Squashed weekend

You know how, when you splat a fly (if you're quick enough!) it's a sudden death, albeit there's a bit of a mess to clean up; ... that's something like I felt this afternoon.  Let me start at the beginning.  On Friday evening, I returned from a couple of good jobs at around 6.30, to find the controller on the phone, taking a rather complicated instruction for a job later in the evening.  As I listened, and watched what he was writing, I realised that part of the job involved a visit to an electronic engineer to whom I'd delivered many times before, about 30 miles away.

Since I knew at least that part of the job, and because the week had been a little straitened income-wise, I suggested that he get me to do it.  He was pleased, because it meant that he wouldn't have the bother of calling someone else out.  The upshot was that, by the time I'd met another engineer in the centre of a city some 100 miles away - the second part of the job - and returned home, it was 3.0 am, and well past my bedtime!  Since I had no special plans for Saturday, I didn't mind this, and it was wonderful to wake up to wall-to-wall sunshine, instead of pre-dawn mist and fog.

Then this morning after church, I called at the cashpoint before driving the last leg of the short journey home.  As I stood there, keying in my PIN, I heard my mobile register an incoming text.  It was my voicemail, trying to tell me that I had a message ... only there wasn't one, and no missed call either!  Puzzled, I mentally dismissed it as an electronic quirk, came home and thought about lunch.  Then the phone rang with a proper call.  It was the controller from work.  Now, normally I don't work on Sundays as a matter of principle.  However, he knows that I don't mind being disturbed if it's only to pick up something for delivery on Monday, and that was the case today.

I was gone only about three-quarters of an hour, and returned with one small box, to deliver about two-and-a-half hours' drive away in the morning.  The only thing is that, in order to get there by the required delivery time, I shall have to be up at around 3.30 am.  With this hanging over me, as it were, the afternoon has seemed somewhat artificial.  I'm not sure how I can better describe it.  I haven't been able to settle to any particular task, because I know that I won't have the usual length of Sunday afternoon and evening before me, in which to get to grips with anything.

The weekend was foreshortened at the start, and now with bedtime fast approaching, it will end prematurely as well.  It's just one more restriction in the haphazard life of a 24-hour courier, I suppose ....  I'm glad I'm not a fly, though!