Five by five

Including today, I have twenty-five days of work to get through before I will begin nine consecutive days off, seven of which will be spent at the beach with my family. Is five weeks out too far off to start counting down to vacation? It better not be, because I may only be mentioning it now but, trust me, I’ve already been counting down for quite some time.

My government boss is actually on vacation this week, but left me with a moderately reasonable task to complete in her absence. The good news is that it’s fairly simple and straightforward yet would make for a good accomplishment to deliver by week’s end. The bad news is that it mostly involves delegating a bunch of tasks and putting the results together as they come back, and I can handle asking others to take a look at the tasks but I’m never entirely comfortable following up and increasing pressure on others to get things turned around, even if it’s all being done in the boss’s name, since I’m not the boss myself. We shall see how it all shakes out.

In the mean time, it occurs to me that it’s been a while since I caveated any of my work-related musings with “And I know I should feel lucky and grateful just to have a job.” Is that because I’ve truly internalized the feelings of gratitude and felicity, or a sign that the recession and bad economic times are actually fading into yesterday? I’m not sure, but one thing I do know is that the whole (no longer new) policy of no cell phones in the office is really working my nerves and making me extremely ungrateful and irritable. For one thing, we have yet to see a single classified computer terminal installed in our office suite, so all the heightened security restrictions are still pre-emptive and for largely hypothetical reasons, which is a drag. But the logistics are just so dang impractical. Today, my wife had a doctor’s appointment to have something looked at which was odd enough to be a minor cause of concern. Boom, cut to, she’s fine, it’s something but not something seriously worrisome. However, for a certain period this afternoon I was afraid to leave my desk because my desk phone was the only available means she had to contact me after her appointment to convey what the doctor said. If I had needed to leave the building altogether I could have taken my cell phone with me and turned it on once I was outside, AND left her a message to call me not at my desk but on the cell between the timestamp of the message and however long I thought I would be gone. Or maybe leave one message saying to call my cell and then, if I didn’t hear from her by the time I got back to the office, leave a second message saying ignore the first. I’m just saying it was easier when, all day, any time, she could just call my cell and get through to me, is all.