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.