So you know it’s been a rough week at work when you’ve hit 50 hours by noon on Friday and you’re still not heading home.
We had our quarterly meeting on Friday morning. I say “quarterly” even though we tend to miss one or two a year, but we’re supposed to have one every quarter. It’s an update of the progress of the department to the VPs and Sr. VPs and anyone else in the program who has anything to do with our part of what’s going on. We give our status report, they ask questions, if we haven’t got answers we can give right away, we write down the questions, track them, and get answers back later on. It’s a big deal and a big hassle. People presenting information need to provide draft copies a couple weeks in advance, we go through a dry-run with a review panel who can give recommendations on things we should make sure is discussed, and then final copies are due so the boss can review them again and make even more suggestions. More changes are made, more reviews are done, I print out copies of all the information and make sure the presentations follow the formatting guidelines and make sure everything is set with the computers and the food and all the bits and pieces that go into a 4-5 hour meeting, and then the boss makes even MORE changes to the presentations at the last minute.
I was at work until about 10:00 pm on Thursday and then back again at 6:30 am the following morning. It was a ROUGH week filled with people wanting to know what the agenda for the meeting was going to be and when they’d have final review edits back and complaining that we don’t have time to do all of this and that we should have tried to get out of it and by the end of the meeting I was so sick and tired of all of it.
My boss did bring me a silk scarf, though. He bought it when he was in China about a year ago and kept forgetting to bring it to the office. It’s a beautiful pale yellow with a lot of characters on it that I don’t know what they mean. Hopefully it’s nothing offensive! It probably says “Tourists buy stupid stuff” or something . . . .
We’ve been taking it pretty easy this weekend. Doing the basics like keeping the house tidy and making dinner and trying to get some laundry done. We took our Friday and Saturday walks on a wooded trail down the road that I keep meaning to photograph. It’s raining today, so even though we’ll probably walk later this afternoon, I won’t be photographing it today. We went to the drive-in last night to see the new Riddick film — we all enjoyed it. It’s a delightfully low-key weekend. Just what I needed after the last couple weeks.