An Alexander kind of day

I'm sure that somewhere along the way I read Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day to my kids, although I don't think I recall anything at all about it except that it was about a little kid named Alexander who had a really, really bad day.

I wasn't far into yesterday before I realized that I was well into an Alexander kind of day.

I woke up, more or less, and dragged my body into the kitchen for my morning dose of thyroxin and vitamins. For some reason, my eyes fixated on the flight itinerary attached to the calendar. I'm really not traveling until next month, so why I stared at the itinerary that was mostly covered up by this month's remaining days is beyond me. But I did.

As I read over the dates and times, I realized that the itinerary said I'd be leaving for New Orleans Saturday morning, 3 October, at 8:45 a.m. That can't be right, I thought in my still-too-early morning stupor; my meeting is Saturday morning. I need to be there on Friday!

Still somewhat hung over from lack of sleep over the past several days, I flew to the laptop, flipped it open, and frantically looked up the airline website. Special deal: Change your flight to a different flight on the same day, and pay only $50. No good for me; I have to change to the day before—and hope like crazy that I can still get a seat.

Getting a seat wasn't the problem, and neither, really, was the $23 charge for the ticket at the "current" price. The $150 charge for changing a cheap ticket tied my stomach in knots.

A few minutes later, my eyes popped open and what sounded like the logical half of my brain kicked in and said, "Hey, stupid, you made that reservation while you were looking at all the details about the trip. Those meetings have been on Sunday morning for years. Your room is set up for the same days as the flight. You have to be flying on Saturday."

I checked my computer for messages—any messages—that would confirm that the meeting was Sunday, but nothing on my computer gave me any help. I couldn't even find my hotel confirmation to see if maybe I had set it up for Saturday, since I knew I had made at least one change in it since I got started, and maybe that had happened whenever I had heard that the meeting was actually going to be Saturday. But no, nothing. And that had to mean the meeting was really on Sunday.

Back to the laptop, find a phone number, and try to talk my way out of the change fee. After 30 minutes of dialing repeatedly, I gave up on the number to help the "rewards" clients and threw myself into the fray with the "normal" people—where a nice kid named Mark answered my call on about the second ring.

The frantic nature of the call apparently hit home with Mark immediately, and while he couldn't undo the charges for the new ticket and the first change, he could change me back to the Saturday flight for only $23 more; the Saturday tickets had gone up, too, since I canceled mine. Big deal! What's $23 if it will get me to New Orleans on the right day?

I spent the morning in my usual routine of grading papers, which didn't go as smoothly as usual for one reason or another, not the least of which being the knot hanging in my stomach as I considered the fact that I'd increased the cost of my ticket by $150 that might or might not (and logically not) be refundable on my travel allowance. (I was pretty sure I could get away with the $46 in increased ticket charges; the original ticket had been pretty cheap.)

Even the dogs seemed to sense my frustration. I usually take a short break in the morning for what other people would call coffee, but since I don't drink coffee, mine is more accurately a slice of toast and a few minutes of fetch with the dogs. Sherman, who adores fetch, ran out to where I had thrown his ball and stood looking back at me as if to ask what I expected him to do next. Parker, who has become a pretty competitive little fetcher, brought back her ball about three times and then wandered around the patio with it as if she were lost. I finally gave up and went out to collect Sherman's ball and pried Parker's out of her mouth and went back inside.

I had a class to teach at 2, but I needed to swing by a framing shop to collect some certificates for an upcoming awards banquet before then, so I cleaned up and headed for the office. On my Alexander kind of day, the frames weren't ready yet, and I'd have to return later. I handled a couple of small tasks before I fired up the computer to check my email. Oh. my. god....

Several messages from the top was one from one of the other members of my committee, apologizing for having to miss the Saturday meeting. The Saturday meeting. The Saturday meeting!

By this time I really was frantic. I flashed an email back to the meeting organizer, who assured me that yes, the meeting was set for Saturday. Drat.

I called the hotel and changed my reservation, then went back online to the airline (I was far too gone by then to face the idea that Mark might answer again) to move the flight back to Friday. The good news was that the ticket price hadn't changed since early morning; the bad news is that the airline slapped me with another $150 fee.

I was still finishing the ticketing process when one of my students showed up to ask me if I was going to class, although I had asked them to delay the start of class by 10 minutes so we could use a conference room instead of the big, barren classroom I had been assigned for a group of 8 students. I was less than cheerful when I got there, and even less happy when I glanced down in a chair next to the lecturn to see that someone had obviously spilled a drink and just left it, balling up on the seat of the chair. I thought maybe my luck was changing when I walked back to a storage cabinet, where I found that the group that had left the drink in the chair had also left a lovely plate of brownies on the cabinet. At least we had one tick up.

Class went swimmingly and I was really proud of my students when it was over, but I was still pretty balled up over spending $300 on what could be considered nothing more than a Stupid Tax—money I might as well have flushed as spent the way I did.

I had one possible out: I had a paper that needed to be edited for a consulting fee, and working on it when I got home could at least get my mind off the Stupid Tax. I worked on it for a couple of hours before Garry got home from a business trip.

As I recall, the one last thing in the Alexander book was that after all, Alexander's day turned out okay.

And so did mine. I still felt pretty miserable about the Stupid Tax, but I had a ball watching Garry. He's starting back to college 10 years after barely escaping high school with a diploma, and he's excited about getting going again. He's taking only an introduction to college course, but it's such a foreign world to him that he's really enjoying it. Part of the course challenges him to learn to operate a computer, and he's really stepping up to that challenge. Last night, when I was just beginning to unwind from my Alexander day, he was in a chatty mood, distracting me from my work and the t.v. news but filling me to the brim with the list of long, if basic, new things he's learning.

So if Alexander ended his day realizing that he's got it pretty good, then I really did have an Alexander kind of day.