The Day I Called In Too Mad To Work

I am most definitely a morning person. If the early bird catching the worm was a thing for humans, I’d have a heckuva lot of worms. But I wasn’t always a morning person…getting up in time to get ready for work used to be an actual miracle. I finally changed my ways but it took a lot of fails to get me up in the morning. One of those fails was trying “unique” alarm clocks.

There was an ad in a magazine for a “never fail” alarm clock. Of course I ordered it immediately because: impulse control issues. And when it arrived, I tore open the box and 3 broken fingernails later…the alarm clock was before me: a plastic hen, sitting on a nest of eggs, with the alarm clock attached beneath the nest. I’ve never before or since set something up so quickly. Excited is an understatement: my life was about to be changed for the better; I was elated. I probably checked the alarm setting 15 times. I went to bed that night with a happy and hopeful heart.

The next morning, at 5:45, I woke up to the sound of that plastic hen clucking right in my ear. It was loud and I thought I was having a dream about living on a farm. But no. It was that d*mn hen, cluck clucking away. In a frightened stupor, I reached out to swat it. And that’s when things got really busy. The nest tipped forward and a dozen or so plastic eggs rolled over my bedroom. That was the idea: clucking to wake you and then the activity of gathering eggs to get you out of bed.

I scrambled out of bed with Mother Hen clucking away. I started frantically gathering eggs; they were everywhere. At one point, I gathered the bottom of my pajama top into a pouch and was stashing the eggs in them. I was talking to Mother Hen the entire time: “I’m working on it!”, “I’m coming! I’m COMING!!!”, “Bear with me!”, “Please STOP!”, “This is rude, YOU are rude!” and some unrepeatable words peppered in between.

Finally I gathered all the eggs in my makeshift marsupial pouch and dumped them in the nest.

But the clucking continued. Evidently I was missing an egg or two and Mother Hen knew it. I got up wearily to find the missing eggs. It was like an egg hunt in hell, to be honest. At one point, I put my head on my dresser and just yelled. I was living in an apartment at the time and I can only imagine what my neighbors thought: a crazy lady upstairs had fowls and was verbally abusing them.

Finally, I reached my limit. I reached under my nightstand, yanked the plug out of the wall and stomped across the filthy parking lot IN MY BARE FEET and flung the hen into the dumpster.

When I got back to my apartment, I was sweaty, disoriented, with tears of fury rolling down my cheeks. I looked at the soles my feet. They were the color of tar. I knew in that moment that I simply could not work that day.

I made the call to let them know. I didn’t say I was sick. I said, “I am too mad to come to work today.” But didn’t say it calmly; I essentially screeched into the phone, my voice scaling up on the “too mad” part. I was on the edge of insanity. The woman asked me what was wrong and I explained. To her credit, she did not laugh or try and convince me to come in. She said, “My God. Yes. Stay home and we’ll see you tomorrow.” I did stay at home and I was frazzled most of the day; wondering why I thought buying that alarm clock was a good idea.