Unusual Thursday

On any other Thursday I would have been in bed long ago.
Of course, this obviously isn’t an ordinary Thursday, given that I’m not in bed and don’t have any immediate plans to be.
This is because I’ve taken tomorrow morning off.
The upside of this is that I get to stay up late tonight and sleep in tomorrow.  The downside is that after I get up I have to write a check for a substantial amount of money, paying off the remainder of the earnest money on my condo.
Or rather, what I continue to hope will be my condo someday soon.
As for developments on that front, there may have been one today.
I had to head in to work for a meeting.  When I got home I saw that the mailman had been here, so I checked my mail to see if I finally got the “paid” letter I’ve been waiting for.
It wasn’t there.
So I called the collection agency again and explained the situation.  They claimed that the letter had been sent on the 28th, but I mentioned again, pretty angrily, that I still haven’t gotten it and that I don’t see why they can’t fax it.
The girl that I was talking to, Tara, was more helpful than the doofus I talked to last week and agreed to fax it to the mortgage company.
I followed this up with a call to the mortgage guy, though I got his voicemail and never heard back from him, so I don’t know if he got the fax or not.
After the meeting at work and before I came home I stopped to get a haircut.
When I walked into the place it was totally empty with no employees immediately in sight, though eventually I spotted – and was spotted by – a Hispanic lady in the back room.
She came out, asked for my phone number and entered it into the computer, and said, “Jon?”  I said yes and she turned to head back to the room she’d come from and said, “She’ll be right with you, Mr. Jon.”
Shortly after that a woman who looked like she might speak English without any sort of accent came out and said hello, then started moving toward the register.
Before she could say “Jon?” and lead me back, some guy came bursting in and stole her focus.  Evidently he was a “regular” of hers or something and managed to steal her out from under me, leaving me with the Hispanic lady, who had to finish up whatever she was doing in the back room before she could actually get around to cutting my hair.
The whole thing annoyed me a great deal, particularly given that the other guy was bald.
I mean, why does this bald asshole get to come in after me and steal the lady who speaks English and leave me with the one who needs to have the word “spiky” explained to her several times.
(I should take this time to mention that despite her lack of fluency in English she did give me one of the better haircuts I’ve had in a while.)
I probably would have been even more annoyed by the whole thing if the chick had been cute, single, and not 8+ months pregnant.
Of course, I did have a very quiet revenge of sorts as I chuckled to myself when she looked at the little soul patch worth of hair he had remaining up there and asked him if he wanted  “a little off the top.”
While my hair is not something I’m in any immediate danger of losing (I’ll happily watch my hair turn gray as long as it doesn’t get thin), I did nearly lose my work ID badge today.
I seldom wear a belt, so I usually clip the little pulley that my badge is attached to onto my pocket.  On my way out the door to head to my meeting I clipped it on, got in the car, and stopped at the Safeway gas station to fill up my tank.
I’ve cultivated a kind of paranoia when it comes to going places, one which requires me to obsessively run through a checklist as I’m on my way, checking multiple times to make sure that I have my wallet, my phone, my badge, etc. so as to avoid discovering too late that I’ve forgotten something essential.
I had, of course, run through the checklist when I left my apartment, but after I left Safeway I was focused entirely on my drive, knowing that I had run through my paranoid checklist.
However, I was vaguely aware of a nagging suspicion that something was missing.
I had gotten about a mile down the road before I realized that I couldn’t feel my badge.
I pulled into a parking lot to see if had fallen between the seat and the door.  It hadn’t, so I turned around and headed back to Safeway, where I was fortunate enough to find it waiting right next to the pump where it had fallen off.
In any case, that will do it for this unusually late Thursday night entry.