I was scheduled to travel back to South Africa: my country of birth. A place I hadn’t been to since I was 18 years old, about 13 years ago.
Everything was planned (in as much as I ever plan anything) down very finely. I arrived in Auckland from Brisbane at 7pm on Sunday, did a bunch of church finances, got the information to the auditor the next morning, handed over a bunch of work and prepared for the day-long meeting at work on Tuesday. The day-long meeting itself lasted from 9am to 2pm, thereafter I quickly whipped up the minutes, sent my final emails to those who needed input from me and raced to the university to give a guest lecture from 5pm to 7pm. Dinner and a shower later and I was off visiting a special someone up on the North Shore before the great trek.
As you can imagine it was a situation of mild panic packing my bags once I got home at around midnight. All I needed to do was get to the bus stop by 3am and I’d make my 6:15am flight in plenty of time. As I packed my toiletries I noticed I was out of razor blades. Hmm, I should buy more of those, I’ll just pop out to the store.
I ran up the stairs unlocked the door and stepped out. In one fluid unthinking movement, I locked and closed the door behind me.
Oh… bugger.