Victim of a Good Night's Sleep

You wake up before your alarm goes off, without anything telling you to get out of bed besides the ringing of your mental clock. Consequently, you miss the six-second segments of “Matty in the Morning,” your choice morning talk show, that you are regularly able to catch between the ten to twelve snoozes you have grown accustomed to. Now you will never know what Matty said to Billy when he tried to plug his home cooking show.

Because you have time before work, you are able to eat a healthy and balanced breakfast of plain oatmeal, a banana, and a glass of milk. This means that the ten doughnuts you keep at your desk that you purchased at the beginning of the week will be untouched for the day. Your daily ritual of eating two doughnuts every morning will be thrown off, and you will have to give your two doughnuts to a random coworker so as to not become a glutton tomorrow. Now your coworker will think you are nice when you have actually been trying to emit a “bad boy” vibe lately. Why do these things always seem to happen to you?

For some reason, when you get to work, you are wide awake and feeling productive. So awake, in fact, that you don’t even need to have your morning cup of coffee. Little do you realize that this means you don’t get to enjoy your ritualistic morning coffee dump at precisely 10:32. 10:32 passes without a trip to the toilet, and you don’t get to read chapter five of A Walk to Remember, which you keep in your desk for such an occasion and have recently gotten rather attached to.

The rest of your morning feels like an out-of-body-experience. Instead of sipping coffee and going through the newest Thought Catalog posts, YouTube subscription uploads, and forums you follow, you are actually doing work. It turns out that you are pretty good at your job, but the price of the morning’s success is that you now have to catch up on Thought Catalog in your own time.

Lunchtime comes and seeing as you are not behind on the morning’s assignments as usual, you decide to join your coworkers for lunch in the break room This turns out to be a bad idea, as the conversation turns against you when you accidentally insult someone’s children while making a joke about onions. This could have easily been avoided if you hadn’t been so productive earlier in the day and were catching up on your work at your desk instead of joining in on the office socializing.

The afternoon does not go much better, as your boss sees what a wonderful job you did on the morning’s projects, and he decides to give you more assignments. You quickly realize that although this workload may be plausible for someone who has had a good night’s sleep, it is not sustainable by your regular living standards. To create the illusion that you have begun to work slower and that this morning was a fluke, you begin to browse Thought Catalog to avoid finishing your new assignments in a timely manner. Of course, your boss walks by, and misinterprets your internet browsing activity as an indicator of the completion of his previously assigned projects. More work is given out, and in your newly-frenzied state you panic and use your mental alertness and productivity to finish everything by the end of the day.

Before you leave work, your boss commends you on a job well done and hints that your responsibilities may be increasing in the coming weeks because you have “proven yourself.” You shudder when you think about what this might mean and make a mental note to try to be more disappointing in the future.

Rather than picking up some takeout on the way home from work, you decide you want to use your energy to make a home-cooked meal. You pick up ingredients from the nearby grocery store and cook a delicious meal from a recipe you find online. However, you realize that you now have a fridge full of fresh ingredients that will go bad in the coming days if you do not use them up, which you are not anticipating on doing because you never cook on a normal basis. What a waste, and nor you’ve got an extra trip to the trash chute you have to plan late on this week.

You take your normal after-dinner shower, and upon drying off and putting on pajamas, you realize that you are sleepy. It turns out that shopping for ingredients and cooking a meal takes more time than picking up takeout, and though it is only 10:00, you feel like you need to go to bed. As a result, you fall further behind on the Netflix shows you have been trying to marathon lately.

Fatigue takes over you as soon as you hit the bed, and you begin to doze off. You fall asleep thinking about what a terrible day you had and that you hope you do not get another goodnight’s sleep tonight.