tgit

Today really sucked. In what frustratingly looks like a pattern of suckiness--at least workwise--today ranked right up there near the top. If the year were a college of suck, today would be graduating summa cum laude.

I had a phone conversation with one of those stereotypical foreign service junior officers scrambling for tenure, trying to convince me that his project--for which we'd already gone well above the call of duty--was so important that I needed to pull my staff off of everything else in order to continue to work on it, not-so-subtly suggesting (in fact, practically threatening) that if I thought I had work of higher priority, he'd contact the Undersecretary for his bureau and have her call the director of mine in order to set my priorities straight. Yawn. Then I got roped into a two-hour stretch of being available as a "coach" for other employees required to take an online exam; I had to give up my lunch for it, and then no one even showed up. Additional last-minute unforeseen meetings and tasks, exacerbated by the absence of two of my key employees for the day--kept me from getting to my own scheduled work until after the official close of business.

When I finally left, just barely in time to get to the Metro to pick Jeff up, I was still in cranky work-mind. Fortunately, his own exuberance about the four-day Manhattan vacation rubbed off on me pretty quickly. Now we're all packed and ready to get some shuteye in preparation for our weekend, which begins Friday morning, in just a few short hours.