Phoning It Down, Part I

The way I see it, the weekend does not officially begin until you’ve crossed through the first doorway outside of one’s place of work. For most, it will be opening the door to their residence. For those with a hard week, it may be the swinging doors of their preferred Happy Hour haunt. For theory-killers, it may be a door-less environment, like the local park or the beach. But nit-picking aside, the weekend does not begin until you go through that next doorway.

And I was so close.

Friday was a peaceful one at work. Because of an amalgamation of events, our normally fill-to-capacity office was only flying at half-staff. Or 7 out of 40. That’s more accurate. This allowed me to leave at a timely 4:30, and drive home slightly before rush hour on a sunny day in the low 60’s. This is how all weekends should begin. Except for that one small point that the weekend had yet to begun, as I had yet to cross through that crucial prerequisite of a door.

My car door doesn’t count.

Making it home by 5:10 is a welcome change from being at class until 10 o’clock plus. I have time to relax, refresh, and maybe even catch Around the Horn for the first time in 9, maybe 12 months. I leave my car parked over by the state trooper’s cruiser (there’s an overwhelming feeling of safety when you park your car next to the trooper.) (Shouldn’t he be a Commonwealth trooper? Nevermind.)

I grabbed the mail before the ascent to the top of Mt. Apartment. I grabbed the mail so I could open it, giving me something to do during my Kilimanjaro-esque climb. The first envelope I opened – free stuff! Part of registering at Macy’s, apparently, included a Registry Closeout Gift from the store, where they send you a gift card that is a percentage of money spent by friends and family to celebrate your marriage, while a national department store chain cashes in on something as blessed as your nuptials.

Ah, the Holy Sacrament of Commerce.

But on the way up the stairs, I had a bit of a problem shuffling all of my hands’ contents. The mail, my keys, the cell phone, my bag, and hell, I even think I had some shoes I was bringing in from the car with me. Despite the copious matter of all of these items, I suddenly got the feeling that I had managed to drop the gift card one or two flights back.

Scrambling to juggle everything to verify this premonition, I started to shuffle my armload to search for the card. By this point, I was on the 3 and a half point of 4 floors – only 6 steps from me walking in the door and declaring it the weekend. Conversely, I was easily 40 feet above the ground. Of course, this isn’t what I was thinking when I accidentally dropped my keys, and the fell to my feet.

Or when I dropped my phone, and it bounced off the landing through the opening in the railing.

Hustling two steps to my right, I watched as my phone sailed downward and bounced – yes, bounced – off the mini-roof that sits overtop the entrance to the first floor breeze way. This roof serves one purpose: to make residents feel dry 42 inches earlier than they previously would have if it ceases to exist.

Make that two purposes.

Even though the roof prevented my phone from an untimely demise, this wasn’t over yet. The cell phone, after two miraculous bounces, began to slide down the incline of the roof. I couldn’t have felt more helpless. This was just drawing out the inevitable, and by the inevitable I mean the 42 individual pieces my phone would soon be in.Hold on, Moto.

Rather than descending towards doom, my phone stopped. In the gutter. My cell phone is in the gutter.

To be continued…