When It ALL Really Goes To Hell....

  To say that things went to hell when Todd was gone on business would be an honest assessment of the situation. Griz sensed the impending Apocalypse and devoured the recycle bins in the back yard, the horses broke down the fencing and all ended up together in one stall hosting the first episode of Kick Fest 2012, and Colt and I had Hot And Ready Pizza 4 of the 7 nights Todd was gone.

So on Friday morning, the day Todd was set to arrive back home, and the phone rang at 4:15 am I naturally assumed it was him, home early, phoning for a ride home. Or, someone was in a car wreck. Because, seriously, why else would anyone call THAT early?!! So, you can imagine my surprise when I answer the phone and don't recognize the caller, but he's talking to me about something I'm familiar with. Then I realize....this is work calling me? At 4:15 in the morning? Seriously? Then I think, "Something has to be on fire, right?" No. Not at all. The call went something like this, "Rikki. I'm so glad you answered. (WTF?) I couldn't get a hold of Joe (my boss). God, I'm glad you answered. (WTF?)" and blah, blah, blah...which pretty much resulted in "Get in here as fast as you can. We need to sell this gasoline and we don't have a certificate for it. Hurry!"  OK. Single parent (for 12 more hours), demanding job, a boss who's smarter than me and turns his phone off at night and not enough coffee in me to make a sound decision. Off we go!

  I leapt from bed and pulled on my jeans from the day before, grabbed my lunch, my kid, fed the animals, got some coffee and off we went.

  Sadly enough, even with a 4:15am wake up call, I still only arrived to work about 10 minutes early. Because, let me tell you: after the week I'd already had even emergencies needed to be planned out. What really ticked me off was that after this post-sunrise emergency, I arrived to find that there wasn't really an emergency after all. Just a miss understanding. A giant misunderstanding that forced me out of bed an hour early in a panic and caused me to arrive unshowered and wearing my clothes from yesterday. Happy Friday.

  Where the story takes a turn is when I start to work. The lab tech that arrived had been working feverishly on the now-non-emergency and left a lot of the routine work for me. I grabbed a cart and headed to the back sample receiving area where there was an operator adding more samples to the already huge backlog of samples. I recognized the operator, but didn't know him by name. Regardless, I start chatting him up. "How's it going?" "Friday, huh?" "Lots of samples today." You know, the usual. As we're standing there talking it felt like my left pant leg was cuffed or bunched up and it was bothering me. So, mid sentence with a mostly stranger, I gave my foot a good kick to reset my pant leg. This was my fatal mistake. Immediately following the mid-sentence kick a pair of underwear flew out of my pant leg and landed between the two of us.

  An immediate series of events played out: I had jumped up and thrown on my pants from yesterday, not checking first as to the fate of the underwear I'd worn that day as well, gone an entire hour with them riding around behind my knee and then with one kick, they appeared at the absolutely WORST time ever. I screamed, "Oh my God!", grabbed them quickly, pretended like nothing happened and stuffed them in my lab jacket pocket. Because maybe he didn't see, right? Maybe he was pretending it didn't happen. Maybe he'd blocked it out? Whatever the reason, he pretended like nothing happened, we said our good byes and I walked away mortified. With my underwear in my pocket. And it wasn't even 7am yet. Ugh. The awesome part about being a woman at a refinery is you're a major minority. Like 2 in 500. So, the likely hood this happened infront of an understanding lady coworker was, like, zero.

  The good news, however, is the lab tech who arrived early (who, thankfully, didn't witness my amazing powers of materializing underwear from nowhere) came back hours later from a trip out to the refinery and promptly reported, "I was out in the refinery and no one was talking about your underwear." To which I replied, "Were you expecting them to be?"...and he said, "Well, FYI, new like THAT travels pretty quickly. So, I don't think he saw anything."