Chapter 1 – Bad Days

A/N: I have never written a short story before, so please go easy on me! About a month ago I read a TBBT fanfic, and I've been quite hooked ever since. This story has been puttering around in my head, so I thought I would give it a shot!

Today was one of those days. Amy had slept through her alarm, rushed to get ready then spilt her coffee on her skirt, lightly scalding her thigh. She rushed to her car and saw that something was wrong. Her window was rolled down, and the papers from her glove compartment were scattered all over the car. Oh my god, she thought, as she scanned the car for damage. She was missing some loose change, an old blanket and her jumper cables. Why the hell would anyone want to steal that? People will steal anything these days it seems. It looked like someone had pried her window down. Amy got back into the car and started rolling the window back up, but it made a weird thud. It looked like something got slightly bent in her window mechanism.

"Great, that will cost me a couple hundred to fix".

No time to dwell on that, she had a meeting at 9 am, and it was already 8:30. She might be able to still make her meeting on time if she rushed out right now. Amy sped quickly to work, and rushed down towards her meeting.

That's weird, her research team were all out in the hall talking loudly, instead of inside the room.

"Amy! Thank god you are here", her colleague Ben said.

"What's wrong?"

"The funding for our primate addiction study has been completely rescinded. It turns out Mitchell skewed some of the results in his study to look more favourable. The university found out, and now the donor has insisted that their research grant be retracted as they don't want to be associated with this scandal."

This was bad….really bad. It didn't change the results of her addiction research, but without funding, her research had to stop mid-way through the study. All the data would be lost, and she would essentially need to start from scratch, and that was if she could get new grant money again. "What happened to Mitchell?" she asked.

"The university fired him, and he's taken off. Hey the department head wants to talk to you about the future of this study."

Amy's head was spinning. "I need to get out of here". Her leg was throbbing, she lost almost a years' worth of work and she had her car to deal with. "I need to talk to Sheldon right now". She walked out into the hall and pulled out her cell phone. Her hands were shaking, as she hit send.

"Amy! I am so glad you called. I need you to drive me to the store after work to return my new t-shirt. The collar is so scratchy it's completely unbearable. I also need to buy some milk. Penny stole a good three quarters of the gallon this week on her cereal and coffee. I had to eat my cereal with morning with less than the optimal amount of milk. It has completely ruined my day."

"Everything has gone wrong…" Amy sniffed into the phone.

"Well the milk thing is annoying, but I've learned to accept Penny's mooching of food. I just need to make sure I always have a contingency reserve on critical food items such as milk."

Amy started sobbing into the phone. "Amy? Amy what's wrong? Where are you? Why are you crying?" Sheldon started panicking as he heard his girlfriend crying.

"Sheldon, all my work has been ruined, my car was broken into, I burnt my leg….I don't know what to do about work…I am so completely screwed. The department head is about to call me, so I can't talk too long."

"Amy, do you want me to come get you? You're hurt and need my help."

"No, no..I'll be fine, I have a girls night tonight at Penny's, which I think I desperately need right now. But, I'll come over afterwards and tell you everything. Listen, I've got to go, I see the department head is walking over to talk to me." Amy hung up the phone, and walked over to the approaching department head. Boy was she ever going to need that glass of wine tonight.

Penny was in a bad mood. She was working hard on becoming a good pharmaceutical sales rep. Her colleagues were giving her a hard time though, a lot of them snickering that she got the job cause of her looks, and that she had no education. A lot of them had degrees in pharmacy and chemistry, and Penny had nothing but some community college and a lot of acting courses. This job was about sales and marketing though, and Penny was good at connecting with people. It is a skill that she had always had, and now she got to put it to good use. She was so sick of being judged good and bad solely on her looks. She had a lot to contribute, it made her feel insecure.

It was a cause of major problems in her and Leonards' relationship early on. She felt insecure because she was not as educated as Leonard and his friends. She was afraid that he was just infatuated with her looks, and would leave her when he realized that she was not his intellectual equal. Oh hell, who is their intellectual equals? Her group of friends were as they say…super brainy. Most normal people would not compare to that group. She felt like the odd man out with her friends, and now at work too. It's so frustrating to not be taken seriously.

It was girls' night tonight, but Penny was not looking forward to it. Amy just completely adored her, and it could grate on her nerves sometimes. It just felt super needy at times. She was not in the mood for needy adoration tonight, she got enough of that from Leonard. Bernadette was like Jekyll and Hyde…sweet a pie sometimes and a vicious jackal at other times…you never know what you were going to get.

She longed for the days when she would hang out with friends and talk reality tv, sports and music. Her new friends were not the type of friends she had normally and their conversations were anything but normal. Oh well, the wine will help right? She was heading home to get an early start.