Where Does the Time Go, and Why Did It Take My Coffee?

Excuse me while I vent a little on a mundane topic that has nothing to do with editorial cartooning.


Like most people, I need to leave the house at the same time every morning. I try to engineer my morning so that I can get everything done in the morning that has to be done before I leave without running late, and every morning, I run late. Everything seems to be running like clockwork at first, but then Time To Leave suddenly picks up speed while Things To Get Done somehow become way more complicated than they have any right to. I have a theory that Morning Time skips over any minute or second with a "4" in it.

Take this morning. At 10 minutes before Time To Leave, I've eaten breakfast, made lunch, rinsed the dishes, showered, shaved, dressed, taken out the garbage and pocketed my keys. All that's left is to pour my coffee into a thermos, turn off the computer, put on my coat and go. I should be running right on time, wouldn't you think?

So I pour my coffee into my thermos and turn the coffee maker off. I go from the kitchen to the office to turn off the computer. I return to the kitchen. Eight minutes have elapsed. There is a rule somewhere that posits that anything involving use of a computer always takes four times as long to accomplish as you think it will. Don't ever let anybody try to tell you that a computer is a time-saving device. Computers suck time big time.

Now with two minutes before Time To Leave, my coffee thermos has disappeared. It isn't on the kitchen counter. It isn't on the breakfast table. It isn't by the coffee maker, the sink, the stove or the toaster. It isn't by the computer. It isn't in the living room. It isn't in the bedroom. It isn't in the bathroom. It isn't in the laundry room. It isn't in the dining room. It's not in the refrigerator. It's not in the cupboard.

If you haven't guessed, Time To Leave has been and long gone by the time I've looked in all the places that make any reasonable sense for my thermos to be. I'm considering checking the garbage, even though the reason I took it out was that there was barely enough room in the bag for the coffee grounds, and certainly not enough for a six-cup thermos.

The thing is, my better half gets home before I do these days. And I strongly suspect that I'll be greeted with a question about why on Earth I left my coffee wherever he will have found it the moment he walked in the door.