I'll read the directions next time

 I'm an attorney, and I oftentimes feel like I have some form of A.D.D..  So that presents problems.  One of those is the fact that I don't thoroughly read things.  It's a skill I acquired in law school.  When you're given 100s of pages to read in a night, you learn to skim.  Get the facts and forget all of the other stuff.  Now, that works when you're reading tons of case law, but not in other aspects of life.

I hate reading directions.  I toss out my owner's manuals, a practice which stopped as soon as a horrified T realized this and took over the filing system.  I am simply not a details person.  I like to get the big picture, what things are really all about.  I'll get the details later.  T, on the other hand, is a huge details person.  (Being an engineer, I think it's a requirement.) 

This can get me into trouble.  It's not always a big deal, but sometimes it's just those little inconveniences that I'm like "oh shoot, if only I had read that correctly!"  Case in point:

One of my employees called into a local radio contest and won free lunch for all of us at the office at Penn Station.  Awesome, right?  A few days before, we had to fill out order sheets for what each of us wanted.  All I wanted was their regular steak sandwich, no cheese (lactose intolerance and what not...)  So I just wrote "no cheese" under where I checked off for the sandwich type.  Done and done. 

So Wednesday, we all head into Penn Station and wait for our orders.  Mine is delivered, and well, it looked kind of weird.  It had this weird red sauce on it.  And were those banana peppers?  And mushrooms?  What gives?  I look at the receipt taped to the sub and sure enough, the sub had pizza sauce, onions, mushrooms, mustard and banana peppers on it.  Not at all what I ordered.  But I didn't want to speak up because, well, it was free, you know?  Beggars can't be choosers after all.

So I ate it.  And it was awful.  First of all, who in God's name puts pizza sauce on a Philly steak sandwich?  You'd get your ass kicked in Philly for that.  And banana peppers?  Hot.  But I ate it because I don't like to admit when I'm wrong.  And I paid for it.  Heart burn and bad, too.  All afternoon and even into the evening.

I mentioned to my coworker the next day about how awful I felt after I ate that and wondered why they thought I'd want all that.  She asks "well, didn't you see you had to cross off the items you didn't want?" 

Wait, what?

Um....no.

So I suffered because of my lack of reading directions.  That's what I get for doing things too quickly.  But
seriously, who does that?  Wouldn't you normally check off the things you want and not the other way around?  Come on!  

But I digress....maybe I need to start reading directions.  My stomach depends on it.