5:40PM
I screwed up. I knew I would at some point. I was sitting there waiting for dinner and realized that I hadn’t written yet, and normally dinner is at 6PM and I write at 5PM. I messed up.
I really don’t like to be late for things, or worse, miss things. To be so late that it doesn’t make sense to show up anymore or to have missed my opportunity.
It may come from being traumatized back when I worked at Caterpillar. I was with my boss on a business trip to Trinidad. As a 21-year-old intern, living on South Beach, traveling to Trinidad, I was living the dream (or at least my dream). We had gone out to dinner with the local sales team that we were training. The local sales manager had mentioned that Beenie Man was playing in concert that night. I was a huge Beenie Man fan. I mentioned this and the sales manager wife said that they had tickets but weren’t going to go and asked if I had wanted to go. Oh goodness, I wanted to go. I asked my boss and he said no. Later that night, I was speaking with my colleague who was also on the trip, who was probably in her mid-twenties and was the marketing rep for the region. I told her that I really wanted to go and she said, “If you go (and get caught), you’ll probably never work for Caterpillar again.”
So I didn’t go. I stayed up late talking with her about how it wasn’t fair that I couldn’t go, I’m a grown adult, and who knows what. We were flying back the next day. I woke up to a phone call, I think from the front desk, asking if everything were OK and that my boss was waiting for me in the lobby. I had overslept! For some reason I didn’t hear the alarm and I had to scramble to get packed and run to the front. I can’t even remember those details, I’ve blanked out most of them. I get there and we have to hustle hard to get to the airport and luckily we made it. I just remember how angry he was at me and how angry I was at myself. And I didn’t even get to see the concert.
I go back to the apartment I was subletting in South Beach Miami and I go in and for some reason it is blazing hot—maybe 100F or something. More than that, something smelled absolutely rancid—I still cringe at the thought. I don’t know what happened as I had emptied the fridge of perishables. I open the fridge to find out that I didn’t fully empty it. The bottom drawer had a yellow sea of liquified cheese. I shudder to think of how nasty it was.
I called my sub-tenant and he said that they shut off the power and therefore the A/C and fridge and apologized. Then asked if I were in Trinidad, if I went to a Club Zen, I think. I said I wanted to but wasn’t allowed. He said he designed it and could have got me to go with the son of the president.
Story time over. Glad I wrote.
5:50PM
