Set to Stun

dear blog nation: i've been a little squirrly at work- and my chair has developed a really loud squeak. you can see how much this might upset me. plus the banana bread conquered me at work and sent me into a late afternoon sugar spiral. i'm so depressed. i have a 1/2 hour left and am with a pile of sunflower seeds restoring my soul. not unlike a woodpecker who burrows out a hole to store his nuts for winter. (it's true)

i started the day by accidentally setting the alarm off at work. good times. i innocently enough walked in and set my stuff down. but knew it was a bad sign that there weren't any lights on. then a beeping started like the sound of def-con 5 (or more aptly like the countdown on Lost- i understand now the contextual necessity for hitting the button every 108 minutes. just to stop the damn beeping- if nothing else. bcs like all castaways i was running on low sleep, had just woken up, and was running on a sip of diet coke and a hashbrown) i jumped back up and stared aghast at the alarm- knowing futility- there was no other way to stop it without the code. i stepped outside to look for help, then decided, as the alarm was now loudly sounding, to hit the 'delay' button. (bcs if nothing else i could delay the inevitable consequence of not knowing the code.) and then hit it again- hopefully in time for help to come. it stopped. thank god. for a good 5 minutes or so. i saw someone, then heard another person moving around. i figured someone had set the alarm to OFF. but then it started sounding again- loudly- i heard a woman on the phone talking as if she didn't hear anything and that there wasn't anything to worry about, like a nuclear holocost. i asked her what the code was: she luckily and non-chalantly said, 5694. i ran to the alarm's rescue, lest the place explode. and crisis averted.

i slunk back to my desk waiting for the police to come find me and admonish me for walking into a building i work in and setting off the alarm no one told me about. kind of not like the time i was in kindergarten and pulled the official gleaming red beacon- aka fire alarm on the wall. i remember distinctly the school superintendant asking me why i did it- i was embarrassed and so answered nothing, as kids do, by furitively shaking my downcast head and shrugging my shoulders- i could not answer 'bcs it was there'. by god! bcs IT WAS THERE! and i wanted to know THE TRUTH.
  
half way thru the day i was happy to note that no one found out about the 'incident' until the blonde woman approached me. She had the time i entered on a piece of paper and exactly where and which direction i walked- there was of course no escaping the undeniable fact it was me (which set me off on a paranoid tick of musing for the rest of the day about society and it's one day, total mechanization, where machines rule the earth and tell the people working at the phone company when to turn off your phone no matter what, or whether or not i qualify for a loan or when one day.... she politely ahemed and called my attention away from the termination of freewill back to the current problem at hand. she talked about the police being summoned and the bill they would receive and wondered why it kept happening in this sector and why people didn't know about the alarm- i thought oh god. i hope she doesn't tell anyone else. i hope i don't get fired. i breathe deeply and continue to sip on my trader joe iced tea and look as professional as possible. i hide the tennis ball and the picture of a possum on a wire in my desk drawer. i sit up straight. i think: blend in. blend in. not a word not a sound- and maybe another alarm won't sound.