It’s funny how accidentally leaving your wallet at home can turn what promises to be a boring, ordinary Monday into a boring adventure of a Monday.
I forgot my wallet at home, which I realized only as I was catching my connecting train at Jamaica into Manhattan. I had my monthly train ticket with me — I use it as a bookmark — and my Metrocard, but I had no idea how much money was left on that card. (I think the MTA designs them that way to encourage lots of panicked new card purchases and balances left unspent.) There was almost no money left on my card, as it turns out, although thankfully I did have enough to get me into the subway at Hunterspoint Avenue, the final third of my morning commute. If I hadn’t…well, I can walk to the office from Penn Station, which I can get to by the Long Island Railroad. But you can’t, as they say, get to there from here. I would have needed to turn back in order to catch another Manhattan-bound train at Jamaica…which, judging by the MTA’s online schedule, would have left me stranded in Queens until at least 3:40 PM. (I realize it’s a commuter connection, going one way in the morning and the other in the evening, but I’m surprised to discover there aren’t any trains going back to Jamaica earlier in the day. So I’m also doubly glad that I had that one fare left on my card.)
Luckily, I had some cereal and a bowl in my desk — the former in a box, not just lying around in a drawer, in case you worried — so I was able to have breakfast. And some spare change I found at the bottom of my bag meant that I got to have a small bag of pretzels for lunch. So, really, I’m not complaining. I didn’t love that the heat seemed to be on the office when I got there — I joked on Twitter that it was about 46ºF outside, and about 46ºC in the office, because there’s nothing like a little Fahrenheit-to-Celsius conversion humor to lighten the mood. Or that I did have to walk from the office to Penn Station this evening, this time with my laptop weighing down the bottom of my bag. Or that my headphones mysteriously stopped working — well, the left one anyway — which, before Jamaica, I thought was going to be my day’s biggest problem. No, I’m really not complaining. Because it was a surprisingly okay day. And although I had to walk half an hour with a heavy bag slung over my shoulder, I somehow managed to make my regular train home.
Somewhere along the way, I managed to do some work. And tomorrow, I get to work from home, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting my wallet behind.