Stupid is as stupid does

Honestly, I’m becoming a new kind of stupid as this menopause thing progresses.  I don’t call it Mentalpause for nothing.

On a typical day when leaving the office, I almost need a Sherpa to help me carry all the crap to the car.  As I had my usual armful with me, I was almost half way home before I realized that I didn’t have my PURSE!

Had I not required lip balm on my drive home, I would have been ALL the way home before I realized it.  At almost every traffic light I came to, I pawed at the space behind my seat where my purse normally resides.  Finally, I actually pulled over and got out of the vehicle to look thoroughly for said purse, only to confirm my gnawing suspicion.

No purse equals no wallet, no phone and no passkey to get me back into my office.  It certainly would make it difficult to pay for my hair appointment the next evening without my wallet but the most alarming thing of all was that I really didn’t know where it was. Could it have been sitting innocently on the parking garage floor patiently waiting to be loaded?  Was it in the bathroom? Or was it in my office?  I could clearly picture it in all three places; two of them public where someone could have walked away with my entire life in their hands.

Now it was a race against time to get back to the office before it locked down completely at 6:00 p.m. Why is it that anytime you actually need to be somewhere by a specific time that all lights immediately turn red, your lane is always the slow lane and people just seem to toddle along?  Here I was driving without a license, so I didn't want to do anything too stupid to add insult to injury.

Without my passkey, the question was, where could I try first without being locked out?  I couldn’t even be absolutely certain that I could get out of the underground garage without it, so I planned to begin my search in the bathroom.

Sure enough, I didn’t make it to the building in time.  The little red light on the security pad mocked me. Loser. Loser. Loser.  So I waited at the front door for someone to come out while trying not to look too shady, formulating Plan B in my mind. 

Plan B involved going to a colleague’s nearby house, interrupting what I prayed would be their dinner and explaining my problem to a sympathetic audience.  Perhaps they would even take pity on me and invite me in for a glass of wine. However, the chances of finding my colleague at home and not out at one of her daughter’s soccer, volleyball, ping pong, field hockey or evening golf games would be slim.

Soon enough someone exited the building and I ducked in.  I immediately searched the bathroom; to no avail.  My office was next.  There it was, happily tucked inside my desk.  I heaved a sigh of relief.

This is what concerns me about Mentalpause.  My brain can no longer be relied upon to remember the simplest of duties; like taking your own purse home and not doing something odd like leaving it in the bathroom, in the parking garage or even on the top of the car and then driving away.  That I can’t remember names is bad enough.  That I can’t remember to take my personal belongings with me is alarming.  God only knows what’s next.