I had an anxiety-imagination crazy spell yesterday. It started with a simple enough email asking me to rate my recent customer service experience on a short poll. I did the poll (which really was very short at only the one question) because I have never contacted the company's customer service.
My initial thought was that I'd been hacked. That idea didn't stay long enough to really create any positive or negative feelings in me. It was the company through which my cat's chip is registered. Or was registered by Scott County Humane Society. I haven't maintained her chip registry. (Please, no angry rants, altho I will allow pointed sighs of disappointment.) Of all the things someone who hacked my e-mail could do, why would they contact a pet chipping company?
Even my overblown skittish imagination couldn't do anything with that.
No, my brain went in an entirely different direction: I burned the house down by not turning off my coffee maker and the firefighters found my wee demon (hopefully alive, please please dear lord let her have survived) and contacted the animal chip people to . . .
I'm not sure. Figure out who she belonged to? Figure out who owned the now smoldering ruins of a house? (I think the sheriff's department could answer that pretty quickly from property tax lists if for whatever reason it wasn't readily available on Google.) I really don't know why the traumatized part of my brain felt the only logical explanation was firefighters. I do logic puzzles for fun; I know this is not logical.
I couldn't let it go. It had me an absolute wreck all day. And if you're regular reader then you know I work a long way from home (approximately 57 miles). No quick popping home to check that I do indeed I have a home. And yesterday (which was Tuesday altho it really did feel like Monday 2: The Revenge of Monday (today is Monday 3-D: Just When You Thought It Was Safe)) was a long day (nine hours) so I didn't get home until a little after 8 pm. I cried big hysterical tears the whole way home.
And my house was fine. Just as I left it. The coffee maker was off. It has an auto shut off. It wouldn't burn down the house even if I had left it on. I'd even remembered to put the thermostat up so the a/c didn't fight (and lose) the 90+ degree heat all day, just when it got really crazy hot in the house.
Torii was also fine. Utter cuteness with more attitude than a full house of Kardashians.
Then only one who wasn't fine was me. All because some really horrible part of my brain decided I needed to up the drama in my life by a trillion points. I have very little actual drama in my life mostly because I've gotten rid of the people and things who need drama more than they need air. Except that I'm still stuck with myself, my brain, freaking out in strange new ways where no one has gone before.
Worst case scenario games have nothing on me. Survive a tornado? Cannibals on an charted Pacific Island? Space station explosion? Ho-hum, what do you have that's really scary?
p.s. My coffee maker is for reals broken. I turned it on yesterday morning because I tried some of the advanced troubleshooting. No luck. So I turned it off and unplugged it before I left for work yesterday. It could not possibly burn down the house.
p.p.s. Torii, maybe, with her determination to clamber onto the stovetop. She would more likely just turn on one of the burners -- with or without flame. So maybe burn a hapless pot or maybe just fill the house with gas. And because my brain is truly beyond understanding, I'm not panicking as I type this. The anxiety mode is not triggered.
p.p.p.s. I'm looking into switching platforms, moving this over to blogger.com. It'll come down to if I can easily move the old posts and I feel like learning blogger's eccentricities.
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