My alarm blares its lovely sound of defeat, kindly interrupting my precious sleep. It’s Thursday morning. It’s winter break and I’m waking up to an alarm. Isn’t winter break supposed to mean I get a break from alarms and getting up early? Guess not. It’s seven AM, an ungodly hour for a teenager who doesn’t know the meaning of going to bed early, ever. After procrastinating getting up until I have approximately fifteen minutes until I have to leave, I jump out of bed and run to the bathroom to brush my teeth while simultaneously trying to get dressed. This fiasco results in toothpaste all over my pants, shirt, and probably hair, but that can’t be bothered with until my face is dealt with as well.

Makeup products are slapped on my face, along with deodorant I also always manage to be wearing all over my clothes, before I run back into the bathroom to scrub the toothpaste from my attire, because changing would be too difficult.

An annoying realization comes to me as I run out the door and start my car: all this flustered running around could be eliminated if I just got out of bed when my alarm so nicely tells me so, but on the other hand, where’s the fun in that? I pull out of my driveway, and turn onto the highway, mentally preparing for the day ahead of me. There’s a new order in today, which means I have to tag, scan, and put on the shelves everything that was ordered yesterday. While I do this, I must also help patients that needs their meds. This means dealing with cranky parents that have sick children, cranky children that have sick parents, elderly folks that take all of ten hours to sign for their prescriptions they can’t hear the pharmacist telling them about, and my favorite, the ones that have an unusually large co-pay on their prescription and get to yell at me about their insurance which, contrary to popular belief, I can do nothing about. I’m sixteen, not a pharmaceutical insurance rep.

As I am thinking about the fun times ahead of me, I’m on the last stretch of road before arriving at the pharmacy. There’s another car coming towards me in the other lane, and I decide I should be further over in my lane to give them enough space to pass by me and we can both carry on with our days. As I am attempting to do this out of the kindness of my heart, I hit a patch of black ice in the road. Great.

My car starts to slide, and I try to remember what my drivers’ ed instructor taught me about sliding on ice. I fail to do so because the back end of my car is now where it’s not supposed to be: in the front. As I am pressing on the brake, the car starts to spin, and I start to think the worst. Well, this is it. Thanks everyone, I had a good run. I’m about to hit a snowbank, or flip my car, causing gas to leak into somewhere hot enough to make it explode, and I die in a fiery car wreck. Fun. And I never got to meet Chris Evans and tell him how much I love him. I’m frozen. My hands are gripping the wheel, white knuckled, and I feel like my heart has stopped beating and I can’t breathe. The car jolts and abruptly stops, and I clear my head enough to silently thank the creator of seat belts. Once I realize I need to wake up and assess the situation, I take my hands off the wheel, wiggling my arms and legs, and looking around me to make sure I am not in fact dying in a fiery car wreck. Turns out I’m not, just stuck in a ditch. I know I’m not going to be able to reverse this and get out, I also know that this is bad. The panic starts to set in. Do I call 911? No. Call Dad, he’ll know what to do. What if he’s mad? Oh, he’s gonna be so mad. Come on, get it together. I fish my phone out of the back seat of the car, and dial my dad’s number. The one time in his whole life he doesn’t answer his phone, and I’m stuck in a ditch. I try my mom next, and she picks up with her usual nice “mom tone,”asking me how I am and the tears come. I tell her my miraculous story of survival from a fiery car wreck with my masterful driving skills, and she gets ahold of my dad to call a tow truck.

The rest is pretty textbook, aside from the fact that there was almost no damage to my car other than a popped tire and a fallen-off bumper. Go me.

So there’s that, a typical day in the life of a pharmacy clerk. Full of excitement and ultimately, the day off.