Bad Night

I used to work at a Residential Treatment Center in Pittsburgh, PA. This was a center for adolescents that had been pulled from their homes because their behaviors were too much for an ill-equipped family to deal with. The Center I was working for aimed at equipping these families and preparing their children for mature, responsible interactions with others. Most of the time, we failed miserably.

There was one client in particular that fell at the bottom of everyone's top ten list. She refused to go to bed at night, and so we tried to make special concessions as reinforcement for good behavior. Her favorite quickly became being allowed to stay up for American Idol and being allowed to phone in a vote. She really loved that one girl. You know, the one that didn't win. No? You don't. She wasn't around that long.

The problem is that her favorite didn't win and, sooooo...this client decided to trash her room and wake everybody up. There was a lot of damaged property and a few extra staff were called to the unit and everyone was cursing and miserable the next day. She later apologized and one of my co-workers said, "It's okay, you had a bad day." And it became the biggest joke to attempt and brush away the most inexcusable actions with this awkward-hat-wearing bromide. We would sing the song as we walked off the unit at 11 and, surprisingly, it did make the day a little better.

I still think of this whenever I hear this song and I still hate the song just as much.