I was going to work all day.  I hadn't gotten much done this week.  Well, I laid a lot of groundwork on some big pieces but I didn't finish that much.  Unfortunately, I only get paid for the stuff I finish.  So....Monday was going to be a cram day.  I figured I could get a bell pull cranked out in the morning and maybe a couple of purses in the afternoon.

Then Margy called.  I don't talk to her all that often so I always drop what I'm doing when she calls.  It would be great to have a speaker phone in my office so I could work and talk at the same time.  But I don't.  We talked for an hour and a half.  Standard for one of our calls. 

By then it was lunch time so I had to eat.

After lunch, I would definitely attack that bell pull.

But Katie showed up at lunch time.  She's on spring break and had worked the morning shift but dropped by to say hi before heading home.

Last week, she had a brief review with three of her instructors.  The assignment had been to write a brief (I don't know what the case was) and after reading it, her teachers met with her to go over it.

"Well, Katie," one of them asked to kick off the review, "How do you think you did on this?"

"To be honest," Katie answered "I think I did a really good job."  Self esteem has never been a problem for any of my kids.

"So do we."

Her professors then spent the next fifteen minutes pumping up her ego.  One even kept reading bits of the brief out loud, laughing, shaking his head and saying "Boy, that's good!"

All of which is wonderful and terrific and I'm VERY proud of her and it was well after two o'clock before I got back into my office.

So I'm done drawing the bell pull and starting to paint when Jay calls.

He'd been stuck in meetings all day and is trying to set up a trip and he needed some info he couldn't get where he was, would I please make some calls for him?  
 
Of course!  When I'm up to my elbows in paint, there's nothing I enjoy more than executing petty chores for my nearest and dearest!  It's not as though my job takes any concentration or anything!  It's not as though I was in a groove, you know!  I WOULD JUST LOVE TO MAKE SOME STUPID ASS PHONE CALL FOR YOU, HONEY.

Seriously, I've done this before and it never takes more than a few seconds.  So the above paragraph didn't really cross my mind when he called. 

However, certain companies have apparently changed their practices, because what I used to be able to do by dialing a number and pressing a button now entailed dialing, feeding in long strings of numbers, being told repeatedly that the long strings of numbers were invalid, talking to some customer rep, being told I had to call a different office, calling that office, going through the whole rigmarole again...only to be given yet another number to call.  This went on for twenty minutes.  Somewhere in there, the above paragraph crossed my mind.  Then it crossed it again, wearing boots.

I was in my office until seven o'clock last night and finished the bleepin' bell pull this morning.

 

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