Got in early

I had to get in early this morning for an 8:00 a.m. meeting, so I set my alarm for 6:00 to make sure that I had plenty of time to go over the agenda beforehand and get everything ready. The only problem was that one of the breakers in our apartment fell yesterday afternoon, so I had to reset the clock before going to bed. Well, I made a teensy little mistake in setting the correct hour: I forgot that France uses military time (e.g., 7 p.m. is 19H00), so instead of setting the clock at 11:23 p.m., I actually set it for 11:23 a.m. Rookie mistake. Thankfully, my biological clock woke me up early (actually, I needed to pee, but that's biological, right?), so I got up, showered quickly and made it out the door with time to spare. The walk to the taxi stand was calm and pleasant, if not a bit dark. There was very little foot traffic, but Paris doesn't really start hopping until around 8:00 or so on Friday mornings, so I just enjoyed having the neighborhood more or less to myself. "I should get up this early every day," I thought. "I'd be so much more productive and have more time to get things done!"

The only thing that distracted me was the large number of drunks roaming around, which I thought was weird because all of the bars close around 4:30 and the alkies usually meander home right after. I was waiting for a cab and hoping that I wouldn't be late to the meeting when I checked my trusty wristwatch (thanks again, E&K) ... and realized that it was actually 5:00 in the morning. Yep, not only had I screwed up between a.m. and p.m., but I had somehow misread the clock this morning and thought that 4:20 was 6:20. Yeah, I'm that dumb. To make the best of a bad situation, I thought it would make sense to just go to the office anyway, so I've been here since 5:15. I've only been here for two hours thus far, but I can already tell that it's going to be a looooooong day.