How I (Unintentionally) Provide Amusement

I should really clean my room more often.

In my last job, my boss liked to give gift certificates to restaurants as gifts--for Administrative Professionals day ("Secretaries Day" is, I don't know if you know, not as politically correct as it once was.), for birthdays, and for any major holidays.

Anyway, last night I remembered I still had two unexpired Pei Wei gift certificates, so I sent a text message to my roommate, asking if she wanted to go out to dinner.

I admit it: I didn't want to cook.

When I arrived home, I started to hunt for the gift certificates. I found one of them easily; it resided in the precise spot on my desk where I remembered placing both of them. But I didn't see the other one.

The hunt was on.

And my floor was--and is, for that matter--completely covered with stuff. Clothes. Notebooks. Books. Boxes. My printer. (I don't have the room to fit it on my desk, and even when my room gets messy, I have a very clear path from my bed to my door. And I've never bumped my printer hard enough to do any particular damage. I just tend to accidentally nudge the tray with my foot sometimes.)

I looked through everything on my desk. Didn't see it. And then, like an anxious little mole, I started digging. Not on the floor. But since my floor is home to such large quantities of clutter, I determined the only way to verify the missing gift certificate was not on the floor was to clear off one corner, thus ensuring it wasn't there, and then shift all of the clutter to that corner.

My roommate came into my room to see if I'd found the gift certificates, and I explained the situation to her. She offered to help search as I told her what I was doing and detailed how I'd looked on my desk four times and under my desk four times . . . how I knew I'd had the gift certificates me with my little brother and I had gone to see Wall-E in Bountiful just a couple of weeks ago (we didn't use them then, because my little brother wrinkled his nose at Asian food, so we ate at Rumbi instead . . .)

Furthermore, I remembered pulling them out of my purse together and setting them both on the desk. As I threw around more objects and more clothing items, I got increasingly frustrated. Yea, verily, I do believe some actual growling may have occurred.

In a precursor to conceding defeat and either just making dinner or just buying dinner, I sat down on my bed, nudged a paper or two on the desk, and saw . . . the remaining gift certificate. It had been sitting on my desk the entire time.

(At this point, I almost complained about turning my room upside down. But then thought better of it, when I realized that I couldn't have maintained my room was right side up--so to speak--to begin with.)

In my defense, I was looking for the yellow of the front side of the gift card cover thingie (I don't know what you'd call it, it's certainly not really an envelope). And the side facing down was white.

I still felt more than a little stupid.

But at least it provided enough laugh therapy for my roommate to last two weeks.