I really did. It started when I turned on my cell phone as I was leaving the house, only to discover a frantic message from The Big Cheese, left about 11:30 on Friday morning (just as I was screaming out of my silly offsite meeting):

“Blah, blah, blah. Urgent! Blah, blah. Call me as soon as you get this!”

Um. Hmmm. I know. 7am on Monday generally doesn’t qualify as a timely response in a case like this.

So I made my way into the city, mulling over how best to handle The Big Cheese. I carefully wove my way through the piles of leaves and leaf sludge that have taken over most of our lovely residential streets (the rant about leaf pickup will be reserved for another time - that’s a doozy!), thinking, “I, uh, had a medical emergency… uh, and forgot that I turned my phone off.” Nope. Can’t pull that off with a straight face.

I parked at the train and found my way to the platform, hugely overcrowded as the 7:10 hadn’t yet shown up, wondering if I should just play stupid, ” Good morning, Boss. That meeting on Friday was a really good one. When will you have time for a briefing on it?”

Nope. That’s just sucking up in the extreme.

Sitting on the ferry, eyes closed, I had pretty much decided to blame the missed message on AT&T (’Hey, Boss, your message just hit my phone this morning. I am soooo sorry. Damn that phone company! Did everything get straightened out?”), when - SMACK!! The boat rams into the pier hard enough to send 10 or 12 hapless commuters flying. Yours truly landed on the deck before I even knew what had happened, taking a couple of random investment bankers with me.

I don’t know if Boat Driver Guy got up on the wrong side of the bed, or if he had a fight with his S.O. and was sneakily fed decaf on his way out the door, but just as I was catching my breath, looking around, thinking… wha’ the? SMACK! He did it again!

Well, geez! I didn’t need that.

I gimped into the office, tackled The Big Cheese (Went with blaming the missed message on AT&T - It worked like a charm), and proceeded to go about my cog-ly business. Then a friend sent me this:

Just as a word of explanation, this guy Brian is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers out of Louisiana and performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an e-mail he sent to his sister. Excuse the language. Any time you think you are having a bad day at the office, remember this letter… It’s a true story.

Hey, sis…
Just another note from your bottom dwelling brother. Last week, I had a bad day at the office. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wetsuit. This time of year, the water is quite cool, so what we do to keep warm is this. We have a diesel-powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of shit sucks the water out of the sea and heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps the water down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now, this sounds like a damn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints.

When I got to the bottom and started working, I took the hose and stuffed it down the back of my neck. This flooded my whole suit with warm water. It was like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my ass started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds, my ass started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony, I realized what had happened: the hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. This is even worse than the poison ivy you once had under a cast.
Now I had that hose down my back. I don’t have any hair on my back, so the jellyfish couldn’t get stuck to my back. My ass crack was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my ass. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the com, but his instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with 5 other divers, were laughing hysterically. Needless to say, I aborted the dive.

I was instructed to make 3 agonizing in-water compression stops totaling 35 minutes before I could come to the surface for my chamber dry compression. I got to the surface wearing nothing but my brass helmet. My suit and gear were tied to the bell. When I got on board, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to shove it up my ass when I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t shit for two days because my asshole was swollen shut. I later found out that this could easily have been prevented if the suction hose was placed on the leeward side of the ship.

Anyway, the next time you have a bad day at the office, think of me. Think about how much worse your day would be if you were to shove a jellyfish up your ass. I hope you have no bad days at the office. But if you do, I hope this will make them more tolerable.

I know, I know. It’s all over the net. But it certainly put my rotten Monday morning into perspective.