Life Lessons: Nine Steps to Making it to Work on Time While Managing to Look Like a Complete Idiot

What do you do (on a day like today) when you wake up at 7:30 and are supposed to leave the house by 7:35?

1) Skip a shower (that’s relatively easy for me, I was never a huge fan of them in the first place).
2) Throw on the closest work-appropriate outfit you can find (and if you have an extra 5 seconds, toss a scarf around your neck for good measure…and to make up for the un-showered hair look).
3) Forgo breakfast (ouch).
4) Forgo packing a lunch…

…are you kidding me?! There is no way that was going to happen this morning. Not after a missed breakfast and earlier-than-normal dinner the evening before. I was beginning to feel (and hear) the hunger pangs raging from the mysterious caverns below my diaphragm. Be quick about it, you only have one minute left, my interior monologue chanted like a school bell. So I proceeded to step five…

5) Pack a ridiculously large lunch, because you have no time to separate it into more normally-proportioned Tupperware. This looks like: packing enough leftover curry to feed 10-12 mid-sized adults (and not bothering to remove it from its present Tupperware container the size of a beach ball). Packing rice to go with it (enough to feed a soccer team). And, finally, packing a salad to “get your greens in”. Only, this salad will have to just remain in its Costco-sized plastic container because you only have thirty seconds till go time. Oh, and don’t forget salad dressing. Shoot, you only have 15 seconds—bring the whole bottle. But what will you pack this “picnic for seventeen” lunch in? It’s too big to fit in the usual lunch pack. Take two seconds to think. Now you have 13 seconds to find a solution. Run upstairs, grab the reusable plastic bag you purchased for $1 at IKEA with your good intentions to be kind to the planet. Think for a another second about how the bag is so large it looks more like a tarp that could cover a dead body and how the bag is really intended to carry copious amounts of home décor items or pieces of unassembled furniture…not lunches. Shake that thought and put your lunch inside.

6) Leave for work with just enough time to enter the office, looking like a total idiot, with a lunch strapped over your arm in a bag that is half the size of your body and causes you to shift your weight to one side.
7) Try to explain what happened to your dumbfounded co-workers.
8) If this ever happens again, remember to enter work through the back door.
9) It will happen again.