I had a headache yesterday, the kind that hangs out in the back of your head and hurts just enough to be annoying until you turn you head at just the right angle and then it starts singing you the ancient Song of Pain that has been passed down from generation to generation, headache to headache. The kind of headache you’re never thrilled with, but work has to be done so you go about your day, a little crabby, a little short-tempered, and just hoping for an easy day.

I go to work and I get shit done despite how much I detest technical thinking with a headache. It always seems to take more effort and more time to do the same things you do every other day when you don’t have a headache.

Lunch comes, I lock my laptop and leave to gas up the bike. My headache beats a steady beat inside my head, flaring up into a scream every time I have to turn my head to the right. I get my gas, get back to work, get my food out of the fridge, go back to my desk, unlock my machine, and prepare to eat my food while watching a YouTube video on arcade cabinet restoration.

With all this movement and head turning, the headache is really making itself known to me, but I do my best to ignore it. But I am getting more and more short-tempered because when I typo my password on the unlock screen, I let out a string of curse words under my breath that would make a sailor blush. I know I just need to sit, eat my food, and calmly watch the video. Maybe it won’t be a moment of zen, but it will be relaxing. And right now I’ll gladly take even a single moment of relaxation.

I start up the video and I’ll be damned if I know how I did it, when I was minimizing some other windows, I went to type something on the screen and I accidentally hit the proper key combination to turn on the Windows Narrator program.

If you’ve never used it, it’s for helping people with vision accessibility issues. Whatever your mouse crosses, it reads out loud, ALL OF IT, in a shitty robot voice that somehow manages to sound robotic and depressed. If you open a menu with 5 options, it reads all 5. It’s a boon for those who need it, but if you don’t and perhaps have an angry headache, it’s like force-fucking your own ears with a dildo made from old circuit boards that they forgot to sand down all the rough edges on.

I immediately went from crabby to pissed, because at first I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought some random other tab had started playing. I was frantically searching tabs in the 3 different browser windows I keep opened, looking for the speaker icon to let me know which one was causing the problem, but there was no speaker icon to be found. I figured out what was going on soon enough, but then I realized I had no idea how to shut the fucking thing off. And every time I moved my mouse or typed something in to find out how to kill it, the Narrator read every single bit of that that shit to me.

Everything I did made it worse. In those few seconds, my headache was like Eric Bana in that shit Ang Lee Hulk movie where the angrier he got, the bigger he got. I ended up taking off my wireless headset, tossing across my desk, and then picked up my phone and googled how to shut it off. (In retrospect, I should have just turned the sound down, but I wasn’t thinking that clearly or logically at that particular moment.)

But I took some painkillers and things got better. I finished the day, picked up Logan from daycare after work, went home and kicked off my boots, swapped my jeans for shorts and that was when Logan ran his Tonka truck full speed across the room and crashed it into my ankle.