This morning, my boss hasn’t yet shown up to work, nor has she called. Apparently yesterday evening before she left, she told the administrative assistant that she was feeling ill and that if she continued to feel that unwell, she wouldn’t be in today. So, in light of the fact that she’s now 90 minutes late and hasn’t called, I’ve taken charge.

Oh, joy.

So now I have to prod my colleagues to send me their weekly reports so I can edit and compile them into a report to send to the higher-ups, and I get to attend my boss’s meetings in her place and deal with the (admittedly fairly minor but time-critical) crises that already have begun to arise.

Combined with the fact that the lab manager who reports to me keeps calling in to say he’ll be late, each time pushing his expected arrival back even further, and the other lab tech also is MIA, while the students are complaining that one of the servers isn’t responding, and this day just has Excedrin Headache Number 1415 written all over it.

And I thought that I’d left the high stress behind, along with a salary double what I’m making here in the government, when I left the dot-com world for the feds.