I won’t lie. On Monday, it took me until about 10 pm to find something that could legitimately be called The Besst, as Monday kinda blew. Airplane travel while important, time-sensitive work processes were being handled on the ground, sometimes waiting for me to land before they’d get answered…yuck. Layer on that the discovery of a fairly simple, and really stupid mistake I made on a pretty important spreadsheet and I was miserable. Purely miserable.

I faked my way through a business dinner smiling and laughing, but torturing myself internally. HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO STUPID? Too busy to check anything? Too full of myself? Imminent dementia? Would my customers ever be able to trust anything I gave them ever, ever again?

I was inconsolable until 10 pm, when I remembered that I hadn’t made what looked like a mistake. What looked like a mistake was actually purposeful, and directed from the highest levels. In other words, it was a feature, not a bug. It just took me four hours to remember part of a five-minute conversation from two weeks ago. When I reminded my coworkers, they went, “Ohhhhhhh, yeah! That’s right! Hey! You did the right thing!”

It’s the work equivalent of finding out the lab had the labels mixed up and you don’t need the rabies shots after all.

 (Note: while I was frantically trying to unwind this ‘error,’ one of the analysts I work with kept insisting, “No, you must have had a good reason to do that.” She was right. I should trust myself more. Sometimes.)

Which leaked over nicely into Tuesday, where everything went really, really well.

The presentation I was traveling for went really well. Met more wonderful people I work with from around the company. Had a terrific lunch at The Canyon Cafe in San Antonio. TSA at the airport was a breeze.

And then, I got on the plane to come home and it was maybe half full. I had the entire row to myself. Dad, Interrupted interrupted his very busy day to sweep me up at the curb at the airport and I am so glad to be home.

I shoulda bought a lottery ticket.

© E. Stocking Evans