Fall’s here, and people are creaming themselves over pumpkin spice like it’s the cure for seasonal depression. Pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin spice candles, probably pumpkin spice hemorrhoid cream by now. Like cinnamon and nutmeg are going to save you from scraping ice off your windshield at 6 a.m. with your debt card and pray it doesn’t snap in half. That $5 scraper you bought last year? Gone. Lost in the black hole of your backseat, next to three missing sockets and your dignity.

So there you are, freezing your ass off, carving out a peephole in the frost while the defrost wheezes like it’s dying. You pull out with your two-inch visibility, praying you don’t nail a deer, a mailbox, or a school bus. Almost crash? Cool—still better than being five minutes late. The red light that hates you personally catches you again, and you’re half-blind, gripping the wheel with hands so numb they could fall off and you wouldn’t notice. Cop drives by, doesn’t stop you, and for a split second you think maybe God hasn’t completely abandoned you.

Then boom—you clock into work five minutes late. Doesn’t matter that you risked hypothermia and vehicular manslaughter just to get there. Doesn’t matter that your boss—who strolls in late every day with his cushy remote-start car—will show up looking warm and smug. You? You get the “be responsible” lecture, like your $19-an-hour ass has the same options as his six-figure salary.

Inside, it’s somehow colder than outside. You hug an oven, lean on a heat gun, basically risk OSHA violations just to feel your blood moving again. Then lunch hits, and magically it’s 85 degrees. You go to your car, burn your hand on the seatbelt buckle, and sweat like a hog in a slaughterhouse while trying to choke down a sandwich. You finally cool off with the AC blasting, and boom—time to drag your soggy self back in and pretend you’re a functioning employee.

By the end of the shift, the sun’s already dead and gone. The only daylight you saw was thirty minutes at lunch, and that was spent swearing at the AC. You turn the heat back on, confuse your body temperature one last time, and remind yourself to buy Vitamin D—because apparently that’s supposed to fix the fact that your body hasn’t seen natural light since September. Maybe they’ll make a pumpkin spice version, so at least your seasonal depression can taste festive.

But hey, the trees look pretty. Great trade-off: freezing mornings, swamp-ass lunches, management’s bullshit lectures—all wrapped up in a nice pile of dead leaves.