TORONTO – Yesterday, Lindsay Crawford experienced her first full day off in two months, an event that should have involved nothing but stress-free relaxation. However, the 30-year-old spent the entirety of her precious free time existing in perpetual fear that she had forgotten something important that she was supposed to do.
Crawford, a freelance artist with multiple part-time jobs, explained that she was still recovering from the harrowing ordeal.
“I was absolutely sure that I had missed something,” she said. “I felt so trapped. I couldn’t go out of town for the day because I was sure that at any moment one of my five workplaces was going to call me, asking where I was. I couldn’t even leave my apartment because I was so worried that I had invited a friend over and forgotten about it. All I could do for 14 hours was sit there and wait for my phone to ring to inform me I was letting someone down. It was hell.”
Throughout the course of the day, Lindsay called every employer she had ever worked for in the last three years to confirm that she had remembered the schedule correctly, scanned her day planner twenty times for suspicious absences, and even scrolled through Facebook to make sure there wasn’t an event she had promised to attend.
“I thought it was weird when she posted a status that just said ‘DID I PROMISE TO DO ANYTHING WITH ANYONE TODAY, PLEASE HELP ME,’” confessed Josh Mulligan, a Facebook friend of Lindsay’s who watched her live online meltdown. “When no one responded, she just started panic-messaging everyone she knew, including me, and we haven’t talked in five years.”
Crawford is adamant that, despite her concerned loved ones’ advice that maybe she works too hard, the strain of the experience far outweighed the amount of Netflix she binged.
“It was a fluke- a terrible, confusing fluke,” she explained as she quickly made dinner between a serving shift and a fundraiser. “It was the most stressful experience I’ve ever encountered, and I’m in the arts. I never want a day off again.”
At press time, Crawford had just learned that most people enjoy something called a “weekend,” and had been taken to hospital in a state of shock.
