March 4th

I recently experienced a night and morning from hell.

I should have known it was coming since I’d been doing pretty well recently. When bad things hit me, they come in groups. No single bad thing can happen to me without another bad thing following closely in its footsteps.

Last Tuesday night I finished up my work around 11 p.m. (for anyone who works on the Equinox staff, they can tell you this is a great achievement).

Naturally, I decided to take advantage of the extra time I had made for myself and do the two loads of laundry that had accumulated over the weeks. I lugged my laundry bag down a flight of stairs and proceeded to shove items of clothing into the laundry machines, attempting to put similar colors together.

Now, I had a lot of laundry. So much so that I was convinced one cup of Tide detergent per load was not going to do the job. Therefore, two cups of blue liquid went into the machines and I was off, up the stairs, to start “Pride and Prejudice” and bask in my good fortune.

Thirty-eight minutes later I sang a different tune.
As I entered the small laundry room I became aware of the fact that each machine was still in the rinse stage and, as I waited, I became aware that a minute was taking longer than a minute should take.

With two minutes to go on each machine (which was ten minutes later in normal time) I began to get impatient. Figuring I could pry the machine door open, I set to work.
That door wouldn’t have opened for the Incredible Hulk.

So I waited another five minutes for both loads to finish and then peered inside the first machine, only to find what could only be deemed a clothing catastrophe. My clothes were covered in soap suds and the inside of both machines didn’t look promising either.
This was around midnight and I was now pissed at myself for thinking laundry at 11 p.m. was a good idea. But I sucked it up and loaded my wet, soapy clothing into my bag, lugged it up the stairs and proceeded to rinse out all the soap, by hand, and then squeeze-dry my apparel.

The de-soaping worked in my favor but the squeeze-drying did not. I therefore loaded up my wet clothing into my bag and lugged it downstairs yet again for the drying stage. I loaded half of my clothing into one dryer and placed a quarter in the slot. The quarter came back out. I tried again, same result. I tried a different quarter, nothing.
There are only two dryers in my apartment complex.

All of my clothing went into a dryer that was at its drying peek in 1980. At three in the morning, I resolved that my clothes were not going to dry and lugged my damp clothing back upstairs so that I could hang them up all over my apartment. I ended up going to bed around 3:30 a.m. smelling like soap suds with pruned finger tips.

I set my alarm so that I’d wake up and make it to work at 10:30 a.m. ...or so I thought I did.
I awoke seven hours later at 10:30 a.m. I had set my alarm for the time I was supposed to be at work. Swearing loudly enough to wake my hamster Henry, I reached for my phone to call my employer.

After an embarrassing conversation with a waitress who told me that, quite frankly, I ought to be embarrassed of myself, I hung up and got dressed. At 10:45 a.m. I was out the door.
At 10:46 a.m. I was standing outside my apartment with a sopping wet left foot because I had stepped directly into a pile of slush. If you don’t remember, last Wednesday was the first day of the slushy, rainy, snowy mess we had to endure.

I slid the entire two blocks to where I parked my car and made it to within three feet of it when another slush puddle did me in. My entire right side was soaked now to go along with my left foot.

I got into my car with tears in my eyes and drove to work believing I was going to have a horrible day.

But, just as the storm passed us, so did my shitty day and now I set both my regular alarm and my phone alarm to make sure I get up on time. I hope you’re having a better day than the one described above.

Lauren Danie can be contacted at ldanie@keeneequinox.com.