Perhaps the worst thing about today is that there really isn’t any good reason why it all went so wrong. Burdened by a near-total lack of motivation to do much of anything, I accomplished little in the way of work. Part of it is due to how humdrum and tedious my current task is, but it’s the same task I’ve been slaving away on — filling in new website content — for weeks if not months now. Today I was just extraordinarily weak.

I could make excuses, but I was just in a rut. Nothing went as expected, I couldn’t even remember simple things that I’ve had committed to memory for weeks, and the general atmosphere was just gloomy. Maybe the preceeding holiday weekend made it that much harder to get back to work.

Seemed like fate was destined to keep my morale low, too. This morning a client sent me an email saying that he never received the file he asked me to send him two weeks ago, and he copied my boss on it, so I looked like an idiot. Nevermind that I did send the file the very day he requested it, it’s just that the client’s company has a highly restrictive email filter and most attachments — of any size — don’t get through, and the sender doesn’t receive a message to this effect. Of course, I was completely unaware of this problem.

The guy wasn’t nasty in his email or anything, and a little later, a co-worker explained that he’s been dealing with the same issue for weeks and that the client almost expects this sort of thing to happen. That helped soften the impact a little. I sent the client a link to a URL where he could download the offending file instead, and requested a read receipt so as to be a little more sure of myself this time.

It wasn’t my day for email, I guess, because a weekly update message I sent to a side-work client bounced, and I later discovered that I had replied to a message he sent from a portable device or something, and you can’t send mail to it. I discovered this error when, ironically, the client himself then emailed me separately asking if I had any progress to report. So again I looked dumb because it seemed like I had neglected to send him the update in the first place. I explained the email address mixup, and he liked what I had to show him, so that was good. The guy is extraordinarily easygoing, but I was already bummed about things today and couldn’t shake the feeling.

I proceeded to get some work done but not as much as I had hoped. I was also highly irritable all day. The last straw was this evening when I rode my bike up to get the mail; a community security guard walking a foot beat called out to me that I can’t ride my bike on the sidewalk. I believe he meant the short brick paver path that leads from the main sidewalk to the bike racks. Honestly, this was news to me — after all, the sidewalk in question leads to the bike racks — but I called back an apology anyway. I mean, what else do you do?

I guess from now on, I’ll…uh, walk my bike up there? Well, I’ll at least look both ways for oncoming security guards. The whole strange escapade momentarily made me feel like I was back in high school again, where I largely tried to be as innocuous as possible in between announcements that I was violating some secret rule or another.

Anyway, I’m off to play some games for the rest of the evening, and hopefully forget about the wrong foot I started on today. Tomorrow’s a new day and I intend to make sure it goes differently.