A very bad weekend

Friday - 9:20 am

Imagine being woken up in the morning by the solo at the piano of the guy who lives above you. Tom or Tommy or whatever his name is defines himself as a thirty-year-old with a misunderstood talent for music. I call him a forty-year-old with no talent for music, but I have always avoided sharing this information with him. The most tragically funny thing about this story is that the first and only time I asked him if he could avoid playing in the middle of the night, because 'you know, I have to sleep', he started a Discovery Channel documentary about people like me who has no respect for young emerging talents like him, who cuts the wings of those who have a minimum of genius, etcetera etcetera. Which is even worse than his nocturnal squawking. So I decided that ...

Wait. Wait! Why did I start talking about Tom?

I don't want to talk about Tom.

Good.

What was I saying?

Oh, yes.

Imagine your poor alarm clock failing to do its duty because it is anticipated by the guy upstairs. And imagine your mood when you wake up with a start and become blinking furiously to try to understand what the hell is going on. Your heart drums in your chest.

Ok.

Now, suppose to get up dazed and to trudge to the kitchen, asking yourself creepy questions like what time is it? Who invented the cold? Why isn't today Saturday? Obviously, immersed as you are in your inner monologue, you forget to lift the lid of the coffee pot and the coffee ends up spilling on the kitchen. Of course, you cannot let it go. You can't. Unless you want to spend the evening scratching off encrustations. So you start cleaning the steel and, when you can finally enjoy the coffee, you realize that it has become cold and you force it down.

Isn't cold coffee awful in the middle of winter?

Decided to leave behind the bad start of the day, you slip into the shower, impatient to be massaged by the hot water... when you find yourself in the middle of the North Sea, because the water heater, which you carefully turned on last night, for some strange reason had stopped working. In mid-February. In a bloody cold February. That cold which penetrates your bones and doesn't get away. That kind of cold.

With your red-hot, tar-like mood, you step out of the shower and discover that the last pair of dark tights is broken, which means giving up the black suit and falling back on the hazelnut one. I mean, it's not that the nutty one is bad. Far from it! It is a splendour. It just highlights everything. Even those five kilos you have put on lately and are trying in every way to hide.

Today you can't wear the suit in the office. You have to. So you put on that nutty one, fix your weird hair and leave the house motivated again.

A pale and hopeful sun is rising in the sky. People start their day. And let's face it... it can happen to anyone a bad day and you still have a lot of positive hours in front of you.

It's eight o'clock and you get on the subway car with the usual passengers.

Imagine it.

You have left behind a bad start, you are confident that everything will be fine, you enter the car, sit in your usual seat and relax as the car starts moving.

It's a magical moment. You stay there, observe the people, stretch your muscles and start thinking that maybe you can read the book you always have with you and...

The wagon stops.

Nobody knows why. It had just departed; you are still in the station.

You begin to look around as time passes and the people around you begin to fidget. After another 5 minutes of useless waiting, the doors open and a sadistic voice happily announces that there has been a breakdown and it is unknown how long it will take to repair it.