Because I'm helping a friend with a renovation project after classes my commute is too complicated for the bike, so this week I'm riding the T.  This morning I get to Davis Square, and I'm going to buy a seven-day pass.  I have a plastic charlie card, but for some reason you can't load up a seven-day pass onto it.  You have to get a paper pass.  Whatever.  It's the T.

So, this morning it turns out that all the non-cash machines are down.  There are only two cash machines, mind you, and about twelve that only take credit or debit cards.  People were queuing up at the two cash-only machines.  There was no T elf present to chew out.  She must have been off smoking crack in her little boof.  I got the news that the machines had been down since yesterday from the guy hawking the Herald. 

I didn't have any cash on me, of course, so I had to go back up the escalator and out to find an ATM.  I don't want to make this sound like it was a lot worse than it was.  There's an ATM right across the street.  But it's one that gives your card back only grudgingly, and after considerable coaxing. 

But the real issue is not the ATM.  It's why should I have to go out and get cash from an ATM for my ticket anyway?  And why do I need a ticket when I've already got a card?  I mean, what's the card for in the first place?  These are mysteries of the T that we may never know the answers to.

So anyway.  My ATM dispenses a minimum of twenty bucks at a time, and a seven-day pass is fifteen.  Of course I was not about to put a twenty into one of those machines and have it either get eaten, or get five dollars in those awful Sacagawea coins they spit out and carry around ten pounds of scrap metal in my pocket all day.

So I went to Au Bon Pain to get a cup of coffee—violating my own no food or beverage on the T rule—only to find that they had NO CREAM.  Half-and-half, I mean, of course.  But what cafe or restaurant whose business is coffee opens in the morning with no cream?  I don't put straight-up milk in my coffee.  And skim is ridiculous. I have to have my half-and-half. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. 

Needless to say, I was appalled, but I had a plan, and I had to stick to it if I was going to make it to the church on time.  So, in one of those one-compromise-too-many-before-eight-thirty-in-the-morning situations, this conspiracy of inconveniences forced me to take milk in my coffee.

And thus the workday's humiliations begin.