Things Fall Apart

So I was dozing in the chair, having written 1,000 or so words on the book chapter that I recently got accepted, and I was feeling quite satisfied with myself. As days go, it was productive and relaxing. There was an invitation to a party this evening that I had hoped to attend, however briefly.

And as you know, dear reader, such moments cannot last.

The phone rang. It was a good friend calling to make sure I was okay. It seems they'd left multiple messages on my voice mail this week that I'd not returned. I explained I'd not received any voice mail messages. I'd been checking religiously because, as you may have inferred from the umpteen bajillion posts whining about things like giant applications and the like, I'm on the job market. The little beeping thing that happens when I pick up the phone to tell me someone was calling to ask for money hasn't happened. But the friend who called is one of the sort that you'd trust your life with, so clearly something was amiss.

As it turns out, there was a voice mail. From the phone company. Telling me my voice mail wasn't working. So only if you're the sort who checks your voice mail even when the thing that tells you whether there is voice mail or not is telling you no would you actually find out that your voice mail isn't working.

To sum up, I'm on the job market and my phone doesn't work.

I take this in stride. I curse the fact that I have to give my home phone number because my office phone doesn't work reliably but evidently cannot be fixed right now because there's a new phone system going in shortly (read: Christmas break). I think of all the SNAFUs like this that have happened in this region since I moved here - dry cleaners going out of business with my clothes in check, never to be seen or heard from again; landlords who won't make repairs; drivers who have opted out of thinking about lanes and turn signals (even paying attention to other people's) who have dinged my car - and I curse this place.

Then I relax. I can roll with this. And I open my e-mail to try and draft an e-mail to all those places I've sent applications to that won't make me sound like a hobo or crack head or some sort of unreliable sort when I explain that I can't get their messages right now because neither of my phone lines work correctly. And I find an e-mail from the editors of the book collection, revealing that they haven't actually secured a publisher for the book they've accepted the article I was dutifully plugging away on, but it should be any day now, and incidentally, the deadline hasn't changed at all though they can't even tell me what style the article is to be written in.

Entropy, dear reader, has wiped the smile off my face.