Not the stress breaker I hoped for
Right now, I'm reffing maybe a night a week. I'd be doing more if I was working high school (and despite my repulsion for the NFHS, I have to admit, I've looked at some of the lighted fields with games going on longingly), but I'm just too busy... which is anothe reason I'm only working maybe a day a week.So yesterday was my day; an adult women's double-header. Although it's the competitve bracket, I'm not expecting anything terrible, or much more than "slightly relaxed"; their fall league (this is my first year working it), is much more low-key than their summer leagues. I was looking forward to it, three hours of running, followed by my going "thud" as soon as I got home. Not worrying about planning the wedding, trying to fix the garage (which keeps falling off the bloody track - whoever installed it did a piss-poor job), just soccer.
Well, I got a fourth of the way though, but it wasn't a stress reliever. It wasn't the game - it was relaxed - but I was only starting to forget the crap that came before the game that really necessitated my running about.
The biggest change in my reffing life came last fall, when I changed on an on-site IT admin for a single company, to doing consulting. I like the work, I make $10,000 more a year, and for the most part, I even do less work. But the hours are chaotic; most of the time I finish between 3 and 4pm, but sometimes... not. Usually I can work things around to not interfiere, but that doesn't mean there's some tight sqeezes, especially when the game time is set at 6pm. I thought I had things planned out: a non-emergency, planned-in-advance call where I would be out by four pm (because their on-site IT person wants to leave, too); but something went "boink" right before then, and I didn't get out until 4:35.
My house is on the way to the field, so I left my bag at home; and I was headed that way, anyway, because something got lodged in my left contact, and I couldn't flush it out without taking out the contact. So, when I finally get home (5:15pm), I scramble to find my equipment, get it on, rinse out my contact, and get out the door (5:30). Keep in mind, I like getting to the field an hour early, just to put myself in the right mood, 45 minutes early at shortest. I get to the field at at 5:45, and I guess fortuantely for me, only one team is there.
The game gets off only ten minutes late, as I got special dispensation to not use passes for one team, because they forgot them (the league commissioner was playing on the field next to ours). But even though the game got started, and I was able to move for a change, things did not look well. A storm (none for forecast) was rolling in rapidly, and it was pretty clear that we weren't going to get through the game; a half-maybe, but not the game.
We did just get through the half. Less than a minute into half, I saw cloud-lightning directly overhead; neither team wanted to wait it out, and there was no point in my being a dick about it (even if I wanted to, which I didn't), so we abandoned the game. It would have been a good thing, too, because it was a doozy of a storm - except someone tweaked the traffic light to get out of the park, and it was only letting out one car per cycle - so I'm seeing this massive massive storm roll in, and I'm stuck in traffic. It normally takes me ten minutes to get home from this park, but I was stuck in the left-turn lane for fifteen; the storm literally hits once I finally get my turn to get out of there.
Needless to say, having a broken garage door, after dodging three chunks of tree that were roughly the size of baseball bats (one went under my car), I came back more stressed than I left.