A Series of Unfortunate Events

mtfwagner
Apr 20, 2015
4 min read

I was going to title this "Strugglebus" but my last post was apparently called that. If that doesn't say something about me, I don't know what does.

It's been forever since I updated (although honestly I thought it was like 6 weeks so I'm a little proud to get this in under the 1 month line) but instead of apologizing for failing, I'm just going to tell you about my day.

A day so spectacularly full of failures that you cannot possibly fault me for neglecting this little blog.

Here we go:

Today was a bank holiday but myself and two classmates elected to represent our school at a "Festival of Learning" conference in Edinburgh instead of enjoying the day off. Full-on Allied Health Professionals telecommunications and media conference. Snazzy stuff. Already a bit out of our league. And RGU paid our transportation and everything so we were very much there on our best behavior to make the school look good. Remember this premise. Since Edinburgh is 3 hours away and it started at a normal morning time, we had to catch a 5:46am train. Being Michelle, I was struggling to be awake and running late, but Google Maps assured me that I'd make it there with 10 minutes to spare if I took the 5:34 bus. Once I was on the 5:34 bus, I realized that Google was not, in fact, directing me to the station, but just to a general "Aberdeen" area somewhere in the middle-ish of the city. I got to the station at 5:44. But I printed my tickets, ran (okay waddled... I did my first leg lift in a couple months last night and I can't really walk) through the gate (since it was wide open and I could bypass the turnstiles) and wandered onto the train 1 minute before it left.

Once the train was moving it was pointed out to me that I only took half my tickets from the kiosk and was holding not a pair of outbound and return tickets, but a return ticket and its own accompanying receipt. Thankfully I very much fit the part of confused, half-awake foreigner and they graciously declined their option to throw me off of the train.

We successfully reached the host university to learn that there was no sort of breakfast buffet of any kind. I did not eat until 12:45. Starving and sleep-deprived (because I obviously was up late watching the Cavs TEAR IT UP against the Celtics last night), I drank coffee at lunch. Never a good thing. Proceed to the afternoon sessions. We were incredibly proud of ourselves for being back from lunch early and first back in the room. 8 minutes later we arrived in the correct room, neither early nor the first ones there. Maybe to compensate for that failure, we sat in the second row. At this point I was both restless from sitting all day and incredibly fidgety from my rare encounter with coffee. So I'm sitting there, as the only presenters from our school are up front, messing with the hair tie around my wrist.

And then it shot out of my hand and hit the lady in front of me in the head.

Did I mention that this was a professional event being live-streamed online and viewed by some sort of public officials of influence? And that I was sitting in the second row with giant lion hair? I shot a lady in the head with a hair tie. And there was no recovering. I hid in my hair for the next 10 minutes trying not to either laugh out loud or die on the spot. As soon as the presentation was over, she turned around and handed it to me. Humiliatons galore. Other than another breakdown in the next presentation (in the room which we had been so early to before) which probably got us blacklisted by several important people, we survived the rest of the conference with some scraps of dignity intact.

Dinner time. I'm recovering from a cold. It was a really beautiful day so we ate outside at a pub in the city, and I got a baked potato and wings because, America. There's no delicate way to say this.

I coughed up a chunk of baked potato onto the ground. Not intentionally. Not consciously. I was eating, and then I coughed like a normal person who had recently had a cold, and apparently the potato had other plans, so it just shot out of my mouth. I am the world's least dignified graduate student. Thank God we were eating outside. Then I tried to find the bathroom after dinner. Every single bathroom in this country is on the other side of a labyrinth so it didn't seem strange when the door to the ladies room had stairs on the other side. Until I got to the top of the stairs and found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking (very confused) at a (very confused) cook. And that's pretty much it. I made it back to Aberdeen and my flat without being hit by a bus.

I just wanted you all to know that I'm as unsuccessful as ever at living life. In case you missed the unintentional shenanigans which are my daily existence, this was one for the record books. Hope you enjoyed. This is all obviously very tongue-in-cheek and it was a hilarious day, but it is, sadly, 100% true. If nothing else, I have this post to go back and read on days that I'm feeling extra disasterous, because it probably won't be as monumentally ridiculous as this day was. Good night. Go Cavs <3