10 Reasons You Were Late to Work This Morning

As a self-proclaimed night owl, I can attest to the fact that waking up early to go to work is one of life’s more difficult tasks, next to brain surgery and coping with tragic loss. Though my disdain for mornings has yet to cause me any major professional setbacks (none of my employers have expressed dissatisfaction towards me or the two bags I carry under my eyes each day), I have been a wee bit late a few times in my life. In fact, I think most people have, at one point or another, been late to work for some of the same reasons:

1) You set 20 alarms but all of them were set to “PM” instead of “AM.”

You never realize the extent of your self-depreciation until you prepare your series of morning alarm clocks, which start out with encouraging messages (“You should probably get up soon”) but quickly escalate into mildly offensive warnings (“You’re a worthless couch potato that deserves to get fired if you don’t get up now”). Unfortunately, none of these will do much good if you accidentally set all of them to PM instead of AM, which will happen eventually.

2) Three of your favorite songs came on back-to-back while you were listening to the radio and you had to stay to hear them all.

Shower radios are simultaneously the best and worst invention of all time, best because it can turn a boring 10-minute shower into a soapy dance party, and worst because it can turn a soapy 10-minute dance party into a 25-minute waste of water. Sooner or later, you’ll fall into the “just after this song” trap, after which point, the possibility of arriving on time decreases significantly.

3) You received a flirtatious text from your Tinder/OKC/real person crush and had to consult your girlfriends for advice on how to respond.

What starts out as a pleasant conversation between two strangers can sometimes lead to “Hey, maybe we could go out for drinks soon,” a question which demands immediate attention from whichever Facebook friends are online at the time. When the possibility of a date is on the table, work is hardly the first priority, though you might need to come up with a better excuse for why you walked in a half-hour late.

4) You couldn’t decide what to make for breakfast so you decided to make one of everything (pancakes, eggs, chicken kebabs, etc.).

There are days where I wake up knowing I can survive until lunch on a cup of coffee and a yogurt. There are other days where I wake up wanting to inhale anything that even appears to be edible. When that happens, I usually end up making a handful of things and hoping that one of them holds me over until the afternoon.

5) You fell and could not get up.

By which I mean, you collapsed onto your bed after getting dressed thinking that you deserved a 10-minute break, only to remember how tired you were, causing you to fall into a dangerous slump. Your whole body turns to concrete as you sink deeper and deeper into the middle of the bed. Thirty minutes later and you start to question if getting to work is worth the trouble of trying to relearn how to move.

6) You moved your alarm clock across the room the night before to motivate you to get out of bed but ended up becoming immune to the alarm and falling back asleep.

The most effective way to ensure that you won’t snooze is to put your alarm clock on the other side of the room, thus forcing you to either get up or throw things across the room until one of them hits the “off” button. The other alternative is to ignore the alarm for so long that the obnoxious ringing turns into more of a lulling background noise and you end up falling back asleep.

7) You had a premonition about a 30-car pile-up on your way to work and had to pull over.

Or, if you lack the Final Destination-esque foresight that puts you on a path of inevitable self-destruction, you could go with “I forgot to listen to the traffic report before I left the house and ended up in traffic as a result of a 30-car pile-up.”

8) All of your matching work outfits suddenly disappeared.

Sometimes, I wonder if the black hole that collects socks moves around the house sucking up other articles of clothing when we’re not looking. On the rare occasion that this void steals all of your professional outfits, leaving you with orange jumpsuits and overalls to choose from, make sure you stash some black shirts and pants in a separate location in case you need a quick clothing fix.

9) You catch a glance of yourself in your mirror as you step out the door only to realize your hair looks like a bird’s nest.

Or a ruffled haystack or a porcupine’s body or whatever fits the hairdo that shows up in the mirror. It’s hard to remember to do everything in the morning, including brushing your hair. Just be happy that you walked out without a brush instead of without pants.

10) You found something on the Internet that demanded attention immediately.

There’s a cat café opening down the street? Time to investigate for 5 hours.

Image via Shutterstock.