fine whine

So now that I'm two co-workers down (well, somewhere between one and a half and two, or maybe three, if Michelle when pregnant counted as working for two) I've had something of an increase in my workload. Threefold, if not more. Without getting into any detail, I can say that it's an awful lot of garments and emails.

Oddly enough my phone is ringing less and less, disproportionately so if not in some weird inverse of the the email increase. This may be some sort of pleasant side effect, or I may just be slicing my time into smaller bits such that the intervals between calls, being filled with more and more work, seem all the more distanced even though the calls still come at the same rate. Or not.

Naturally I am under the delusion that I can somehow handle all of this.

Perhaps I delude myself because I have nobody else to delude, as promises of help and the like seem to be hopeful suggestions, not concrete assistance.

Tomorrow and Friday I leave the office to trek across the Rust Belt, and all the time I am going to be away from my emails and garments and desk and phone.

I'll look at my emails, unofficially, but that's all. I'm not going to check my voicemail, and I'm going to pretend that the place is at a standstill without me.

Which, effectively, it is, since I am apparently the Final Authority on a number of little decisions, the cumulative result of which is a pair of jeans in a store.

Well, several hundreds of thousands of pairs of jeans in hundreds of stores, but the idea's the same.