EMTs and the Unintended Consequence of Working Early

I really thought I was going to post on Tuesday. Now almost a week has gone by. Yesterday we celebrated Father's Day with Jen's parents. We saw X-Men: First Class, which I quite liked, and then we got pizza and ice cream at Lucky Pie and Sweet Cow. That's a good celebration.

This weekend I also attempted to rake up the cotton coating our yard. If Zeus ever tires of having Sisyphus move that boulder, he can have the poor guy turn to trying to rake cotton out of a lawn. When I was done, I had filled a 30 gallon trash bag with the stuff, and yet my yard looked like I hadn't done anything. Then it rained, and the remaining cotton has mostly dissolved or disappeared. Go figure.

Work has been difficult but enjoyable. I've been parsing rather ill-conceived data sets into matrices in order to display them as tables. Then I have to make them editable, reorderable, and addable and then turn them back into the same format as the aforementioned data sets. My brain has been working overtime. Sometimes it seizes up, but I have made it through the complex grids. I feel smarter.

Too bad that didn't help me on Friday. See, on Friday I went to work early in order to work on the complex grids. I arrived before anyone else, which is unusual. I went to turn off the alarm, but my code wouldn't work. It'd been a long time since I had to deal with the alarm, so I couldn't remember if I had to press a different key at the end of my code. So I started punching in my code and following it with a different key. Finally the alarm went into high gear, the kind that summons police officers and triggers an animal panic in a person. It certainly did in me. My hand started shaking and I started hitting buttons I knew had nothing to do with disarming the alarm. Finally I called my boss, who was in the shower, and he walked me through several attempts at silencing the alarm before we finally got it to work. I apologized and walked upstairs. Then my boss called me back. He told me that police and EMTs had been dispatched, because, in my panic, I had hit the medical emergency button. Oops. He said he told them to not come, but he told me to be prepared for some imminent arrivals. Thankfully the police never showed, but the EMTs did. I apologized profusely and they were thankfully understanding. I considered baking them cookies or something to apologize. It took a while for me to calm down enough to work. So much for getting an early start.