For the past few days, I have been out of sorts. And by “out of sorts,” I don’t mean I’ve been sitting quietly by a window, staring thoughtfully into the distance while sipping tea and contemplating the mysteries of the universe. I mean everything has been getting on my damn nerves. Companies. Customers. Dogs barking. Things not working correctly. People asking questions that make me wonder how our species managed to invent indoor plumbing. My husband simply existing at the wrong volume at the wrong moment.

Basically, I have been an absolute ray of fucking sunshine.

The first thing I did was try to figure out what changed. I recently stopped taking my supplements, and the timing was suspicious enough to make me wonder if that had something to do with it. I’ve also been questioning supplements in general lately—what I actually need, what I don’t, and when exactly we decided everybody needed a cabinet full of capsules to function as a human being. So I stopped them, and then within a few days my internal volume knob apparently got ripped off and stuck at eleven.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the supplements weren’t the only thing that had changed. Actually, there was a whole pile of crap sitting there waving at me.

Apparently I Have Been Firing Companies

Within a very short period of time, two companies managed to lose my business. Ulta irritated me enough that I finally decided I was done, and then a book subscription I’d been looking forward to turned into an ongoing saga of delays and lousy communication. By the time they finally sent tracking information, I’d already canceled.

Then Ulta sent me a customer satisfaction survey.

I laughed.

There is something wonderfully dangerous about sending an aggravated Gen Xer a questionnaire that essentially says, “Please tell us how you really feel.” Oh, sweetheart. Are you sure? Because I’ve been holding onto some thoughts, and now you’ve provided boxes for me to put them in.

I didn’t go looking for another fight. They mailed the invitation directly to my inbox.

But even that wasn’t really why I’ve been so aggravated. It was simply another little irritation added to a pile that was already getting pretty damn tall.

Dare I Say It? I Think I’m Bored at Work

There. I said it.

I think I’m bored at work.

That’s actually a strange thing for me to admit because it isn’t the same as saying I hate my job. I don’t. It isn’t even that I can’t do my job. I can handle most of what comes my way. New user? Sure. Locked account? Got it. Troubleshooting something I’ve seen before? Let’s go. There are reports I can handle, setups I understand, and calls where I know exactly what I’m doing.

Maybe that’s part of the problem.

A lot of it has become routine.

There is a peculiar kind of mental exhaustion that comes from doing something you know how to do over and over again. You’re not necessarily overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work; sometimes your brain is standing in the background with its arms crossed saying, “Are we seriously doing this again?”

And then someone mentions a template.

Oh, fuck me.

The Fucking Templates

Templates are my nemesis.

Not ordinary templates, either. These little bastards sometimes involve variables, IF statements and logic that feels suspiciously like somebody snuck programming into my customer-support job while I wasn’t looking. This is the one area where I don’t feel like I received enough training, and it’s also something I can’t easily practice on my own.

That’s a lousy combination. The best way for me to learn something like that would be to get into a practice environment, build one, screw it up spectacularly, figure out why it broke, fix it, and do it again until my brain finally says, “Ohhhh, THAT’S what this does.”

Except I can’t.

So I’ve done what any resourceful person living in 2026 does: I use the tools available to me. Documentation, knowledge bases, searches and AI. We have plenty of technology designed to help us find answers, and some of it is genuinely useful.

Until the AI confidently gives me the wrong answer.

There is nothing quite like asking technology how to fix technology and having technology confidently bullshit you about the technology.

Welcome to the future. We have artificial intelligence, but apparently nobody has invented the artificial coworker who leans over the cubicle wall and says, “Yeah, that IF statement is fucked. Put the variable here.”

I could use that.

Bored and Frustrated Is a Weird Combination

That’s when something clicked for me.

I’m not sitting at work thinking, I can’t do this job. I’m sitting there knowing I can handle most of it, while simultaneously getting frustrated by the handful of things I haven’t been able to practice enough to master.

So somehow I’ve managed to become both understimulated and aggravated at the same time.

That’s quite the achievement.

And boredom does something sneaky to patience. When your brain isn’t particularly engaged, the little annoyances start feeling bigger. The customer asking the same question you’ve answered a hundred times feels more irritating. The person who didn’t read the instructions suddenly becomes your personal nemesis. You find yourself muting the microphone and staring into the middle distance wondering whether insurance has always been this complicated or whether humanity simply decided to make it that way for entertainment.

Then you clock out.

Except apparently your irritation doesn’t.

Guess Who Gets the Leftovers?

My husband and the dogs.

Yeah.

I’ve been yelling.

I’ve screamed at my husband. I’ve yelled at the dogs. I’ve had moments when something completely ordinary happens and my reaction has been wildly disproportionate to whatever actually happened.

The dogs certainly didn’t cancel my book subscription. My husband didn’t send me a customer satisfaction survey. Nobody in this house created the templates. As far as I know, the dogs have never written an IF statement in their lives, although I wouldn’t put it past them.

Their version would probably be:

IF Mom = cranky, bark.

IF Mom = very cranky, bark louder.

IF Mom walks into another room, follow her and continue barking.

ELSE request snacks.

Honestly, they’d probably be better at templates than I am.

But underneath the joke is something I don’t particularly like admitting: the people and animals I love have been getting the leftovers of frustrations they didn’t create. That’s not how I want to move through my home. I don’t want my husband wondering what the hell he did because I walked through the door carrying every irritating customer, corporate email, bad night’s sleep and technological annoyance from the entire day.

That’s when I realized I needed to stop looking for one culprit.

Maybe Nothing Is Wrong. Maybe I’m Just Full.

I wanted one answer because one answer is easy.

Maybe it was stopping the supplements. Maybe it’s lack of sleep. Maybe it’s work. Maybe it’s the companies that pissed me off. Maybe it’s having a trip coming up and a hundred little things bouncing around my head. Maybe Mercury is doing something stupid again. At this point, I’d accept almost anything with a reasonably convincing explanation.

But life rarely hands us one neatly labeled reason.

Sometimes it’s twenty-seven little things rubbing against you at the same time. None of them is catastrophic. None of them deserves a dramatic soundtrack. But together they slowly fill every available inch of patience until somebody asks where the scissors are and suddenly you’re thinking, WHY DOES EVERYBODY NEED SOMETHING FROM ME?

The scissors are in the drawer.

Nobody has betrayed you.

Calm your tits.

That’s the part I’ve been sitting with.

I don’t think I’m falling apart. I don’t think I’ve suddenly become an angry person. I think I’m full. My brain is full. My patience is full. My irritation bucket is overflowing, my sleep hasn’t been great, and apparently nobody has emptied the emotional trash in several days.

And maybe admitting that is more useful than pretending everything is fine.

I’m Paying Attention Now

I’m not going to solve this by beating myself up for being cranky, but I’m also not going to make screaming at everybody my charming new personality trait. There has to be something between pretending everything is wonderful and declaring myself Queen of the Irritated People.

So I’m paying attention.

I’m looking at my sleep. I’m thinking more carefully about what I stopped taking and whether any of it was actually helping me. I’m noticing when I’m carrying work frustration into the rest of my day. And yes, I’m admitting something I wasn’t expecting to admit:

I may be bored at work.

That doesn’t mean I’m quitting tomorrow. It doesn’t mean I’m ungrateful. It doesn’t mean I’m bad at what I do. Maybe it simply means I’ve gotten comfortable with much of the job and my brain wants something more challenging than repeating the things I already know.

Preferably something other than templates.

Let’s not get ridiculous.

And maybe the biggest thing I’m learning from these last few days is that when absolutely everybody starts getting on my nerves, there’s at least a small possibility that absolutely everybody hasn’t simultaneously become an asshole.

Occasionally, the common denominator is me.

That’s not self-blame. That’s useful information.

Because if I’m at capacity, I can do something about that. I can put things down. I can stop carrying Tuesday’s irritation into Friday. I can walk away for a minute before answering someone. I can recognize when my reaction belongs to the previous seventeen annoyances rather than the person standing in front of me.

I’m still going to get irritated. I’m still going to encounter stupid things. Companies will continue making baffling decisions. Customers will continue being customers. Technology will occasionally lie directly to my face with remarkable confidence.

And apparently there will always be fucking templates.

But I’d rather recognize when I’m full than keep overflowing all over the people I love.

Especially the dogs.

They’ve already started documenting everything for HR.