I’m sure everyone has moments where they just can’t think straight or they have some crazy incorrect idea. I for sure have my dumb moments and when they happen I usually go a bit crazy. If I don’t realize the moment is happening, I’m going crazy trying to fix it. And if I do realize what happened, I go crazy going over it in my head. And then of course I go crazy thinking about how crazy I got over it. It’s a very bizarre cycle but in the end I usually can laugh about how I behaved.
Last year, I had one of those moments where I didn’t realize what happened until it was over. I’ve written about how I work when I’m out of town for Thanksgiving. I’m so lucky that I work remotely so I can do this and I work out the hours I can work with my manager. I usually have to change the hours I work to accommodate family stuff but I can either work extra hours another day or use my banked hours to make up for it.
But as I’m sure a lot of people know, when you are out of town and not doing your normal routine you can forget what day of the week it is. Last year when I was working the day after Thanksgiving, I started early and my manager knew that I would be ending early based on what the plan was with my family. But because I do start early a few days a week, somehow I got it in my head that I was supposed to start that early and I was going to have to use banked hours to make up for the time I lost. Everything went fine that day and when I was in the car with my parents on the way to the airport that night, I suddenly realized what day of the week it was. Because of my schedule, I actually worked more hours that day than I was supposed to, not less. I had a huge moment of freaking out in a good way about what happened and I messaged my manager to let her know what happened. It was fine and it all worked out with no issues, but it was still a truly dumb moment on my part.
And I had another dumb moment this week. It was also related to work but it was for my other (temporary) job. Because it is a contact job with a specific number of hours, I have to be very aware of how many hours I have worked and how many hours I have left on my contract. It’s not that hard to track and I have a good general idea of how many hours a day I need to work to get all the hours in before the contract needs to be completed.
But even with being on top of all my tracking, I freaked out when I was looking at my hours worked versus my hours in the contract because I thought I had to finish out my contract this month. If that was true, I would have been very behind in my hours and I would have needed to work almost double the hours I expected this month. I went into planning how I could accomplish this and probably spent 20 minutes trying to figure it out before I realized I should double check my contract.
If only I thought of doing that first because I discovered that my contract is not done this month but next month. And I was exactly where I should be in my hours and everything was perfect. I wish I had skipped the time I spent panicking and just looked calmly at things and made sure I was correct with the hours as well as my contract. That would have saved me so much stress.
But at the same time, even though this incident caused me stress it is now giving me some happiness at laughing at myself. It’s so silly how insane I was acting and how irrational I was since I just couldn’t look at the situation calmly. Looking back, I’m so glad nobody was watching me have that moment because I’m sure I looked like I was having a breakdown and trying to solve the world’s problems with math with all the post-its and paper I had used to work out how to do all my hours.
With all the things in my life that do stress me out, it’s nice that I can bring some levity and happiness to my life from my dumb moments. It gives me a moment to sit back and not think about everything else that is happening. I can just think about how crazy it was that I thought things were the way I believed they were and just enjoy that things are all working out for the better.
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