I posted this on my Livejournal earlier today, and I have decided to post it here also:

The last 10 hours of my life have been pure hell.

It started last night after my wife left for work. We had nothing in the house for dinner, so I went to the store to go pick something up. When I came home, I put my key in the door, and it would not turn. I made sure I had the right key, and kept working on it. It still would not turn. I ended up destorying the key trying to get the door to unlock.

Now, normally, this would be no big deal, right? I could just go to the apartment managers office and get one of their maintenance guys to fix the lock. Well, it was after midnight, cold, rainy, windy, and stupid me left my cell phone in the apartment. I walked over to the apartment managers office to write down their emergency pager#, and see if there was a pay phone. There wasn't.

I had a few choices in front of me. One, I could call their emergency number from a pay phone. Problem with that was, there would have been no number I could have had them call me back on. So, I did the next option I had. I drove to where my wife works, got on a payphone there, and called her. Her store was closed, so I could not get in. She walked out, and I let her know what was going on. I gave her the emergency pager#, and then I waited in my car. I was out there for over an hour. I was able to finally eat my dinner in there too.

To keep warm, I would occasionally turn the car on to run the heater. During this time, I started planning what I would do in case I could not get back into the apartment. Most hotels would no longer be renting out rooms, except for the cheap $20 a night nasty ass porn in every room ones. I would rather sleep in my car than go to one of those. I figured what I would do is find a secluded place to park in that lot and sleep in the car. I would have my wife wake me up at around 8am so that I could do whatever I could to get ready for work.

At about 2am, she left work. She did not want me to have to deal with this alone. She left instructions with one of her coworkers, in case they called. We went to the apartment to try her key, just in case. The lock would not budge. We went back over to the office, to make sure we had the write pager number. They had not called back in the near 2 hours since our first call to them. We decided to go to a Chevron station to use a pay phone before looking for a place to stay. She decided to call the apartments regular office number to leave a message and see if there was a different emergency pager number to call. There was. She called it and left her work number.

She called her coworker about 20 minutes later. They had just called back and were on their way. We raced back to our apartment. No one was out there, but we found him at the office. He said he looked in the lock and found that something had broken inside it. After showing him our ID to verify that we were the tenants, he opened it up for us, and the lock was replaced about 20 - 30 minutes later. I finally got to bed and fell asleep around 4am.

I got close to 4 hours of sleep. I usually try to get at least 6. I woke up a little late, showered, got ready, etc. I left with plenty of time to get to work. Well, there was a massive traffic jam on the Interstate, and I ended up being 10 minutes late for work. When I got in, I let one of my supervisors know what had happened. Unfortunately, I could not get time off, because someone had already called in sick.

I am hoping my day improves. I don't think it can get much worse.