Beautiful Morning

I was preparing to leave my gym Friday morning when this middle-aged gentleman walked into the locker room.

“Good morning, sir,” he said with refreshing sincerity.

“Good morning,” I responded.

I got a good vibe coming from this man so I decided to keep the conversation going.

"Are you all done?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I just got here.”

“I just finished.”

“C’mon,” he said, “that’s not fair!”

I laughed and wished him a good workout.

“Have a beautiful day,” he said.

That was it. The entire encounter lasted less than a minute, yet I got such a boost out of talking with this man that I briefly forgot how tired I was.

It’s amazing how one good person can undo the damage of a dozen nitwits.

I decided that would indeed have a beautiful day and I promised myself that I would pass this gentleman’s kindness on to other people.

And then I went home and switched on the computer.

I had forgotten that the night before I had downloaded one of Apple’s seemingly endless system updates that render the computer useless for hours and apparently do very little else.

The downloads also have this unfortunate habit of wiping out the passwords of your most imported accounts, including email, social media, and, in my case, all the various work-related sites.

I struggled to recall my assorted passwords, while trying to do my job without going psycho.

But that didn’t work out so well, since the download apparently also clogged my system, so everything took forever to come up.

Locker Room Talk

I had similar situation in April when Bernie Madoff croaked and I had the same unhinged reaction, cursing and fuming and taking the whole situation very personally.

I couldn’t believe that I had started the day with such optimism and positive energy.

What the hell had happened to my beautiful day?

I was determined to get out of this rut. There was too much work to restart my computer during the morning, so as soon lunchtime rolled around, I shot the damn thing down and rebooted my day.

And it worked.

Okay, with that out of the way, it was on to the next bit of drama. I handle the market close every afternoon where I update the numbers and revise the headline of our main story.

On Fridays one of the copy editors does the weekly calculations of how the major exchanges performed and adds them to the story.

However, he’s on vacation now, which meant I had to figure this stuff out.

Fortunately, I planned ahead by asking my buddy to leave me instructions on how the hell to figure out the weekly results for the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

He wrote it all up and very kindly took me through a dry run on Thursday.

Still, I was worried.

It’s going to be too complicated, I fretted, I’m going to get it wrong, I thought. All the other news sites will have it out except ours.

But I didn’t want to give up. So, I printed out the editor’s directions and went through them step-by-step, adding this, subtracting that, dividing the whole mess and then moving the decimal point two places to the right.

And, son-of-a-bitch, I nailed it.

I checked my calculations against other business sites and they all matched up.

Okay, so I didn’t exactly split the atom or build a better mousetrap. But I did overcome one of my many limiting beliefs and now I’m anxious to take on some more.

After work I had dinner with my sister at a local restaurant and, after a brief shower, the clouds took off and we were treated to a lovely sunset.

It was a beautiful day after all.