it got worse

Just as I was leaving lab, after 11pm last night, I realised that I didn't have my wallet anymore. Then I remembered that I'd forgotten my keys and had been counting on getting home while my housemates were still awake. Luckily, I was able to call a housemate before he went to sleep and get him to leave a key for me. I also raided a labmate's change collection for train fare home. I was a little worried that the ticket machines wouldn't accept coins and was relieved to see that they did.

My labmate must have been selectively using all his quarters, because most of the coins were nickels (5c) and dimes (10c). It was kind of slow, putting all those coins into the slot and waiting for the machine to recognise them. I'd just got up to $1 in nickels when the machine beeped at me and told me it would only accept 20 coins per transaction. The fare is $2. I cancelled the transaction and started counting dimes to see if I'd had enough, grateful that I'd grabbed the whole pile of change, rather than counting out $2 as I'd started to do.

As I was counting, I was already thinking about blogging about how my day degenerated further and realised it would be a better story if I didn't quite have the right coins to get to $2 in 20 coins. But, I really just wanted to get home, so I was glad to find I had exactly 16 dimes and 1 quarter as well as the many nickels. Apparently the universe was thinking of your readerly enjoyment, though, because one of the dimes turned out to be Canadian.

At this point, I thought it was kind of amusing how sucky my day was, so I wasn't too miserable as I walked home. I was feeling much better this morning, too, although I came in early to try to salvage some of my ruined experiment and didn't get to finish it before someone else had booked the machine. I also just realised that I forgot to bring any money with me and I'm supposed to meet a visiting friend for ice cream later. I really hope my wallet is at the other lab where I last saw it. If someone had handed it in there, the security guard would have emailed me, but that email account has apparently been cut off because I've been slow at renewing my visiting student status...