Card Chaos

The following really happened...

I was covering reception at work today. It's a shame I'm not allowed to tell you where I work but if you can just try and imagine what working at a reception desk for the day entails then you'll be able to follow me. It's a real shame that I can't tell you where I work actually because my employer does an awful lot of good work for charity which it doesn't like to talk about. It once saved an entire litter of puppies from drowning in a sack on its lunch break. When the sun comes out on summer days my employer is responsible. It's a real shame I am not allowed to tell you where I work.

All was quiet in the morning until around 11.30 when everything started to go distinctly boobs upwards. Suddenly the reception area was swarming with people asking questions and wanting this, that and can you effing believe it, the other. I had to go into the room next door to reception which I can only access using my staff card. My staff card that is made of gold and sings a joyful ditty at you compliments of my employer. It's a shame I'm not allowed to tell you where I work. I reached into the bag under my chair where I keep my wallet. No wallet. It could only be in one of two places. The toilet, or the room next door to reception where I needed to be, but where I couldn't get to without my staff card which was inside the aforementioned wallet.

After a brief flap during which I thought only of how I was going to have to cancel all of my cards and how I was going to have absolutely no means of buying any dinner I went back into the office to borrow a staff card from a colleague. I was still fairly hopeful that I would find my own staff card in the filing room next to reception. I explained that I had lost mine without going into painful detail about the whole sorry scenario and my colleague kindly agreed to lend me her staff card. She even asked if I wanted to keep it on the lanyard which goes around the neck to keep it safe. But I didn't. I'd just lost one card and I was 100% certain I wasn't going to lose another. Despite my assurances the last thing my colleague said to me before I left the office again was 'don't lose my card'. I wouldn't. As if.

You're probably ahead of me here. I went back into the filing room where fortune smiled upon me in the case of my own staff card. I found my wallet resting on the top of a box of filing. Opened but untouched. I put it away and found what I was looking for the people in reception who were still waiting for me to stop having a dithering nightmare. I put my colleague's card 'safely' in my lap. My lap which has reduced sensation due to something called a disability which I temporarily forget about from time to time. As I pushed back towards reception the thought crossed my mind that I should take my colleague's card back to her. It was a passing thought which I moronically ignored. I was perfectly capable of handing out the items to the waiting people and then taking the card back to my colleague. Except I wasn't. With still at least 398 of the 400 people who were waiting for me to get my sorry shit together I reached down to my lap to pick up the card and take it back. Not there. It must have fallen off my lap while I was moving back into the reception area from the room next door.

By this time it was time for another of my colleagues to come and take over reception for my lunch break. We spent the next 10 minutes looking for the missing staff card to no avail. I was wasting everyone's time and no small amount of oxygen in my floundering attempts to resolve this Keystone Cops situation. I had even been to the bathroom to see if it had slipped down into the depths of my chair somewhere, or even my person. This has happened before. I have found items under my cushion, stuck to my arse, and in all manner of other ludicrous places before now. Onen day last week I left a shoe outside my house and had to drive all the way back home, whereupon I discovered it had been moved to my doorstep by my cousin, who just happened to be dropping her kids off at my auntie's house because they were off school that day. It took some time to get into the bathroom to properly check if I had somehow managed to lose the card in any of these ways because when I opened the toilet door there was a girl there, sat on the toilet with her pants around her ankles. She apologised!! Well, she should have locked the door of the disabled toilet that she should never have been in in the first place, to be fair. I was so pre-occupied by the whole lost card scenario that I barely noticed her holiest of holies winking at me in any case. I just noncholantly shut the door as if the whole affair had never taken place.

Finally I had to admit defeat and went in to deliver the comically bad news to my colleague. Just on the off chance I asked her whether anyone had brought her card back into the office. They had. It turns out another colleague had been passing by and noticed the offending card on the floor in the reception area. Without telling me she had just picked it up and given it back to its rightful owner. I'm used to feeling like an idiot but this was taking it to a whole new level. My colleague had saved my bacon but not let me in on the plot. Well, my colleague would save my bacon because I work for an employer which once averted a full scale nuclear war between the world's leading superpowers before sauntering off out to break the world record for the 200metre dash.

It's such a shame I'm not allowed to tell you who I work for.