tomorrow.
Yes, you read that right. They called me in.
Then they called me back off again.
I call shenanigans.