While Mercury Was Busy Enjoying the Retrograde Resort & Spa…

Hello Mercury.

I hope you just read my delivery of your name through the same closed-teeth disdain with which Jerry Seinfeld greets Newman. It looks a bit friendlier on the computer screen but note that in person, it’s far worse.

Your month-long vacation is almost coming to an end. Club Retrograde sounds like it’s been a really fantastic time for you. You’ve gotten to stop, unwind, take a step backwards, chill. On Instagram you appear to have gotten a tan, lost a little bit of weight; your cheeks are rosy, your hair is ombre’d, and it seems as though you’ve picked up a lover by the pool.

How nice.

While you’ve been waking up to the sounds of nature and doing yoga on the velvet sand of your beach-front resort, the rest of us on earth (not to mention the entirety of the hard-working solar system) have been completely, and irrefutably, fucked.

You’re the planet of communication. We need you to ensure conversations are being interpreted correctly. We need you to aid us in being clear and making sense. You are the Hooked On Phonics to our 3rd-grade reading level. When you abandoned us for 24 days to take some bullshit planetary sabbatical, the tower of Babel crashed down upon us.

In fact, a Verizon tower did go down. Yes, Mercury. Don’t look so shocked. It happened exactly one week ago and ruined half of New York City’s plans, not to mention completely screwed over anyone working remotely from their cell phones.

Let’s talk about cell phones while we’re at it. My brand new iPhone 6’s screen cracked. Same thing happened to three of my friends, and the 20 other strangers who waited at the Genius bar in a slumped-over fraternity of crushed glass and broken dreams. “Here you go, Apple,” we said cheerfully as we deposited our life savings into sleekly designed shredders. “Good bye, productivity,” we waved as the Internet in our building went down for the second time in three days. “Who needs the Internet anyway, LOL! Not us websites.”

Susan Miller tells us you’re the head of perception and negotiation. This could explain why, as you were shaving your legs to the sound of dolphins chirping, Mercury, important deals were falling through. High fives were being awkwardly missed. Suspicious though innocent activities were being perceived as relationship infidelities and restaurants were misinterpreting Seamless orders with careless abandon.

Commerce is just one more area you were supposed to handle, yet failed. It’s like you’re a drunk babysitter who lost a kid in the mall. You let the stock market drop down an escalator along with your cheese fries by almost 10% last week. And why couldn’t you just put one of those monkey backpacks with a leash on e-retail? I returned the same pair of shoes THREE TIMES, Mercury. Jesus. Do you even care?

In a few days you’re going to come back from Club Retrograde. You’ll be refreshed, you’ll be rejuvenated, and you’ll feel alive. The 12 signs will be forced to accept you back because you’re a planet, and we’ll spew bullshit pleasantries as you bore us with photos from your trip. But I wanted to write you this letter so that you know that you really screwed us over. You’ve used up your vacation days, Mercury. Welcome to overtime.

And will the genius who photoshopped that viral image of Audrey please stand up?