perspective

The day starts off badly.

My toilet is clogged again. I need to call the super to come with a snake.  Before moving here, I thought a snake was either a slithering reptile or an untrustworthy person.  I had no idea there was a third definition.

Next, the contractor who promised to come at ten to finish something with the sink pipes never shows up.

By eleven, I give up waiting and go to my new office to finish some meaningless assignment.  An older woman introduces herself and we have this conversation:

“Hi, my name is Muriel.  Are you new?” 

“Yes, I’ll be starting soon, but today I’m here to work on a training exercise.”

Oh, are you new to real estate?”

‘Yes.  What about you?”

No, I’ve been doing it for 26 years.”

“Oh, do you like it?”

“What kind of question is that?  What did you do before?”

“Marketing.”

“For how long?”

“Over 20 years.”

“Well, if someone had asked you if you liked Marketing, what would you have said?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s not like that in real estate.  No one likes it.  It’s just a way to make a living.”

I go to my computer — a PC, which I hate — and it keeps crashing.  I’ve forgotten all the shortcut commands, so everything takes longer to do.

My exercise consists of basically finding 60 different apartments and printing out 4 different pieces of information from 3 different websites on each.  It takes me three hours to do 10. That should be enough to learn what I need to learn. My biggest challenge is to figure out how to align the three-hole puncher and to print floor plans that don't want to print.

I come home and turn on the news. 

A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared from the skies on Saturday.  Still, there are no clues. No remains.  No blinking black boxes giving off signals from water or land. 239 passengers gone.

I am embarrassed thinking my day was bad.