I’ll admit it; when my alarm went off this morning I was pissed.
Being tired and having no compelling reason to stay up, I went to bed early last night.
Somehow that translated into me getting less sleep than usual, as I was tossing and turning for hours before finally getting to sleep.
So, yeah, even the stirring strains of Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing For Whom The Bell Tolls was greeted with antipathy.
Things didn’t improve much from there, as it was still raining, and continued to do so all day long, to the extent that I was beginning to wonder if someone somewhere was building an ark.
Then there was the matter of the project that refuses to die.
Weeks ago I accepted a meeting invitation at work for something that I didn’t know anything about, but it was a new process requiring documentation, and that’s the nature of the job, so I accepted.
I didn’t really learn much more about the process once I got to the meeting, other than that I was expected to create a document and that there was someone – who wasn’t at the meeting – I needed to work with to get what I needed.
Okay, fine.
Once it came time to get started on the document I contacted said person who, though not in so many words, basically said that he didn’t think a document was necessary and that he had no intention of helping me create it.
(Well, he did say that he didn’t think the document was necessary in exactly that many words; it was the second part that he didn’t say, though it was implied, and reinforced by his subsequent lack of help.)
So, with the deadline for document completion approaching, I began reaching out to other people for help, with varying degrees of success.
Ultimately someone said that the document, with some minor changes, would essentially be identical to an existing document. So I made the appropriate changes to the existing document and sent it out for review, at which point I discovered that “identical” apparently didn’t mean what I thought it meant. On a positive note, much of the information that I needed for the new document magically appeared, as reviewers sent it in saying “This needs to be in there.” They couldn’t have given it to me when I asked for it two weeks earlier?
However, some essential information was still missing, and the deadline was moving steadily closer.
On the day of the deadline, it was decided to push the deadline back two weeks (not because of me), so I thought I had some time in which to get the missing information.
Not so; with the deadline now two days away, said information has yet to prove that it exists. Still, the person who actually needs the information has decided that we can proceed without it for the time being, and so, at last, the document is finished.
Or is it? After sending it out for review yet again, someone has chimed in saying that some other information needs to be included.
This is actually not the case, but because the person asking for its inclusion has the letters “V” and “P” in his title, I now have to find this other information and place it in the document.
Oh, and there’s a meeting about the whole thing tomorrow.
It is worth noting again that this whole mess is not my fault, and that people realize this. Still, it’s been much more of a mess than it needed to be, and I have to say that if this document were a person, I would punch it right in the face.
When I got home from the day’s struggle, I decided to order a pizza for dinner.
I did so at 6:20 PM, and was informed, via e-mail, that the expected delivery time was 7:50 PM.
WTF? An hour and a half? I could place three consecutive Domino’s pizza orders in that time.
Ultimately, my pizza arrived a bit sooner than that. And by “a bit” I mean ten minutes.
And it was cold.
*Sigh*
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