Get in car, house pulls up and the lights are off
I’ve been spending so much time arguing with people who seem hell-bent against me doing things the way they should be done (because I’ve fixed just enough screw-ups in my day to know when to spot a problem barreling at me like a runaway freight train) that, well, a screw-up of my own was pretty much inevitable.
Nobody died or anything. In fact, all I have to say is that some impeccable copy went out to people who were supposed to receive it. I know what the bigger problem is, but that’s an argument that is about two pay grades up. The more-immediate problem is that I’ve lost so many senseless battles this week that I just assumed this was a task I could crank out and feel like I achieved something.
(I was wholly opposed to the task itself on a fundamental level. So I sort of did the Band-Aid thing with it — just rip it off, get it overwith and fugettaboutit.)
Besides, you give me a task, I do it. I do not sit on it or wonder what the hell just happened. (Well, not most of the time.)
What burns my ass is that if the Internet had just gone down a half-hour earlier, I wouldn’t have had people about four pay grades above mine in my cubby asking what the hell just happened. 🙂
OK, what really kills me is how much time you spend in a day making everything “just so” and helping your stars to shine and banging the other, ah, wire hangers into some sort of shape that you can’t beat them with. You correct a dozen mistakes in a day but when you make one? It’s on a grand level. My mistakes are few, but boy are they public. *sigh*
I think my people understand that you just get tired and you just juggle everything in and that you’re on autopilot, mostly. It’s like when you’re so tired at night that “you get in the car and the house pulls up.” You don’t know how you get through a day sometimes — you just do, and that’s victory enough.
Anywho, the tornado watch of yesterday brought storms that wiped out the power all over metro D.C. for several hours. We had to give up at work around 5 — it was my battery backup dying that did me in, not to mention that all the local cafes with free Wi-Fi were also sitting in the dark, too, so I was screwed on all accounts.
There wasn’t a functional traffic light anywhere that I had to travel, which let me tell you that there is ONLY so much joy that I can take in a day. Yarr. While there were cops directing traffic at some of the main intersections, you just couldn’t trust your fellow D.C./Md./Va. drivers to exert courtesy anywhere else. It was spectacularly frightening.
Worse still was taking the freeway, which I did because there are no traffic lights. But the freeway was jammed with folks also giving up on working. But then the lights at the off-ramps weren’t working, so can we say clusterfuck, boys and girls? I’ll bet you can!
And of course there was no food at home, which was great because I didn’t lose anything in the power outage, but that meant A) braving the streets again, as it had turned into the Wild West of “it’s everybody’s turn!” at intersections, and B) oh yeah, where are the neighborhoods with functioning electricity?
I’m just so excited that it’s now 6:30 a.m. and I finally have everything (power, cable, Internet) back. I need to make an online purchase just to show Teh Intarwebs how much I missed them!