An Ordinary Day -- 1

"Well, I admit that spending an ordinary day with Pamela Anderson might probably be a bit more exciting to most people -- especially if you're Tommy Lee. Still, I personally would find it rather irritating to get up every morning and face the question whether to have some plastic surgery done in the afternoon, to marry/divorce Tommy Lee, or to just sit in the livingroom and play with my breasts all day.
Anyway, to take your mind off dirty thoughts, you're not spending an ordinary day with Pam, but an ordinary day with me. An ordinary day like Tuesday, to be precise.

07:00
My ordinary Tuesday begins, ordinarily, in the morning. Although my consciousness for time does not start until 10 a.m. the alarm clock starts annoying me at around 7 a.m., anyway, which always is way too early. God, in his infinite wisdom, has clearly not constructed me for this time of day. Actually, some of my friends argue that the main reason why I'm in marketing is the fact that you can start a bit later than, for instance, in a coalmine. This, of course, is a blatant lie.

07:30
It is ordinarily at 7:30 that I recognize I should have gone up 15min ago. This is when I start tossing and turning, screaming "Oh no" for about 10 minutes, and throwing books at my alarm-clock; Could this be the reason that I'm single?

07:45
Still groaning and moaning, I manage to get up and open the door to let the cats in. They're locked out to spend the night in the living room because of their slightly annoying habit to chase some imaginative mice at hourly intervals, usually starting at 1 am. This is especially irritating if a) you're normally sleeping at night and b) the imaginative mice turn out to be your toes.
I then tumble into the bathroom for some minor freshening up (desperately avoiding looking in the mirror). I despise taking a cold shower in the morning because it would wake me up, something which my body definitely would strongly object to.

07:55
My cats start scratching at my leg which a) hurts and b) is an unmistakable sign that they want their food to be served. So my next task is to wash out the bowls, open the can and let the cat food drop neatly into the bowl. "So much for presentation" is what Garfield would comment here. Fortunately, my cats can't speak, so they just take a sniff and walk away to make clear they would have wanted a different food in a nicer presentation (some salmon with butter on a golden plate, probably). They do that every morning, and it has never worked with me, which goes on to prove that cats are quite extraordinarily stupid.

08:00
My favorite morning task: cleaning the cat litter. Luckily, now, 15min after getting up, I'm still more or less in a state of coma, so everything is done sort of automatically - which is good, because cat litter isn't something you would want to spend hours thinking about (unless you're rock group Nirvana, because then you write music - more precisely: noise - about it).

08:10
I'm dressed and ready to go. I just snatch my suitcase, close the door and lock it - just to open it again and put on my shoes. Then I lock the door once again and head to my motorbike.

08:13
Actually, my workplace is a mere 2km away, perfectly to go by bike, but since I don't believe in 100% perfection (because generally the last 5% have to be gained at 50% more effort, which is just not efficient), I have a terrific excuse for not going by bike. Another good excuse is the Dutch weather, which makes fooling weather forecasts into an art, being able to change from summer to winter in just 5 minutes. You don't wanna leave on your bike in summer and get in a blizzard halfway to your workplace, do you?

08:20
Here I am again, before the iron bars to the building. "Oh, yes, finally again, what great to be here" is actually not exactly what I'm thinking. But I check in, anyway.

08:25
I greet and am greeted by my nice colleagues and before I even get a chance to get to my computer, I'm offered a cup of coffee. Since I hardly ever drink coffee, and definitely not in the morning, and since I'm offered the coffee every single day for more than a year now, it is evident that some Dutch colleagues compete hard with my cats when it comes to being completely ignorant to recognizing behavior patterns.

08:35
The first meeting. I'm 5min late, rush into the meeting room, only to see that I'm the only one -- for at least another 10min to come. Since I do recognize behavior patterns, however, I brought something to read with me and start working on a report with my Psion organizer.

[cont...]