… I want to BE on vacation.
The path between here (3:00 Thursday afternoon) and there (Saturday, sometime, I think) is looking pretty damn rocky.
I only take one full week off a year – the first week of August, when I go “downtheshore” with the same delightful group of people every year. (I do use up the other 10 vacation days and two floating holidays, but usually in a couple of days here, a long weekend there.) One of the reasons I only take one week a year as a week is that it’s such a PITA to get things set up at work to happen smoothly in my absence. No, I’m not truly indispensible – and no, none of what I do is so recondite that I can’t teach someone else how to do it – but there’s a shitload of weird little things that I take care of that I have to think through in advance so I can tell someone else what to do – those that I can’t move up or back so they don’t hit while I’m gone. There’s about a dozen balls that I keep going at any given time, and it’s only when I prepare to move someone into my spot to keep all the balls going while keeping all the balls going that it becomes clear how many of the mo-fos there are.
Yesterday, the underling whom I’ve decreed to be this year’s “acting twicks” (as the person is known) sent me an email indicating that he was unhappy with … sigh – it would take a while and not be interesting to explain … the way that another person does certain things that affect his job, and he asked to take over these tasks. I asked for an explanation of what the problem was, and he didn’t want to tell me, lest he “get this other person in trouble.” I explained that since my job is to make sure that things happen, if they’re not happening, I need to know the details, and that I couldn’t even consider his request unless he was more specific. Got an email this morning saying X, Y, and Z – which are all things that this other person needs to correct, in order to be doing her job properly (i.e., to my satisfaction). I’d known these two weren’t particularly friendly, but just found out yesterday (in discussing this situation with my boss) that they actively loathe each other. Blah blah, blah blah – I’m not granting his request, because the first step in dealing with this problem is to have her fix what she’s doing, not take the job away from her.
So he’s getting all pissy with me, and I haven’t actually sat down and discussed this with him, because I’m running around trying to get all this other shit done before I leave. Plus there have been not one, not two, but three weird problems that have popped up today that I have had to stop and deal with (all of which were things where, “yeah, right, good luck figuring this out if I weren’t here”). Plus I have to get all the “acting twicks” stuff figured out and lined up. Plus my boss is out tomorrow, so I also have to do her stuff also. Plus my typesetter (who’s actually in Florida, making it all a trifle complicated) is away for a couple of days because one of his oldest friends died unexpectedly last weekend (at age 52 – had knee surgery and a blood clot ended up in his brain – yikes) – which means that the usual Friday routine is shot, so I have to figure out what the non-standard-operating-procedure procedure will be.
And I can’t start packing and getting organized to be gone at home, because I’ve got friends coming over tonight, and then I have a date tomorrow night (first date, naturally), and I’m not meeting him till 7:30 because of his schedule, so I’ve got a couple of hours after work to kill, which is a fair amount of time to kill but not really enough to make it worth going home and coming back, because it’s a half hour each way. And usually I try to get up early and leave for the shore by 9:00 or so on Saturday morning, to beat the traffic and get an extra beach day, but they’re saying the weather is going to be iffy on Saturday, and besides, if I’m still packing and getting organized, how early will I be able to get out? So do I get up early and do a crazy Saturday morning or just accept getting stuck in traffic?
Why are you still reading this? This has to be one of the whiniest and least interesting OPs ever written – but I do feel better having vented. 
