Dude, if one more thing goes wrong...!!!!!!!!!

Have you ever had one of those days where if one more thing went wrong, you just might loose your religion, snap someone’s head off and make a small child cry for no reason other than to wield power over something for once today? Man, have I ever had one of those days. On May 28, I was at work trying to do some meaningless paperwork that someone whom I’ve never met thought one day would be a good idea to make us do so that we can have a reason to feel over worked and underpaid. I happened that afternoon, about an hour before clocking out time, to run out of those wonderful documents. So naturally, I head to the copy machine to make more so I can finish the day without any stragglers for the next. I put the paper in the machine and hit start and it tells me I’m out of toner and cannot complete my job until it is refilled. So I head upstairs to use the other machine and I tell the Business Manager that the machine is out of ink. She hands me a box of toner and says if I have any questions, to call and she will come down when she gets off the phone with FedEx. So, back at the copier, I open the box and examine its contents. Not too scary. I look at the instructions. Here was my first mistake: I thought that I, being a college graduate, having studied Greek and Hebrew with some facility, would be able to interpret the all too simple looking pictographs on the box. Instead they turn out to be ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics! And I just don’t understand Egyptian Hieroglyphics. So to make a long story short, around picture #5 is where things get interesting. Needless to say, the toner didn’t quite make it into the copier the way it is supposed to. There’s toner in the copier, just not they way the manufacturer dreamed it would be at the end of picture #8. Oh, and there is copier toner on the wall, the floor, the table and my shoes. It looked like the black smoke monster on Lost sneezed all over the room and left me standing there in the wake. I was never so mad at myself in my entire life. All I could do was stand there in amazement, looking at a pound or two of black powder falling to the floor like a blanket of snow across a plain. If only I had called upstairs the first time I tried to interpret picture #4, I could have saved myself some grief, some ribbing and my company a service call to the dealer who will undoubtedly have to charge us since this isn’t the first time someone has gotten the pictures all wrong. As I think back on the incident, I’m reminded that Jesus often told his followers that if we would just seek him out when things get sketchy and the pictures just don’t make sense, then we’d have better outcomes and more successful completions of our goals. Jesus taught us that if we want the things we do to have a positive outcome, then we need to make sure we seek out the advice of the one whose been down that road before. I thought I could accomplish the simple task of adding toner to a copy machine. What I didn’t expect was to be called on the carpet because I didn’t look at the whole picture and ask for help when I got confused.