That old familiar feeling

You know when you’re at work and your wheely chair won’t wheel properly because there’s Too Much Grut on the floor because it’s been raining for forty days and forty nights and you didn’t want to have Mopping Day until it stopped so the bits of dirt and rocks and very small porcupines that get dragged into the office on your shoes don’t get dragged in all over the Mopping Day floor? And so you put off Mopping Day until the bird returns with a bit of something other than fish in its beak? Like maybe a french fry, or a grade sixer? And so finally you decide to mop the floor at work because even though a bird didn’t show up with something land-based in its beak, you saw some guy with a huge white beard and toga getting out of a canoe on your way into the office and figured it’s a sign that today  might just be Mopping Day? You know that feeling?

And you know how sometimes after Mopping Day! mopping duties are completed, you’re all happy because your wheely chair wheels better, so you sit down at your desk and wheel yourself toward the keyboard and you’re really quite focussed on that Project you’re working on when suddenly something slimy starts tentacling up your leg? And you know how *normally* tentacles (or octopus arms, which are Not The Same Thing) are kinda cool and not creepy at all but when you’re sitting at your very land-based desk in your beached office and you know there’s nothing belowdecks but dust and archives, the feel of something tentacling its way up your leg is kinda disturbing?

And you know how when that happens, you try to ignore it for a few minutes but it keeps touching your leg and then it’s COLD and slimy and that’s just way too weird so you actually look under your desk expecting to say, “Oh, hello Cthulhu!” but there’s nobody down there who isn’t a *regular employee*? And then you think maybe you’re hallucinating and you peer into your coffee cup to see if there are any bits of paper with purple smiley faces or little stars on them but you don’t find any and then remember that the last time you had coffee at the office was before the weekend so the stuff in the bottom of your cup probably isn’t coffee anymore and you’re a little relieved that you didn’t absentmindedly drink something out of that cup that was fuzzy and partially sentient like you did that one time around Thanksgiving? So then you know how you get kind of distracted wondering why it is you haven’t figured out to look in your coffee cup at work before you drink out of it because that time at Thanksgiving wasn’t the first time and then you feel that slimy thing on your leg again?

You know how that is?

And then you leap up screaming and stomping your feet and you knock over your wheely chair and dump all the paperclips  all over the floor and start hollering “QUIT TOUCHING ME, YOU PRETERNATURAL HORROR!” and then realise that the whole time it was the cord from your mouse and not Shoggoth at all and now your co-workers aren’t sure if they should laugh or run and it’s ONLY MONDAY!!??

You know how that happens?

Yeah. That’s the kind of day I had today. And by ‘the kind of day I had today’, I mean “that actually happened in my office. To me.”