Don't You?

Don't you hate it when...

your son makes you late for work every day because he won't get up on time, even on the one day a week you have duty?

the same son gets off the bus after school carrying a handful of what you think is the wire and headphones to his fancy-schmancy $200 music/video-playing handheld thingy, which you discover a few steps closer up the hall to be his 2-week-old $200 glasses?

you spend 30 minutes at the optometrist while a girl who wants to leave at 4:00 starts trying to fix those glasses at 3:55, and asks two other girls to help her, and then says it just won't work, and then finally gives them back, and when the boy puts them on, the left lens is above his eyebrow, and the right lens is below his cheekbone, so he tells her they are crooked, and a different girl takes them to 'fix', and after she finally brings them back, she asks, "Has he had them a while?" and you say, "For two weeks" and she says, "Well, the string is sticking out the top", and you look at them, and the fishing line string thingy that attaches the rimless lens to the frame is sticking out a good inch right by the boy's nose, and the girl says, "I'm going to order him a new pair", which is OK by you, but you hope they are not going to charge another $200, because you got some kind of insurance thingy when you bought them TWO WEEKS AGO in case they broke, and shouldn't he also be able to keep the broken ones, by cracky, which he will be wearing with a string sticking out by his nose until the new ones come in?

the same dark-cloud son says not to cash in your lottery tickets and buy more when you stop for the PowerBall, because "This really has not been a very good day", and the minute you step up to the convenience store counter with each boy holding three donuts because Gummi Mary knows they don't get enough junk food at home, the cash register stops working, and the guy has to figure everything on a calculator which he is apparently not trained in, because he tells me it will be $18.87 for half a dozen donuts advertised as $3.49, and a $5 PowerBall ticket, which means that not only can he not add, he can not calculate sales tax, which is around 7.5 percent, and is not charged on lottery, so you have to say, "Umm...don't you mean $8.87?", and the very minute the clerk hands you back your change, you hear a little noise, and he says, "Wouldn't you know it? Now it's working again" ?

you go through the line to get a school lunch, only the 5th one you've had in two years, because it is chili day, and the cooks do not give you your two half-slices of cheese, but your second-cousin gets FOUR half-slices of cheese with her chili, and doesn't want them, and gives them to you, and you see that the end of each one is that hard yellow orange color that cheese gets when it is not covered properly, which means that it is leftover cheese, which is not permitted in the school lunch program, but you are so glad to have cheese that you rip that end off of each piece and stuff that cheese in your chili, watching your second-cousin dip her peanut-butter-and-syrup sandwich into her chili, thinking "Ewww, who would do that to their chili?"

your school computer will not let you into your gradebook program to take attendance and enter grades, and the only way you can get online is to use that dastardly IE instead of Firefox, because in IE, your home page is not set as the school website, which is cantankerous since it picked up a virus on Friday afternoon, district-wide?

the copy machine is broken, with a message to call the service man, so you go to the office to use that copier, and Mr. S is running a test, but he lets you make three copies ahead of him, and when you go back at 4:00 to run some more, the office is LOCKED UP (Mabel knows the special connotation of that phrase), so you take your work home and run copies on your personal copier, because you know you have the duty the next day, and you will not be able to find a copier that works or is unused, unless it is because it has not yet been turned on, and by the time you turn it on, it will be time to be outside on duty?

your small son leaves his new winter coat at school, in some room on the stage in the cafeteria where he has OT the last hour of the day, and he's afraid to go in to get it when you drive him over there after school, so you have to go in with him, and hope that it's actually still in the unlocked room, and not tossed in the bottomless pit of lice-y lost-and-found items?

I hate it when that happens.