Ladies and gentlemen, David Bowie.
Hello again everyone. I'm back with yet another monthly update on how things have been going with me. Before anyone asks, I had an okay Christmas. My dad and I ended up giving each other fairly practical gifts, which is fine. There wasn't anything I particularly wanted this Christmas this year. I'm just glad that my dad didn't get me anything I would've hate, like a blu-ray copy of TRON: Ares. I did get some gift cards to Barnes & Noble and Amazon though, and honestly those are the best gifts I could've gotten.
Anyway, it's actually been kind of a stressful month for me, mainly because of my current job. I'm still working in a retail store, and we all know how crazy those places get during the holidays. There have been two instances now where I've had to work seven straight days in a row from the end of one week into the start of the next. On top of that, I also had to Christmas shop for my dad, which is a task that seems to get harder and harder every year. One of my go-to moves in the past has been to get him some old movies on DVD, but since my dad pretty much just streams everything these days, getting him a movie on disc seemed pointless.
Of course the most stressful thing to happen to me this month concerns a library job I had applied for shortly before Thanksgiving. During the day off I had following the first seven-day stretch of shifts at my current job, I found I had gotten an email saying that in order to even be considered for an interview for this library job, I first had to take a sort of competency exam. This was not an online exam, but one I had to take in-person, and the site of the exam was a college campus located in an area I had never driven to before. On top of that, the exam was scheduled for a day I was scheduled to go into work. Maybe if I had gotten this email two weeks sooner, I might've avoided this little scheduling conflict, but as it was it was kind of dumped on me last minute.
So as it was, my only good option for how to get out of that shift was to call and say I couldn't come in because I came down with a bad migraine. I didn't like lying about such a thing, but under the circumstances what other options did I have? Like I said, this whole thing came up pretty last minute. Besides, I don't want my bosses to know I've been looking for a new job until I actually get a new job lined up. I don't want to give them any excuse they could use to cut my hours.
Unfortunately having to lie to get out of work was only the beginning of this ordeal. Remember how I said the site for this exam was a college campus I had never driven to before? Well in the two short days I had leading up to the exam, I did my best to memorize the proper route to this campus via Google Maps. I thought I had gotten it down pretty well, but during the actual trip I apparently made one little wrong turn without realizing it, and the next thing I knew I had somehow driven all the way out to a little town just outside the border of my home state. I managed to backtrack, and once I was back in the city I pulled into the parking lot of a Walgreens I found and asked one of the employees there for directions to the campus.
By some miracle I managed to make it to the campus well before the exam was scheduled to start. I even had just enough time to properly calm down from the stress of getting lost. Incidentally, I got the result of the exam this past Tuesday. I didn't get a hundred percent, but I at least scored enough to pass and make it onto a list of candidates that may or may not be called in for an interview. So hopefully I'll at least get an interview for this library job here in the next month or so.
Yet while I did do well on the exam (at least it felt like I did well at the time), my troubles that day still weren't over. Because I had gotten lost trying to get down to the campus, I wound up getting lost trying to get home. I somehow wound up in yet another town, though this one was at least in the boundaries of my home state. I found and went into the local public library, and they printed out a screenshot from Google Maps showing a possible route home. I followed the map as be I could, but after a while it just didn't seem right.
I did at least make it back into the city though, so once there I drove in the direction of home while following streets I at least recognized the names of. I eventually made it back to a part of the city I recognized, and from there getting home was easy. Once I returned home from my little odyssey, I hopped in the shower and tried to relax as much as I could during that afternoon and evening. The ironic thing is the stress from this whole thing caused me to develop a pretty bad migraine later that evening. I guess the lie I told to get out of work that day ended up becoming the truth.
