stupidity – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Local radio managed to really irritate me during the drive in to work this morning. I’m not going to get into the details, because I’ll just get all het up again, but let me just say that there was some major performative piety bullshit going on on the radio channel I listen to this morning, and I just absolutely was not willing to deal with it.

But this story isn’t about that, this is about how weird my brain is, and it’s nonetheless necessary to include here because it establishes that I was fully aware of the date when I arrived at my destination this morning– which was not the school I work at, but another one, because I had an early morning departmental meeting for all the middle school math teachers and it wasn’t at my building.

As I pulled into the parking lot for this other school I got a text from another math teacher at my school, apologizing and saying he was going to be late because of car trouble. I texted him back, still in my car, and let him know that I’d seen the message. “Don’t forget we’re at <other school> today,” I said, and then hit send.

And then I immediately realized something: that it was September 11, not September 18, and that my meeting was in fact not today, but next week. And that, further, I had managed to go through the last several days holding the following two contradictory thoughts in my head: one, that the date of the meeting was the 18th– I am convinced that if you asked me the date of the meeting on Saturday I would have gotten it right. Nonetheless, the second idea that I was holding in my head was that the meeting was today, regardless of the fact that the week between the 11th and the 18th hadn’t happened yet. It was Schrödinger’s meeting, happening simultaneously today and next Monday until I actually arrived at the meeting, at which point the waveform collapsed and I found myself late and at the wrong fucking school at 7:30 in the Goddamn morning on a Monday, not how I intended to start the week.

The punch line: I was not the only teacher on my team to make this mistake. Apparently three of us went to this building, two realizing in the parking lot that they were wrong and the third managing to make it into the building and have conversations with a few people before the fact that she didn’t work there got brought up.

The guy with the car trouble managed to beat me to work.

Great fuckin’ start to the week, that.

Without getting too deep into my financial status, I will say this: I have spent my thirties paying off less-than-optimal decisions I made in my twenties. The good news is that I’ve been pretty good at being in my thirties, and while I had hoped to be entirely free of credit card debt by my 40th birthday at one point and won’t make that date, I’ll be pretty damn close.

I currently have two open Bank of America cards; one that was originally opened from BoA and one that was actually the first credit card I ever had in my own name and has subsequently been acquired by them. One, the older one, has a zero balance. When I started beating on it, the balance was five figures. The other card is my current “target” card, and a big part of the obscene raise I received with the new job this year has gone to paying off this card. I tend to send them money twice a month a lot of the time.

Furthermore, the paycheck I just received last Friday is technically a “third paycheck”– meaning that I already have a Bills Paycheck and a Mortgage Paycheck in January, so I can literally spend this one on whatever I want. When it showed up, I took what was left in my checking account from my last paycheck and immediately sent it to Bank of America.

Tonight, planning on making another BoA payment now that I’ve figured out what I’m doing with the extra money, I logged in. And noticed that the extra money I’d sent them didn’t appear to have shown up.

A bit of investigation showed that somehow I had managed to make a $150 payment to the card with the zero balance, meaning that that card now has a -$150 balance in my favor.

Bank of America is one of the worst corporations ever, so I expect shenanigans when I try and fix this tomorrow, if I even can, because of course I discover this on the Sunday night before a national holiday.

I’ll keep y’all posted.

Sigh.