We Have Great Britain on Line 1

So I was sitting at work the other day, simultaneously arranging for travel, formatting a document I had moved from Word to Excel, and knitting myself an afghan (not an Afghani – and ooh, boy, if you’ve ever made that mistake you know why I double-check those directions now!) when I realized that the whole world depends on me.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? The whole world!

And yet there it is. For some reason, I – and you and you and you, it seems – have drawn the short straws here and will be required to toil until just moments before our deaths.

Now how in the wide, wide world of sports do you suppose that happened?

Was it because of Senior Skip Day, all those years ago? My mom said nothing good would come of it. Is this what she meant?

Was it because I laughed – hysterically, true, but I laughed – at a relative’s funeral? I didn’t want to! I bit the inside of my mouth until it bled, but I couldn’t stop; and worse yet, it caused my sister to join in. We hung our heads, hoping our jerking shoulders would lead those around us to believe we were sobbing, but it didn’t fool our aunt, who turned around and whispered, smiling, “I know what you’re doing”, which led us to both laugh and burn with shame at the same time.

Was it because I ate the recommended limit of sugar-free dark chocolates the other day, risking a testing of the sugar-free-chocolate-as-laxative theory I’ve been hearing so much about lately?

For whatever reason, the weight of the world is upon my freckled shoulders again.

So is there anything I can get you, while I’m up? I’ve got India on hold with questions on Outlook, Wisconsin is drunk and threatening to come over with laundry – and you just know we’ll be up all night – and some guy in Texas wants to fight because he thinks I took his coat but he didn’t even have a coat when he came in, so I don’t know what he’s talking about…

Sigh.