What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Warranty work. My fancy three year old tacticool backpack busted a clasp holding the shoulder strap together a few weeks ago. It’s got a “lifetime” warrantee, but they want you to send it back for them to look at it before they decide to repair or replace the offending piece. Look. Just send me the $.25 part and I’ll swap it myself. That seems like a solution that would make life easier on everyone. Apparently it is not.

2. Bad head space. I’ve been in a shit head space for a few weeks now. Taking every bit of available energy to manage a cool and reasonably calm exterior while the inside runs somewhere between a steady simmer and rolling boil. It’s just damned exhausting. Coming home every day ready to crawl into bed at 5PM isn’t my style when there’s things that need doing and I’m determined not to let the 8 hours I just spent whoring myself to the high bidder ruin the reason I’m whoring myself out to begin with. The up side is that when I do finally crawl into bed, I’m out like someone flipping off a switch so it makes for some awfully deep and dreamless sleep. So I’ve got that going for me.

3. Elephants in the room. There’s a great big obvious topic I’d dearly love to write about this week in far more detail. Doing so, of course, would violate my personal guidelines about how much of those details get posted online. Sometimes writing in generalities just isn’t the kind of catharsis you need to address the elephant in the room. Some day, if I manage to escape getting hit by a bus or stroking out at my desk, I’m sure everything will find it’s way into print. Somehow, though, I’m sure it won’t feel as good as saying it when my blood is up.

The calm…

I had a moment today. It was a moment in the late afternoon when the phone wasn’t ringing, there weren’t two dozen emails demanding immediate action, and no one was parked at my deskside expecting a decision of any kind. It startled me. It startled me and the the reality set in that I was in the calm… that last moment of peace, the deep breath before the inevitable shitstorm crashes over your head, swamps all efforts to manage it, and defiles everything it touches with its unholy stench.

Yes friends, I had that moment of calm this afternoon and every finely honed sense developed during nearly half a lifetime as a professional bureaucrat is screaming out a warning of rough weather ahead. Truth be known, I could have done without the calm – without the chance to sit back for a minute and think on the myriad of ways the thousand moving parts of this circus can come undone between now and Monday.

Someone once said that “Jeff is happiest when he’s bitching loudest.” There’s probably some truth in that… although I’d settle for being a little less happy if there were reason to need to do a little less bitching.