Those Flowers Had Better Be Made Of Diamonds

I’m at the store where I work, buying ingredients for my wife’s favorite dinner and some of her favorite treats. I’m joking with my coworkers that are ringing me up but seriously explaining that I am, in fact, kind of the worst right now and my wife is rightfully annoyed at me, so this is an “I’m Sorry” dinner.

Coworker #1: “I mean… I don’t know. You can’t be that bad.”

Coworker #2: “To be fair, neither of us is married to you, but what could you have done that warrants cheesecake, strawberries, a homemade dinner, and a promise to clean the house yourself tomorrow, on top of all the apologies you’ve already given?”

Me: “Ah, well, the first thing you have to understand is that everything that happened to make her day awful was directly caused by something I did or didn’t do… that she reminded me to do or told me not to do. For example: an ant hill was built right beside one of our windows, so we’re battling a slight ant infestation right now, so we need to be really careful about not leaving food out. I didn’t scrape out any of my dishes from yesterday, and I left them right beside that window.”

Coworker #1: “…oh, no.”

Me: “Yeeeeah. She woke up to find ants everywhere. My fault entirely. Once she dealt with that, she realized our cats were fighting.”

Coworker #2: “Well that’s not your fault!”

Me: “In this case, it is. One of our cats will forget the other and become territorial if the other cat is gone too long, and we both know this. I’m in school to be a vet. We’re supposed to take them to vet appointments together to avoid this. I only took one cat because I didn’t want to deal with both of the carriers while walking. Now they have to be kept completely separate from each other for a week minimum, and we live in a one-room apartment with no way to separate them. She’s been scratched already.”

Coworker #2: “Oh. Okay, yeah, that’s kind of your fault.”

Me: “One of them peed on her game console, and now it won’t turn on.”

Coworker #1: “No! Aw, okay. I’d be pissed, too, especially if you knew it was a problem and just didn’t do the solution.”

Me: *Nodding* “Yeah, I totally screwed that up. And then…”

Coworker #1: “There’s more?“

Me: “I’m really bad about losing my keys, and we keep having to pay our landlord to change our locks and get new keys. So, my wife made a firm rule: keys go in the bowl by the door. Always. No exceptions, ever.”

Coworker #2: “Right, that makes sense.”

Coworker #1: “I need that rule, to be honest. I’ve lost so many keys over the years.”

Me: “Well, I… couldn’t find my keys, and I was running out the door to work, so I just took hers. And I didn’t tell her. And she had a doctor’s appointment. She had to leave the apartment with no keys because she couldn’t get a hold of me to ask where the keys were.”

Coworker #1: “Uh-oh.”

Me: *Wincing* “She was getting her broken foot looked at, with its also broken toe, after she’d walked on the broken foot for over a month not realizing it was broken. She’s under strict orders to stay off her feet as much as possible right now, and she had to come into my work, get my keys, and then walk half a mile home on a broken foot because I lost my keys again.”

Coworker #2: “…dude.”

Me: “I wasn’t kidding; I’m kind of the worst right now. I think if we had a couch, I’d be sleeping on it tonight. This all happened today.”

Coworker #1: “I think you also owe her some flowers.”

Yes, I got the flowers, too!