once in not so a blue moon, i encounter what i call day killers. these are circumstances, people or emotions that just mess up my day totally. in addition to spoiling my day, these day killers ensure i find myself unable to recover the day. i end up accounting for such a day as a loss. such stuff kill my day in the sense that only a nap can recover it. in other words i have to sleep and wake up in the course of that day to make it productive, just like a new day. otherwise i have to wait till the next day to pick up life.

waking up in the morning from a terrible nightmare definitely tops the list. some of these are horrors that give me a throbbing headache, which apparently stays put for the rest of the day. some of them are plain crazy, a common one being wrenching nails from a wall with my teeth or working myself tired a whole night trying to find my way out of an eerie maze or digging trenches to contain the floods.

missing out the alarm in the morning coz of heavy sleep is another day killer. especially when i have an important appointment and i wake up an hour or more later. it is worse when i hear the damn thing but i switch it off unconsciously. some form of conditional response. my hand is used to reaching out from the heap of warm beddings and skillfully maneuvering through the snow, find some ice cream in the form of the alarm button, pressing it and triumphantly retreating to the igloo to savor the delicacy of a morning sleep.

the conditioning had replaced the constant smacking of the alarm which left my hand aching and the occasional smashing against the wall. that’s how i lost my first cell phone. this made me relocate the alarm to weird places like under the bedside table or under the bed or inside the wardrobe. at first it worked, but the morning gymnastics of nabbing the intrusive spy turned dangerous as the sleuth in me working 99.9 percent asleep severally suffered grievous body harm. the alarm had to go to its bedside watchtower! after alarm relocation, the devious mechanism in me connived with the ears to be ignoring the melody all the same, especially when i have important assignments. i end up waking hours later with a back ache to boot.

another morning day killer is when i wake up and find that kenya power and lighting company has decided to challenge god’s edict of ‘let there be light’. there are alternatives but i am yet to find an effective one for un-ironed clothes. this collusion happens when i fail to iron on a sunday or the previous evening and i have a presentation or an interview. possibility thinking gets challenged, its just a matter of seconds and the lights are back. of course that does not happen and i have to crisscross town impulse buying formal clad and looking for an open dry cleaning service to get them straightened up. if the appointment is early in the morning, the tongue and the cell phone gets to work to negotiate a few hours or another day. but with the mind at a freeze, it is like reading a book with no cover and lots of nibbled out pages!

bosses do kill their employees’ days too! you are upbeat in the morning, feeling good and gorgeous, armed with the report whose deadline is today. you pass it to your boss with a smile and she smiles back approvingly. you rush back to your desk feeling king solomon. you grab a cup of coffee since you spent most of the night polishing up and colourfully laying out the report.

before you can settle for the day, your boss calls you to her office and kills your day! the nicely formatted report is now full of ugly red markings, all these ?!@*??!! characters combined and implied. nearly all sentences have been cancelled and indecipherable writings have replaced your favourite font.

with the handing back of the report, the boss opens your x-files in her mind and spats to you all the mistakes you have ever done since you signed the dotted line. no chance for explanations, you are supposed to hand over the report in an hour’s time. in many other instances than this one, you feel micromanaged. as you sit down to redo the report, you wonder why she didn’t do it herself, she has rewritten all over it anyway! nevertheless she is your boss, and you asked for it. you just swallow hard that your day was killed and you long for a fresh day. if only you could take a nap!