Sticker note attached to my apartment building's front door. Damnable FedEx. "We attempted to deliver......" Pudding brains.

Some English as a second language graduate called me from FedEx the night before. They were confused about the address and tried to deliver my brand new toaster oven to the wrong place. Desperation and panic coating their voice as the weather has been cramping their claims to deliver packages on time.

I truncated the conversation. Hold up, freeze. You people weren't suppose to deliver the box to me until my day off on Monday, why in the ever loving world of international parcelling did you try and deliver it to me days before that? Told they are not open on Mondays.

Me - "Are you actually asking me to believe that Federal Express does not operate on Mondays?"

Customer Service Peon - "This is FedEx HOME Delivery, our branches are closed Sundays and Mondays."

Me - "Arrgh. So what possessed you people to you gleefully make guarantees to my Pop that you would deliver it to me on Monday, not one day sooner or later?"

Customer Service Peon - "Um, I dunno."

Me - "Listen to me very carefully........"

So, I quickly calculated a compromise. Told them if they rang my buzzer after five I would gladly take my possession off their hands. Seeing as I adjusted my life to suit them, they were pleased muchly and beamed with cocky assurances that my package would be in my hands after the clock strikes five.

When my brain unclogged, I realised that my brief stint of morning shifts ended that day. So the meet needed to be changed. Immediately called the number they had just contacted me from. Deposited directly into voice mail hell. Growled, recorded an explaination that I was the fellow who they just talked to, please please please deliver the goods before two, not after five.

So with the historical parameters of initially only after five, and then correctively only before two, of course they split the difference and traversed the steps to my door at three. Top notch service there. Delivering my stuff in exactly the dead window of time. Is it National Idiot Week down there at the old FedEx offices?

Undoubtibly I will be seethingly insulting people when it becomes necessary for me to haul my ass into their retention center. The first pawn behind a counter to smile at me and ask how they can help me, or slacker fuckwit to uninterestedly act like I am imposing on his daydreams of raiding the snack machine, I will unleash the grumpy spanky protocols. I will ruin someone's day and possibly have them question their worth as a human being.

So, steaming, rifling through the crap on television. Finally happen upon a movie I wanted to see on IFC, Cube. People trapped in a maze of innumeral connecting metal square rooms, with razor wire deathtraps. Saw the tail end of it one night and was gonna fill my completist geek core. Power meltdown.

At this point I had ashed half a spliff. Stoned is the way of the walk. Started feeling the effects of the high just as all the juice left my crib. Stereotypical winding down noise enveloped my walls. I ask out loud who the fuck the wiseguy is. Scramble in the darkness for a pen light. Light candles. Get back to the phones.

Con Ed informs me that they are not in the practice of shutting off people's power in the middle of the night. Yeah right. Sell the kind hearted mega corporation elsewhere. But, beams of evidence that neighbors had electricity were invading my windows and animating my walls. So I knew it wasn't just a general outage. It was insisted that I must contact my super first.

Ugh. The super is a super dweeb. My tolerance for the i.q. deficient is, as you know, onion skin thin. At the moment of my call to the misnamed super, the insulation on my nerves was dissolved. Left a very shaky and unconvincingly veiled rage intoned message on the "emergency hotline" for my building. Listened to A.M. radio till someone mentioned the current time. Set the clock radio, luckily stoked with a fresh battery. And fantasised about fucking someone like a caveman before passing out.

Pillow like a magnet. Dammit, a rainy day. One of the few types of atmospheric conditions where I can possibly sleep longer than six hours. Now I have to wake up to try and wrangle in some help.

Tweedle Dee the super was finally reachable.

Stuper the Viking - "Oh yeah, I hoid from a couple udder people ovah dere, dat de lights is out."

Me - "Wonderful. So I guess you're heading over here now to handle it huh?"

Stuper the Viking - "Well, I'm in Brooklyn, dunno if I can make it out dere today."

Me - "I can tell you that you definitely will make it out here today and fast."

Stuper the Viking - "Alright, easy."

Me - "Don't tell me to take it easy, all I want you to tell me is the small number of minutes it's gonna take for you to get here and get my power back on."

Stuper the Viking - "Alright, I'll leave soon."

Click.

Somewhere around three the bathroom light illuminates. Scramble around, shit, shower and shave and I'm out the door for, ugh, work.

Greeted with a collapsing wall of poo. Fingers pounding the keyboard, frantically resolving one issue after the next. Good old bend over and take this corporate cock Saturdays. Floods of requests from engineers. Wondering why someone who gets paid three times as much as me needs to be babysat in order to make sure they do their job. I'd like to kick them in the teeth. Head damaged with constant phone ringing.

And now on top of everything else I felt prompted to write an abnormally long entry filled with bullshit. What a lime jello filled balloon of joy today has been.