Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day

My day began nicely enough. Slept in for 30 minutes and then managed to catch the train just as it was pulling into the station. Vacation time is evident not only in the fact that I can pick and choose where to sit on the train, but also that conference rooms at the office are readily available.

Yesterday's top quote, from Handsome Karl:
Let's hold the meeting in USA, so we don't have to walk so far.

We had booked Luxembourg, which is at the far end of a corridor. USA is at the beginning of the same corridor. And by "far end" I mean thirty meters away. Hardly far. Needless to say we held the meeting in USA.

And yes. Our conference rooms are named after countries. Its better than at one of our competitors, where conference rooms are named after rock bands. I've had a meeting in Iron Maiden. Now there's a perfectly ordinary English sentence.

Back to my day. I got some serious reading time on the train. JPod, by Douglas Coupland, again. Geek lit. As the train passed out of the tunnel from Södra Station I looked out over the gray, choppy waters of Riddarfjärden, under an overcast sky, while This Will Destroy You played in my headphones. I felt at peace.

Then I got to sit onboard the non-moving train as it stood between stations just outside Karlberg. Not so much at peace anymore. Not so confident comments from the driver over the PA system. "There's a problem with the train. We're doing what we can to fix it". Sent angry texts to Mah Girl.

Knowing SL, the train was probably displaying the Blue Screen of Death, or a "This train has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down". Reboot required. All is then well in the Mofosoft world.

My inital thought was that if we had to evacuate the train because they couldn't get it moving again, I would just turn around and go home. There is no way a day that starts out like that can turn out to be anything other than a disaster.

After twenty minutes we were on the move again. The train shook and rattled in oh so reassuring ways. But we got there. Hooray!

The day so far is parsecs ahead of yesterday, in terms of clusterfuckedness (it's a word!), despite the train incident. Why? Not really because the problem is smaller. Today, I don't really care. I have reached some zen-like oneness with the world. Or maybe I just can't be bothered. Who knows?