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It was just one of those days. To his horror Auror Stanley Malone had quickly found out that being an Auror was far less glamorous than he'd imagined. He'd had visions of tracking down Dark Lords, fighting the Evils (Capital E) of the world... But despite appearances and recent history, Dark Lords were a lot less common than expected. In fact, they were quite rare. In truth, there hadn't even be stirrings or rumours of a new one, so that aspiration had obviously turned out to be a pipe dream.
Still, did the job have to turn out to be so... mundane for lack of a better word. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't one big adventure, most days it wasn't even particularly interesting. Most days it was just tedious. But that's what routine is: tedium.
Every once in a while though, there where days like today. Those days.
Days that should just be struck from the calender. Days where everything went wrong. Or days were everything went... weird.
If Auror Malone had known how his day would end, he would not have bothered to get up in the morning. First he'd almost tripped his way head first down the stairs. That should have been his first clue. Then his partner had knocked both their cups of Earl Gray over, not only loosing them their lifeblood in the mornings, but also ruining a stack of paperwork. Sure, both those issues were easily fixed by magic – and they did rectify things quickly – but that had been strike two against today being anything even remotely resembling a normal let alone a good day.
Strike three had been their colleague not showing up for work. Not that they needed a third to their team, but they had been temporarily assigned to be a three man team, until Auror Bay was released from St. Mungo's after that horrid curse injury. That had been one of the more adventure like days and Auror Malone had not even been on that assignment.
Strike four happened during lunch when they accidentally grabbed the wrong food order and only noticed when they were already on site. Strike five to seven, not that he was still counting at that point, were the stake out assignment. First of all, it was a stake out. Why couldn't they just put up a monitoring charm and be done with it? Not that he wasn't well aware how easy it was to get around those if you wanted to but it was a stake out mission. Those were the epitome of boredom.
And then when they naturally had stopped paying attention, they missed people arriving at the mark's residence and only noticed when there was some sort of clandestine meeting already mostly over and the first people were leaving. So chances were high that they did not even clock all of the participants. And then even worse, most of them got away while they were outnumbered and waiting for back-up.
And then the ultimate screw you of the day: One of the wizards they were fighting fired of some new spell that covered everything in slime. And it was impossible to remove. The whole street was covered, including him and his partner. And no Finite or any other counter spell in his repertoire did anything at all to the slime.
Three hours later he was sent home, his shoes strangely enough oozing slime everywhere despite the slime on them not getting any less – to hope and wait that the spell would run its course and dissipate by morning.
Worst of all, it took a side remark from not even a ministry worker but a civilian in the afternoon the next day for anyone to try washing it off by Muggle means – simple water and not something like an Aguamenti. Turns out the slime had only been immune to magic means of removal. Everything else apart from just flicking it off or moving it by hand worked.
So yes. It had been one of those days.