Oh the embarrassment.

There are some days, we all have them, when the fact that you even got out of bed was your first big mistake. Today was one of those days!

Having woken to minus 5 degrees and frost a foot thick rendering my car white as opposed to it's usual blue, I trudged outside, already feeling a little 'fragile' (reason unknown), and gingerly scraped the ice from the windows, not wishing to repeat my experience of a few weeks ago and damage the windscreen. Mission accomplished off I set to work.

At about the half way point I encountered an odd problem. You have to understand first that we live so close to the border with England that on each journey, to or from work, I cross over the border. This morning upon crossing into England I discovered that someone, somewhere in local authority, in their wisdom, had decided that despite the weather forecast grit would not be spread on the roads. Scotland had gritted but no, not England. Last winter it was the same....when snow fell there was a definite line in the road on one occasion where the snow plough and gritters had stopped at the border and presumably the boundary of their jurisdiction. This morning it was the same....in Scotland the roads were fine, I hit England and immediately had to begin crawling along on ice!

Journey completed and having arrived in one piece a cup of coffee was hastily obtained from the 'nasty coffee' machine and then straight into the business of work. Well that at least was the theory.

I unlocked the office and settled for the mornings work of cashing up the previous days takings, within less than a minute the fire alarm sounded! The manager and myself looked at each other, there was no way this was a drill, there was only he in the building with authority to carry out a drill, I locked the safe fastish and the six of us that had arrived by that time evacuated into the freezing temperatures, no coats, no coffee, no damn cigarettes!

The usual hoo ha of checking every one who went in was out etc. carried on while something struck me.....only moments before the alarm sounded I had turned on the heater in my office........hells bells, the alarm panel was blinking a light furiously, designating said office as the seat of the fire. The Fire exit and the office are very close to one another. I am not completely without common sense, I was after all married to a fireman for many years, you can't help but learn a little so we nipped back in and sure enough there was the heater, still only smoking at this stage. It was duly turned off and the more serious consequences averted.........we still had to wait outside in the cold for the bloody fire brigade to arrive and officially declare the building safe though.

That sorted we had lost precious time, come hell or high water we have to open ontime and for anyone who has never worked in a large store, getting it up and running is no mean feat in 20 minutes! We made it......... but the day only degenerated from there.

We were staffed by only 8 and one manager, this is a BIG store, and just about every demanding obnoxious customer in the area appeared at our door at some point in the day, each one of us seemed to have to give 150% for 100% of the time and it began to take it's toll. The place felt like mayhem for the main part, negativity set in and things began to fall apart. I needed 20 or more staff at any given point to attend to outstanding customer requirements and only had 8 including myself. We are generally used to stress in my workplace but hell......this was something else particularly for one who had begun the day 'fragile'!

Ultimately for me the wheel came off as they say, the umpteenth difficult and rude customer said the wrong thing at the wrong time and I did the unthinkable, something I haven't done in as long as I can remember and I don't wish to do again. I finished serving her, ditched my keys with a capable colleague, fled to the staff room and fell into a heap of pathetic tears.........oh the embarrassment, thank God the only person who found me was feeling similarly herself! I gathered my wits, had a smoke and went back into the 'throng'....FFS, I hate myself for 'losing it', I don't 'do' losing it, I 'do' appearing at least to keep it all together......Goddamn, why didn't I do as the guys do and go run the forklift into the side of a container or something macho instead of behaving like a pathetic woman!! Grrrr.

Oh, and PG rang in the middle of all this to inform me his car has 'died' yet again.......happy days!

Hey ho....tomorrow is another day :o)