Seven things that can throw your day into an absolute spiral: Mel Buttle

Missing bin day, leaving your phone at home, they’re the things that can make or break a day, says Mel Buttle who shares the life events that can throw your day into a spiral.

I missed bin day. I’ve had a brutal week of piling up rubbish shamefully behind my agape, overflowing bin, and as the flies intensified so did the realisation of the magnitude of what I’d done.

Yes, to answer your question, I did hear the roar of the garbage truck, but I wasn’t able to wake up quickly enough to run downstairs and yank the bin out to the kerb. I was too deeply asleep, stuck in a dream about a house where you could swim from room to room.

I told my friend about the oversight with the bin, who quite frankly didn’t deliver the correct tone, amount, or style of sympathy that I was seeking. Instead, I got rebuffed with an all-purpose “well there are worse things that could’ve happened”.

She’s right of course there are, but I think there are certain events, the weight of which feels disproportionately large, compared to the minor inconvenience of the inciting incident. I’m halfway to a PhD thesis there.

It got me thinking about other things that can throw your day into a spiral. Here’s my list:

■ Leaving your phone at home. Brutal. I think what’s even more heartbreaking is when you get home after a day of no comfort scrolling and no maps and you find that you’ve only missed one call from yourself at work, two texts and that’s it. It’s slightly crushing isn’t it?

■ It always seems to happen when you’re already low on pasta but it drives me nuts when you’re draining pasta and four perfectly good ravioli slip out into the sink. That’s a quarter of your dinner literally down the drain. Well, unless you’re a frugal gal like myself and still eat them, muttering to yourself, “heat kills bacteria”.

Mel Buttle shares the things that can make your day spiral.

■ I’m not great with passwords, this week my phone hasn’t recognised my face either, it’s time to look into a serum I feel. One of my password issues is when you’ve forgotten your password and during the resetting process you enter what you think is a great new password, to receive the following error message, “This is an old password, please choose a new one”. Well, if you knew what I was trying to do you should’ve let me in! Sure, I’ve left off a capital letter here or an umlaut there. There should be an option to tick, “If I’m over 40 and I’m in the ballpark please just let me into my Dominos account, as it’s very likely just me.”

■ When someone says, “You’re more than welcome to attend”, this always feels like an afterthought of an invite, or that somehow you’re not really more than welcome at all. What I hear is, “You can come if you insist”, well that’s how it feels.

■ This one is very personal. When the ice cream machine at a certain fast food outlet is being cleaned, which seems to be very often. You could perform surgery in said machines with how clean they are.

■ On the topic of treats, the rollercoaster that is forgetting you’d bought a packet of Tim Tams, then finding the packet at the back of the fridge behind a pickle jar and a bowl of leftovers, then the agony of realising a monster has put just the empty packet back in the fridge after eating the final biscuit. There’s only one suitable response here: it’s rage, incredibly justified, hangry rage.

■ I’ve got a beef with shampoo manufacturers; there’s always half a bottle left, but the conditioner is empty. So when it’s time to buy more conditioner, the one that matches the shampoo is never on sale. I can’t be mixing sandalwood and rosemary with my lime and coconut, I’d smell like a mojito gone wrong.

Originally published as Seven things that can throw your day into an absolute spiral: Mel Buttle