Dumb move of the day...

I went to work today for about 4 hours. There was a meeting that I had to attend and it was in the afternoon, so I took my time getting there. It was a nice day today, so I was not at all eager to go and get holed up in the office. It's not like I was going to be out having fun in the sun or anything, but I just was not up for the office. When am I ever up for the office? Yeah, good point.

At this point, a trip to the office is purely economic in every facet. I have essentially two options for getting there. There might be three, but there's no one near enough to me to make carpooling a viable alternative. I can drive or I can take public transportation. From a purely convenient standpoint, driving is the best option. If I drive, I can come and go when I please, and have the freedom to go somewhere for lunch or run an errand. If I have something to do like workout or play ball after work, I can divert my course accordingly. However, at nearly $4/gallon for gas, driving to work costs me about $16 a day, including bridge toll. If I take public transportation, it costs $14 a day. In addition, I am annoyed and frazzled from having sat in traffic for an hour or more. While sitting on the bus or the train, I might be sitting by some folks engaged in a violent lovers quarrel, or somebody else whose odoriferous emanations are offensive, to say the least, while they shout into their cell phone, but I can read a book or just "space" as I stare out the window.

Today there was another wrinkle to add to the excitement. My Translink bus card that has $77 of credit available on it was on BLOCKED status. Thinking that I had run down to a zero balance I put an additional $40 on it on Friday, but it hadn't posted by the time I got on the Dumbarton Express bus that evening. The bus driver was cool though. He waved me on and said I should straighten it out later. I didn't expect to have the same problem today. Nor did I expect to have that same bus driver. At first he gave me a hard time when the sensor beeped as it declined my card. "You had this same problem last week, what happened?" I tried to explain and he didn't look like he was buying it so I stepped back off the boss and started to call the customer service center number on the back of the card. (No, I didn't get a repeat of that other customer service rep. This lady wasn't nearly as entertaining, but was helpful, even if her answers completely lacked logic.) Homey eventually told me to get on as I guess he thought I looked sincere enough while I talked to the customer service folks.

But my dumb move of the day was leaving my laptop power supply at work. I now only have about an hour and 26 minutes of battery life left. I wasn't planning on going to work tomorrow, and I'm still not. I've already been on Best Buy's and Circuit City's websites trying to see if they carry one that I can use, since both of those are right near the house. I need an extra one anyway. I hate having to tote one around everywhere. I'd much rather have one that travels and one that stays at the house so I don't have to think about it. That kind of limits my ability to be unnecessarily verbose. Oh well, I'll have to be long-winded some other time.