Misconception
I walked into my boss's office at about 10:00, half an hour "late for work". I was holding and sipping from a 32-oz Pepsi cup. I smiled. I asked if he wouldn't mind unlocking my office so I can go into it and do my job. He cheerfully obliges. I apologize for being late. He says "ah, no problem."
Maybe he thought I had overslept, and then had gone over to DenMart anyways to buy refreshments before moseying on over to work. Maybe he's annoyed that I still haven't submitted the KEY REQUEST FORM that sits next to the stack of books at my desk so that he wouldn't have to let me in anymore. Maybe he's annoyed that I'm trying to pull a fast one by wandering in so nonchalantly so late. Maybe I make too many assumptions.
If he had asked me about it, and I had felt comfortable telling him, he would have found out that I got less than three hours of sleep last night due to a nasty teacher-fabricated glitch in a programming assignment, that today is my veryincrediblysignificantother's birthday and I have no gifts, no flowers, no cards, no cake, and not even any energy to play her a love song on my pathetically disused guitar, or show her how much she really means to me, that I feel like total crap, hungry, sick, and so very tired, that when I saw her this morning she was happy and I was sore, bleary-eyed and grumpy and I promised last week that this wouldn't happen and now I feel terrible, that my drink was actually warm, flat, diluted Mountain Dew leftover from the night before, that I don't have $30 in cold hard cash that I can just whip out and hand to the key office as a "DEPOSIT", and that I was late because I was looking for the pager he gave me last week that I have misplaced.
Things tend to even out in the long run, maybe that's why he hasn't wanted to fire me yet, and I can postpone my sweetheart's birthday till next week like she suggests but it just isn't the same. I didn't even finish the stupid assignment. Yesterday I had so many plans...today is all wrong.