A Rough Week
This has been a very difficult week for me. So difficult that I threw my diet to the winds and had the largest possible Cappuccino Blast at Baskin Robbins three days running. (That’s bad, my friends, because even small (one pint) Blasts are strictly taboo for this diabetic dieter, and the largest size is a full quart! According to BR’s website, there’s about 100g of carb in that large Blast!)
It started on Monday. Monday started out pretty normal, except for the painful, throbbing, and occasionally still bleeding right index finger that I shut in the front door on Sunday. But I can cope with pain, and God made sticking plaster for blood. So I was coping. And then, kaboom! The phones at the office went out because some workers down the street cut a cable, and my day was shot all to pieces. Because one of my responsibilities is the phones at the office. So I’m on my cell phone (pay-as-you-go @ 25 cents a minute), trying to get our repair people on the line. I spent more than $7 trying to get some answers. And people kept coming to ask me when the phones were gonna be fixed. How the dickens should I know?! And then my boss got mad because the repair guy finally called me, when I was on my lunch break, and when I got back to the office, the boss was in a closed-door meeting, so I didn’t have a chance to tell him what I’d been told until he came out to ask me (again!) when the phones would be fixed.
I HATE getting in trouble for stuff that isn’t my fault. If and when I screw up, I will take the responsibility and the blame and the consequences without complaint. But I’m not that chuffed about taking it when I did not cause or add to the problem.
After work, I went home to do some yard work, and not only did I have to deal with ants and a snake, but I sliced my left ring finger wide open on a piece of glass that was buried in the flowerbed where we planted the new hydrangea bush. Now I have a bloody injury on both hands. So Monday was pretty crummy.
The best part of Tuesday was nice lunch with the other members of the Admin Team at the office. That was fun. And so was karate class. But there were some hefty clouds on Tuesday. First was the name list. You see, I was responsible for organizing this year’s Family Day for the office. Now, I have planned events before, so I had a pretty good handle on what to expect. Though this would be my biggest event — more than 400 people signed up! So I get the sign-up sheets, and I’m looking it over, and I’m thinking, “There’s an awful lot of misspellings in these names. Or there’s a lot of people with some really far-out names….” So I go to the reservations person and ask if they double-checked their list before giving it to me. Was assured that everything was exactly as submitted. Went to my supervisor and expressed my concern. Was told to correct the obvious mistakes and not worry about the rest. Red flags and alarm bells and sirens are going off in my head, but what can I do?
The second cloud on Tuesday was the promo packets. I maintain stock of informational packets for the properties that our company is selling. We have one property that we are pushing hard on, and I’m having trouble keeping the packets in stock. And they are about 25 pages, with information pulled from several different files, printed at several different sizes, folded down to letter-size, and comb-bound. (I hope that sounds time-consuming, because it is.) So my boss comes into my work area and looks in the marketing files, and swears. I ask what’s wrong. He says he needs two of the packets and why are there none?! I tell him I can make two up in about ten minutes. Only I forget that when I’m under pressure, I don’t do so good. He’s obviously upset and says he’s going to be late. Printer jams. Binder jams. Pages won’t fold. I did finally get them put together, but I ended up feeling like a wrung-out dishrag. I told my coworker that if things didn’t improve, I was going to make her teach me to smoke. She just laughed at me.
The next cloud over Tuesday was that I got off work late and skidded into karate with about 15 seconds to spare. (For those who don’t know, coming late to class means 10 extra push-ups and asking permission to join class. I don’t like that bit. But then, I don’t like being late, so I usually get there early, so I don’t usually have to worry about the consequences of tardiness.)
The final straw on Tuesday was after karate, when my ex brought the kids home. He wouldn’t leave. Even though I told the kids that he could not stay to tuck them in because it was already after 9:30. My biggest problem is that I have to be really, really, really mad to feel up to confronting this person, so I usually just seethe quietly. Thing is, he’s been told that when I get quiet and pretend you don’t exist, I am nearing explosion point. So you’d think that when I stopped reminding everyone to say goodbye and get ready for bed, it would have clicked: oooh, she’s awfully quiet, and she did say I couldn’t stay. Maybe I should stop talking to the kids and leave now. But you’d be wrong. It was nearly 10:30 when he finally left, and by that point I was absolutely livid.
Wednesday was my birthday, so you would think that the world and all the heavens above would give me a break. Ha! I did get lots of nice birthday greetings, though, and thank you again to everyone that sent them, because they got me through the day. That and having lunch with Daddy. Daddy is a prince, and I adore him. But to illustrate the kind of day Wednesday was, let me tell you about my lunch with Daddy. I wanted to go to River Oaks. Daddy was agreeable, and we pulled up, only to find a sign on the door that thanks to MLGW messing up their water main, they had no plumbing and were temporarily closed. So Daddy suggested Yia-Yia’s. Only Yia-Yia’s closed a couple of months ago. So we decided on Houston’s. Which I love except for three things: They don’t take reservations; they have a minuscule waiting area with a dearth of seating (and chivalry is all but dead), and they have some phenomenally poor wait-staff. (They also have some great wait-staff, but whenever I’m in a hurry, I seem to get the waiter who is channeling the poky little puppy.) Still, lunch with Daddy was lovely. The whole day at the office was one weird mess after another, and I was glad to get home. Except my sons had a computer class for Scouts, which meant that they couldn’t “take me to dinner,” so I spent my birthday evening alone. Which turned out good in the end, though I was a bit desolate at the time.
Because then there was Thursday. Thursday made Monday and Tuesday look like crumpets and tea on the South Lawn. Family day started out pretty well. I was planning to leave the office for lunch at 12:30 and head over to the venue afterward to set everything up. Had a co-worker coming to help me, and I had promised her that she’d be done by 3 or 3:30. You know that guy Murphy? Well, he was alive and well on Thursday afternoon.
First thing was that for the first time in five years, I had to tell my boss that something would not be possible. At 11:45, he brought me a mailout that he “hoped” could go that day. Normally, his smallest wish is granted in record time with a wave of my magic wand. But I had to look him in the eye and say, “Sorry, today is not possible. Tomorrow, for sure.” Bless him, he was understanding, and even said he’d kind of thought that was the case.
Next, I got to the venue and we started setting up. I had printed labels for the arcade cards, and we were sticking them on and making great time. Until we found that the last person who’d used the labels had put them away with a couple of sheets of plain paper mixed in. I had to hand-write 30 labels. Then people started coming, the name tags got out of order, people would not stay in line but kept trying to get ahead … and remember that list I mentioned? The sign-in list from which I made the name tags and the card labels? Well, it turns out that not only were about half the people’s names misspelled, but some of them were so badly misspelled that people were offended. In front of my bosses, their wives, and my HR director. We just kept apologizing and handing people blanks so they could write replacements.
Keep in mind that since the wreck in 2005, I have severe panic attacks in large, chaotic crowds; I stutter when upset or nervous, and I get migraines when under excessive stress. Imagine 250 people descending en masse, wanting to check in and get to the food and games, and being angry because their name is misspelled. Yeah. I was a nervous wreck. And it was SO intense that not only did my coworker not get to leave at 3:30, but I didn’t get to leave until 7:00. And I had planned to leave at 5:00 to go to karate. And because I was so intensely controlling my panic in that crowd, I was getting a migraine from trying to keep all my atoms from exploding in a million directions. (If you’ve experienced this, you will understand what I’m talking about. If not, there’s no words to do the feelings justice.)
When I left, I literally flew home, told the kids they had exactly five minutes to change or they would be left, and flew back out the door. We were late to karate (of course — class started at 7 and I didn’t leave the venue until five til, and then it’s about 10 miles home and another 5 miles to class). I was wound up so tight that I didn’t even care. I went through the doors, tied on my belt, and dropped into my push-ups. I was on something like number 7 when I realized that I was so upset I was not doing them “girl-style,” but on my knuckles and toes. And then things are kind of a blur, though thinking back I realize that I stomped up the floor and got in line without asking permission to join class. (Oops! Major faux-pas. Thank God for my understanding and compassionate sensei.) Thank God, too, that my sensei worked us hard. I was calmer when I left that evening. But still on edge.
And then came Friday. I got to work and put in the request for the final payment to the Family Day venue, and was told the invoice was wrong because we had paid a larger deposit than they had credited us for. It took two hours to resolve that mess. And it was two hours of everyone acting like I was lying or stupid or intentionally trying to cheat the company. (It also turned out that I was right, and the large deposit was paid on the venue for a different company event. Sigh. Why does no one ever believe me?) It was so frustrating that I sent out an hysterical plea for prayer — which many friends read and obliged.
For which I am truly grateful, because the whole time this mess with the invoice was going on, the person who was primarily responsible for the complete balls-up of the Family Day sign-up roster kept pestering me about was everything okay, and how did it go, and did I have fun. I finally lost my temper with her and snapped “No, I had a rotten time, I didn’t even get to eat, and it would be better if I didn’t talk about it just now.” And then I ignored her completely. I wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled in her head. (So thanks for the prayers; you guys probably prevented at least one (justifiable) homicide.)
Then I had to get some special supplies for the mailing for my boss. Now, I am a smart admin. I called the store that was on the way to the venue where I was taking the check, and had them make sure they had what I needed in stock. They said they had two. When I got there, they couldn’t find them. But this other store, near my office, had some. When I got there, they couldn’t find them. This time, the person who helped me called the other store and asked for a visual check. And this time, they had what I needed. When I got back to the office to compile the mailing, it was nearly lunchtime. I had set up all the mail merges before I left (while working out the deposit mess that morning), so I thought it would be a simple thing to print all the envelopes and the proofs for my boss. Only the envelope printer went berserk and refused to print the envelopes properly. By lunchtime, I was nearly in hysterics.
I left early and went home for lunch. I walked in the door, Mom said “how’s it going,” and I burst into tears. I cried for about half an hour, then spent half an hour recovering. But it helped, and at least I didn’t cry at my boss. He doesn’t understand. Mom does.
The afternoon was a little better — I think by that time half my friends had heard that I needed prayer, because there was a definite sense of calm and peace that I felt, even as I was pushing hard to get the mailing out. I managed it, and my boss gave me a rare (and I think he will never know how timely nor how needed) word of thanks and praise. Two other, urgent projects still await my attention, but I don’t care. They will still be there on Monday, and maybe I can have a better, more peaceful week.