Cat v. Printer

OK, this is silly, but it still makes me laugh every time I see it! (A friend who’s deployed sent me a trimmed version.) I’m sure my own cats would approve.

Moody week

I’ve had a rough week, this week… Work has seemed unusually burdensome, I’ve been having some trouble sleeping and, to top it off, my two favorite contestants got booted off ANTM and Survivor, respectively! (Though I was going a little sour on James over these past few weeks.)

I think that the nadir of my week was when I sat through an hour-long meeting yesterday about the software documentation that I had spent several weeks working on and spent a day getting all the signatures from all the right people in order to finalize it.

Well, after signing it, the decision-makers decided to read it, then decided it wasn’t the document they wanted, and proceeded to have a long meeting to redefine the project entirely. (There are a couple more variables involved, but that’s the long and short of it.) It works out wonderfully for the programmer, since he only has to adapt something that’s already existing, but for me (who doesn’t actually have anything to do with the software at all, either with the development or with the use of it — analysts in my office have this job because we’re extra bodies and no one else wants to write the documentation), it means that I have to scrap the entire thing and start over from the beginning. I am not a fan of wasted effort nor of redoing things — especially not when it’s because no one bothered to figure out what they wanted in the first place. But I don’t want to dwell on this because if I do, I go back to the angry place, and I’m glad to be done with all that!

Actually, today I landed a job that was right up my alley… it was something that I’d actually already started exploring out of my own curiosity on my own time (to distract me from the red-haze-over-my-vision fury that would overcome me any time I considered the documentation I have to eventually rewrite in entirety). It had to do with a cost-benefit analysis of sending our people out on repeated extra duties that are being increasingly thrust on our directorate. I got to spend all day in Excel, mucking around with man-hours and pay rates and overlap dates and things like that… which probably sounds horrible to someone who doesn’t like messing around trying to find answers to problems. I got to wrap up my analysis of the problem with a set of recommendations that really were just glorified common sense (though I’ve noticed that in large organizations often common sense gets left when people come in the door). Really, this project just made my day–I wish I got more of them like that, because it’s actually something I feel qualified to work on and come up with a reasonable solution to! (And when I finish it, I know that I can argue it down to the ground, invoking obscure mathematical turns of phrase that would intimidate even the most irritating of bureaucratic automatons…)

So, by the grace of my nerdy short-turnaround project, my mood was greatly restored by the end of the day and I am actually just shy of feeling happy this evening, which is quite a feat when compared with the frustration/rage/despair I was wallowing in for the past couple days. Yes, I was being a drama queen; no need to worry about me. It was just an unhappy conjunction of gloomy overcast winter days, natural mood swings, and a bad week at work. And tomorrow is Friday! So life is good…