Thursday, December 10, 2009

Too Late

7:06 AM. That’s the time I tie my alarm clock each morning. Wow. Did I just write “tie my alarm clock”? I’m seriously starting to lose my good English because of the all the Arabic I’ve been building up on. (“irbot il mnabih” in Arabic literally translates into “tie my alarm-clock” in English, which explains but doesn’t forgive my incorrect use of English. MY FIRST LANGUAGE!) Let’s start over…

7:06 AM. That’s the time I set my alarm clock each morning.
It takes me 5 minutes to mentally wake up, 5 minutes to physically wake up, 4 minutes to make my bed (yes, I start the day by making my bed!), 5 minutes in the bathroom, 10 minutes to have breakfast, and 15 minutes to get dressed. If you add up all the time it takes me to get ready in the morning, it amounts to around 45 minutes. This means that I should be out the door by around 7:55AM, and at work by 8:00AM (as it takes a five minute drive to get to work). Yet despite my seemingly organized morning time schedule, I always end up wasting time and arriving late. Today was no different but by no fault of my own…

See today, I was on schedule, out the door by 7:55AM, I even power walked my way to the end of the street where I had Mika (my car) parked (it was the closest parking place I could find after circling the area twice yesterday afternoon). But then, lateness struck:

An old and falling apart car was double parked right next to Mika, making it impossible for me to squeeze out...

So, I climbed in from the passenger side, and hit the horn. I honked and honked and honked some more. The doorman of a nearby building heard me and came to ask me what the matter was. I thought “the matter” (me sitting in a car blocked from all three sides) was pretty self-explanatory and luckily, the doorman caught on. He told me that he knew who each car on the street belonged to yet he had never seen the one double parked next to mine. Great...

After another five minutes of helplessly just sitting there, late as I was, I decided to give up and walk to work. LATE AGAIN… :-(

3 comments:

  1. tie my alarm clock...............
    Ha ha .....like that.

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  2. I consider it quite an achievement the fact that u DON'T hit the snooze button!

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  3. Piece of advice: Never park ur car next to Ghassan's house ( I assumed thats what u meant by the end of the street) bcz the assholes in the nearby buildings always double park after they come home at night and find no parking spaces. They just guess that they'll be gone the morning after before u have to use ur car. Hehe, this blog reminded my how frustrating Tripoli is :P

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