A bit of a fright...

Today hasn't been the best of days and the stress increased as the morning wore on! I was working with Sue and we were busy with calls first thing. Sheila chose that moment to come over and ask if I wanted to do another, quite complicated, job for her. I was willing but she explained it so quickly that I lost track of what I had to do, and the phone kept ringing as she talked to me!

As tomorrow is the first day of the Easter holidays we had lots of calls from people booking cinema tickets and Peter Rabbit is what everyone wants to see! We even had a woman call who wanted to change her tickets to another day, another complicated procedure that Sue and I had to learn how to do!

Things quietened down a bit around lunchtime but I agreed with Sheila that the job she wanted me to do was too complicated to handle in between calls so we gave up. We also had to deal with orders from one of the managers and uncharacteristically, one of them was wrong so I had to wait for him to call me back with the correct information, which he did at about a minute to 2pm. I was on the brink of going home when I realised I had to go back in and finish the order off as tomorrow is a Bank Holiday.

Sue helped me, thank goodness, and I called Sophie to say I would be a little late picking her up from the pub she was having lunch at. I did the order, dashed to the car and drove to go and get Sophie, managing to call her on the hands free on the way to say I was almost there.

However, her phone went straight to voicemail, which was a little strange as I'd only spoken to her fifteen minutes before. I kept on calling her and when I arrived at the pub (opposite uni) she wasn't waiting for me. Feeling a bit annoyed as I had just minutes to pick her up and get home, I texted her and then decided to go inside to find her.

I went in and searched everywhere but there was no sign of my daughter and no sign of the friends she'd been with, either. I saw a woman who looked like her then realised the woman had a baby so that definitely wasn't her! By now I was starting to get a little worried as Sophie is 100% reliable and will always be where she says she'll be. I kept on calling, went outside to the garden area, even though it was a chilly, dreary day but I still couldn't find her.

I scanned the car park to see if she was sitting in a friend's car and even went to the entrance to see if she was waiting by the road but nothing. I went back inside in case she'd been in the loo and then called Keith in a bit of a panic as I still couldn't get hold of her on the phone and she hadn't answered my text, something that is highly unusual.

He told me to calm down but it was so uncharacteristic of Sophie to disappear like that, that I really thought something had happened to her. My last hope was to see if she was waiting for me at uni so I drove like a maniac the short distance down the road and sped into the campus, anxiously searching the students at the bus stop...and there she was. My relief was enormous, as was hers, as she'd thought I'd been in an accident as I was so late! Apparently, she'd told me she was back at uni when I called to say I'd be late but I hadn't heard her in my haste to get back to the office!

When we arrived home Keith said I was mad to worry like that and I suppose he's right, but normally she's exactly where she says she'll be which is why I was worried I couldn't contact her. Her phone had died on her minutes after I'd called her but then had miraculously come back to life as I arrived at uni. She has definitely decided to get a new phone now!

It was my last session at the after school club and thankfully we had very few children attend, and they were all gone by 5.15pm so we had a lovely early evening. Lisa was very pleased, even though she'd predicted we'd still be there at 6pm!