Wow, what a day it’s been, full of ups and downs, highs and lows. The day started off pretty crummy, with me feeling tired and exhausted, since I got to bed late (I stayed up to watch the game last night) and haven’t been sleeping well lately. I dragged myself into work, more or less on time, and things started to look up. A couple people that I hadn’t officially met came up to me and said “Are you Chris?” I said I was, and they congratulated me on winning the NCAA bracket pool. Now, I that maybe I had won since I picked UNC to win it all, but wasn’t sure since I didn’t have Illinois in the final game with them. I wasn’t sure how the scoring went, so while I was optimistic, I didn’t have my hopes set too high. When my co-workers started coming up to me, though, my hopes rose, I started decided which bills I should pay first A little later in the day, I got an email from HR saying that I had won the lottery for tickets to the Reds game tonight. Could it be, I had won two things in the same day?!? A couple of my co-workers joked that I should play the lottery that night. Well, naturally, this is when things started falling apart. I did a double take on the email, and some of you may have picked up on this by now, because I didn’t think the Reds played tonight. Sure enough, after checking cincinnatireds.com, I verified that they weren’t scheduled to play. Oh, well, I thought, I probably shouldn’t have gone anyway, since I had class tonight. Besides, I still had won the pool. Or so I thought… Lunch time rolled around and I still hadn’t heard from the person in charge of the pool, so I checked out the final results, which had been posted in the break room. Second place! What?!? The person who had been in fourth place jumped right over me and took first by 5 points. He successfully picked 3 of 4 Final Four teams, both teams in the final game, and the winner, enough to jump him over me. Seems that someone made the assumption that I had won, based on the fact that the person I was tied for first place with going into the weekend didn’t have UNC in the final and had Illinois winning. One thing I’ve learned over the years is never assume. Blah…

I wished the “bad luck” had stopped there, but it didn’t really. NKU sponsored a Job Expo today, so I left work a little early to go to it. Unfortunately, I got there later than I intended, having only 30 minutes to visit the many employers who were there. I made my way down the first row and got approached by someone for Target. As some of you may remember, I had a post about Target in mid-November of last year, asking people not to shop there since they wouldn’t allow the Salvation Army to have a kettle stand outside their stores. I hadn’t even thought about employment there. I took the information they offered and intended to move on. However, I ran into an old friend of mine from NKU who currently worked for Target, so I stopped to say hi and see how he was doing. You probably can see where this is going… We talked for so long that the job fair ended and the companies started packing things up. Bummer! I was hoping to make some good connections and impressions and have some good opportunities to follow up on. No such luck. At least I have a connection with Target, though :-/

All in all, it wasn’t a horrible day, just not what I intended it to be. As with all things, God’s guiding us, and often it’s not where we were intending on going. I’ve got to look for the blessings in disguise and thank God for the small things.