B365V2.86 - Because I am an idiot

This is where I am supposed to tell you how things went today. Well.........

We learned I am a fucking retard.  So there's that.  And that even I need to sleep eventually, so there's that too.  But let's begin by taking ourselves back to where this all began, and where the last entry left off, with me finishing up my laundry.

So I walked back from the laundry mat, dropped my clothes off and proceeded to do the shower and greet the day thing, sans any sleep.  I took my tablet into the bathroom and fired up some Pandora.  The sign it was going to be a good day was when the first song that kicked over was Alex Chilton by The Replacements.  Oh how I wished they would have played some Big Star right after that.  But it wasn't too be, nobody but nobody plays Big Star.  Anyway I have really developed a love/hate relationship with the Replacements.  During there heyday they had a habit of playing shows fucked up.  I know some people consider this a cool thing, or how they were fighting against mainstream by not selling out.  I am not one of them, if I buy tickets to a show and the band turns out to be all fucked up and can barely get through a song, then I want a refund on my ticket.  Well as the band continued to spiral out of control their career together seemed to come to an end following a concert in Chicago, where inexplicably, they broke up depending on accounts, either right there on the stage or immediately thereafter.   I figured that would ruin any chance I would ever have of seeing them play, but then a strange thing happened.  They got back together earlier this year and were planning a tour and Pittsburgh was one of the dates.  Needless to say I rushed out and got me a ticket, just one, this was a venture I could do solo, no need having someone there messing with me reliving my teen angst riddled years, or as much angst as one can have while growing up in the sticks.  You can only build up so much anger in an area where the biggest concern is " Did the corn get high enough this year?"

So I found a ticket for the show after checking a few different ticket scalpers online ( the Pittsburgh show sold out rather quickly)  and the ticket I got was only about $10 over face value, even with the added processing fees and what not.  Then the day of the show gets here, I get a call on my cell phone and I don't recognize the number, but I take the call.  It is the ticket company telling me the show was cancelled.  I hop onto Facebook because nothing is true until you read it on the Internet, I go the Stage AE Facebook page and sure enough, they have one of those apologetic notes saying someone in the band was sick and the show date would have to be rescheduled.  If I did emoticons this would be big frownie face time, but I figured I have a ticket for the rescheduled date at least, perhaps Pittsburgh could be snuck in on a day before they left for the European leg of their tour.  Well, that didn't happen and they didn't come back from Europe as a band either, they split up again. So any chance I have of ever seeing them in up in smoke and with that the hate portion of the love/ hate thing was born.  To literally be within a few hours of seeing my favorite band as a kid ( I say kid, I was in the ballpark of 17-20 years old at the time) and have it snatched away because a bunch of alcoholics couldn't get their shit together for more than a few months before falling back into the same old habits and bullshit.  There, that is me going off on a shower tangent, fuck you Pandora.

So I climb out of the shower and most mornings I would have buckets of time.  It is about 7:15 am, there are days where I do not roll into work until 10 am ( I wield my management power with impunity after all) but those days almost always result in me being there a good chunk of the day, but with me needing to be free for lunch I figured I best get a jump start on the day.

I catch the 7:30 bus into work, and after I stop for a coffee at the new Crazy Mocha on Smithfield, where they have a cute red head working mornings and as we all know, red heads get bonuses to their saving throws versus charisma in my book, we parted with her saying she would see me Friday morning and I say you could bank on it, I trekked the other block to work and I was going through things like clockwork.  By 11 am I already had one of my two deposits done, placed 5 different orders, met with the Pepsi rep, met with the Everfresh driver and worked my inner office politics like a true statesman in securing hockey tickets for December.

See, the other day Ed asked me to pick out a hockey game I would like to go to.  We have and allotment of tickets for events at Consol ($2000 a year) as part of our 7 Up contract, but hockey tickets are not cheap, especially if they are in the 7 Up box, where they run $200+ per seat.  So when Ed placed the call into 7 Up for my requested game, he requested 4 tickets.

Now this is where my sly thinking comes into play, if 4 tickets to a hockey game show up in December, Brian is going to think they are his, by that point in time Ed will be in Florida and probably would have forgotten my request anyway, so I got in front of this today by tipping Brian off about the tickets and how I only need two (not 4 and not the parking pass) so when they come in there will be two extra seats.  As it turns out it was perfect, Brian does not have his kids on Mondays, they are with their mom, so the game I picked fits everybody's schedule perfectly.  What can I say, I got this shit on lockdown.  Now just need Brian McGee over at 7 Up to deliver the tickets and we are good to go.

Now we are approaching lunch time, I still have not heard anything about my lunch plans. I keep myself busy with bull shit work and keeping myself fully infused with caffeine, I had been up better than 24 hours at this point.  The clock keeps ticking, it is now almost 1 pm, still nothing.  Now I am thinking, maybe I dreamed the whole lunch thing, that the conversation never took place to begin with.  I check messenger on Facebook, I hadn't received a message there from Debbie since June for my birthday.  Now I am thinking I really did make this shit up in my head and I am turning into my mom or Brian Williams or something.  So I start backtracking in my head when this conversation may have taken place.  It wasn't on the phone, because I hate talking on the phone, it wasn't on Facebook messenger, it wasn't via email because Debbie has never emailed me about anything, that just is not a line of communication we use.  Then it clicked, she responded to a message about Steeler tickets my boss was trying to sell.  I scroll back to Monday on my feed and there is the conversation.  I would be such an easy stalking victim, just throwing my plans out there in public like that, but as I am reading the conversation the lunch date was the 27th, or  one week from today.   All of this for nothing.  Because I am an idiot.

By the time I left work and relaxed in Mellon Square for a minute or 30, I walked to a bus stop and caught a 65 Squirrel Hill to go home.  I sat down on the bus and closed my eyes and slept right through my stop.  I missed it by a good mile or so, my eyes popped open again just as the bus was leaving Schenley Park and entering Squirrel Hill.  So it is an additional 40 minutes or so till I get home, where I order pizza rather than attempt cooking and stay awake long enough for the driver to get here, and eat some pizza and breadsticks and then pass out until I started this little blog entry.