Well, It’s Official – The Year of the Ox Blows

Yesterday was Chinese New Year which marked the beginning of the Year of the Ox. The Ox, or the Buffalo sign, symbolizes prosperity through fortitude and hard work. If by hard work they mean driving office workers into the ground with annoying phone calls and questions then by god they hit the proverbial nail on the head. Today has been a mess. If I didn’t think it would end with me getting booted from my job I would have refused to come into work today.

My lovely Tuesday started at 5:00AM when a dull pinging noise awoke me from my flannel sheet wrapped slumber. At first I thought it was coming from somewhere outside. But then, gasp, I realized it was coming from inside the apartment! (Exclamation only intended to replace the dun-dun-duhhh that accompanies all revelations like this.) So I stumbled into my bathroom only to find that water was slowly but steadily leaking from my ceiling. Knowing that there was nothing I could do about it at that hour, I threw a couple towels in the tub to stop the sound and went back to bed. Granted it took me almost an hour to get back to sleep because I was convinced the next sound I would hear would be the ceiling collapsing into my tub (which didn’t happen and here’s to hoping that is not what I go home to tonight either.)

But the rest of the day has been just as weird. If I didn’t know better I would have thought it was a full moon. The agents that were calling me were in rare form, being even crazier than the average travel agent. You would have thought we were saving the planet from an impending asteroid attack and not trying to plan someone’s vacation in India.

If this is how the Year of the Ox is going to be I want to state here and now that the Ox is a stupid animal and the only thing it is good for is grilled to perfection over a nice bed of coals.

Take that Bessie.

~The Office Scribe