Tag Archives: Monday

There are worse things…

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Sunday is usually my lead off post for the week. It helps set the tone for what’s to come. Believe it or not I tend to put a lot of thought into what shows up on Sundays… Not that you’d know it based on what’s showing up here tonight. I’ll blame that mostly on spending a large portion of today thinking it was Saturday. You can imagine my grave annoyance when, around 4PM it occurred to me that it’s actually Sunday – and all the baggage that goes along with it.

As happy as I am that Game of Thrones is less than two hours away, I’m all too aware that it’s the big huzzah before Monday comes along and sucks all the joy out of life. It wont be as bad as all that, of course, but still I’d be more than happy to roll back the clock and have a bit of extra time. Since that’s not going to happen, I guess I’d better do my best to make the next couple of hours count.

A friend of mine sent me a text from their office this afternoon – which reminded me there are worse things than watching the end of the weekend close in… Sunday could just be one more day at the office. That’s probably good for the hard chargers among you, but as for me I’d rather be screwing around in the yard and wargaming the next home improvement project. At this stage of the game I don’t think I have it in me to give more than 40.

Come to think of it, I need to go check my Powerball numbers. This whole discussion could be purely academic.

Unicorn…

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colorful_unicornIt’s a rare feat of living that finds all three slots reserved for What Annoys Jeff this Week filled before the end of the day on Monday. Maybe it has something to do with coming back from a four day weekend and being struck by the realization that it’s a three-week haul to the next break of any significance. I don’t think that’s the root cause, though. Maybe a contributing factor, but definitely not the cause. Today was just that stupid.

Usually when I say “stupid,” I mean in that mayhem and chaos kind of way that makes everything bad and wrong. That wasn’t the case today. In fact I honestly can’t pinpoint anything at all that made today any more ridiculous than a typical Monday, but it was.

Although all three of the current contenders is perfectly worthy in its own right, rest assured I’ll be perfectly happy to throw any and all of them over the side assuming the trend set today continues through Thursday. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if any of today’s objections will make the final cut. Regardless, today I stumbled upon my elusive unicorn of annoyances. The hat trick. The triple play. God willing I’ll never see another.

Where you stand…

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It’s Monday again and while they don’t seem so bad when you’re not shuffling off to work in the dark hours of the morning, it’s still the kind of thing that turns your mind to thoughts of the office. Inevitably, that means I’m thinking about meetings, because, in a “professional work environment” apparently meetings are just about the only thing people do.

It’s been my experience that on any given day there are more meetings than people available to go sit in them. That problem compounds because everyone inevitably thinks their meeting is the most important of the day and demand that the most senior person available attend them in order to reinforce the perception of importance. And you see, that’s where things start coming off the rails, because some meetings get stuck with guys like me showing up. When I show up unescorted by someone of senior grade, there’s a good chance your meeting isn’t nearly as important as you think it is.

It’s not that I’m in any way incapable of expressing official thoughts or ideas, it’s just that I have no standing to actually make or enforce decisions on behalf of my large bureaucratic organization. Those activities are reserved to pay grades far higher than mine (and I’m OK with that). The other thing that you really should be concerned about when I show up alone is that there’s always a chance that my filter will slip off and I might accidentally open my mouth and let my actual opinion fly out. While there’s always a price to pay for telling truth to power, I generally don’t think about that until the cat’s well out of its bag.

As it is, I’m amazed on a weekly basis how many times I’m left alone with an open mic and a naive optimism that I won’t say something stupid directly into the ear of someone at echelons higher than reality. Also, and I’ll give you this one for free, if the only time you can schedule your meeting is after lunch on a Friday, go ahead and kill your project because that’s a sure sign there isn’t a single person anywhere on the planet who actually cares about what you’re doing.

So, yeah, on this Monday morning, I’m reaching out to meeting organizers everywhere and giving them an opportunity to reevaluate their actions, how many gaggles they schedule, when they’re held, and where they stand in the grand scheme of things.

The forgotten blog…

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I could probably create some grand story about why this is the first post in three days, but the fact is I mostly forgot about posting this weekend. Not spending a great deal of time annoyed, aggravated, or otherwise pissed off radically diminishes the number of ideas worth writing about. That might be the only unfortunate side effect of spending a weekend successfully hiding from the world. The lower blood pressure resulting from the lack of human interaction is probably worth the lack of words.

Conveniently, Sunday night making its inevitable appearance has reminded me that there is, in fact, still a world out there just waiting to cause offense. That’s probably what reminded me that I needed to get back to the blog. I’m doing my best to remind myself that this weekend is leading into a short week that’s leading in to a long weekend, that’s leading into an even shorter week, that’s leading into an even longer weekend, that’s leading into yet another short week. As long as I get over the hump of the next four days, at least the first half of July is scheduled to look pretty damned good. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that I don’t find some way to jack it all up between now and then. In fact even admitting that I’m looking forward to it has probably been enough to irretrievably jinx myself.

Tomorrow’s Monday, which if nothing else means that there will in all likelihood be plenty of fodder for new posts. I just hope the blogging gods will let me off the hook for skipping out on them for the last few days. Otherwise, it’s could be a very long week indeed.

A matter of priorities…

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So Russia is back on the road towards rebuilding the old Soviet Empire. That’s bad, but it’s not what’s dominating my thoughts today. I’m my head I’m already projecting forward to Monday morning and wondering if the projected “winter weather event” will be enough to buy me just one more day of weekend. Maybe I’ve got my priorities all sorts of jacked up on that one, but Monday is the closest problem to me. Statistically, its arrival (and the ruination of the weekend) is an absolute certainty, making its bad results guaranteed to happen. Ukraine, on the other hand may or may not dissolve into civil war through the prodding of the Russians… and even if it does, that badness is less of a direct impact on me. Sure, it probably makes me a bad person to be more worried about Monday than another potentially catastrophic war starting in Eastern Europe, but if the rest of the world isn’t bothered that it’s on the fast track to hell in a handbag, I’m not going to waste a lot of time worrying either.

One good thing…

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I don’t know anyone who is really a fan of Monday. I suppose there is always the odd shift worker whose weekend starts on Monday, but they are clearly the exception. For most other working stiffs, Monday is mostly just the week’s great reminder that our time really isn’t our own.

The day does have one redeeming quality that I’ve found. This singular quality would be that Monday is so significantly different from the two days preceding it that in most cases the morning just seems to fly by once it gets going. Maybe it’s a minor issue of perception, but being the optimist that I am, I thought it worth pointing out. After lunch, of course, the perceived passage of time slows to its standard weekday snail’s pace. At least one this one day of the week it’s nice to look up from whatever I’m doing and be pleasantly surprised that it’s time for lunch rather than looking up and wondering why it’s not even passed 9AM yet.

Perception is a tricky mistress like that. She gives with one hand and punches you in the junk with the other. My advice: Try enjoying the good moments while you’re waiting for the other hand to drop you like a ton of bricks.

Particularly lame…

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Mondays are bad enough without assistance. It’s the day of the week when you have to do the most moderation of the standard weekend attitude of doing what you want, when you want. That one has always given me trouble, even under the best of circumstances. When it comes to feeling like I had a big plate of jagged glass for dinner, it’s safe to assume that rules out this being one of those “best circumstance” kind of days. Mostly that translates into feeling pretty surly… or maybe just more surly than usual. That would really depend on your perspective, but that’s not the point.

The point is I’ve spent the last thirteen hours trying to figure out what to swallow that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to rip open my throat from the inside. So far the losers in this contest have been coffee, a turkey sandwich, pretzels, water, and spaghetti. Plus, I’ve spent the last eight hours feeling like I need to sneeze. Eight hours. It would be ok if there were an actual sneeze to go with that feeling – you know at least some momentary feeling of relief or that something is getting accomplished, but no, that’s clearly out of the question.

So instead of doing anything more productive than heating up leftovers and blogging, here I sit, sipping hot tea with lemon and honey (the only thing I’ve found so far that doesn’t hurt to swallow) and feeling like I need to sneeze. Even for a Monday night, this one feels particularly lame. If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here nursing a sore throat and not sneezing.

1,147 Mondays…

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22 years, 24 days, 6 hours. That’s the amount of time between this evening and my first date of retirement eligibility. I didn’t start out the day with that stuck in my head. What I was really focused on is what an utter disappointment Mondays are in the grand scheme of things. Monday is the week’s little way of pissing on your leg and calling it rain.

Maybe somewhere there is a happy group of people who leap out of bed on Monday mornings excited and ready to get back to their cubes to get started on the exciting week ahead. It’s a good bet that I’m never going to be that kind of person. The best I can manage on Monday is a grudging acknowledgement that at least Friday afternoon is a few hours closer… and if I really want to put on my optimist hat, I can always do some quick math and find out that there are only another 1,147 Mondays standing between me and having the right combination of age and years of service to qualify to retire. Eligibility, of course, doesn’t mean that it makes financial sense to hit eject, but that’s going to have to be a separate discussion.

But hey, looking on the bright side, in less than three years, I’ll have whittled down the number of Mondays into the triple digits. Wow. Yeah. That’s depressing. Stupid Mondays.

Over the horizon…

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Some days you just have nothing to show for getting out of bed. As far as I can tell, this is one of those days. For the record, that’s not a complaint. It’s a simple acknowledgment of fact. It’s one of those days where the best thing you can say is that you’ve managed to do no harm – neither advancing the cause or making it substantively worse in any way. It’s a draw… and if you’re a smart bureaucrat, you’ve survived long enough to know that a draw is effectively a win, because the scales are almost always weighted in the direction of making things worse off than they were before you touched something.

I should really put a more positive spin on the day. To paraphrase what a wise man told me this morning, “Look on the bright side, it’s Tuesday. That means were as far away from next Monday as it’s possible to get.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic. After all, it’s Tuesday night now. If you strain your eyes hard enough you can start to see the first signs of the weekend coming on, even though it’s still out there somewhere over the horizon. That’s as cup-half-full as I’m likely to get, so make of it what you will.

And people say I never post anything positive. This’ll show ‘em.

Happy pills…

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Some pain is worse than others… while for most run of the mill problems, the standard dosage of ibuprofen is more than sufficient to dull the aches to a minor annoyance, missing half a tooth calls for something a little more substantial. Thankfully I keep every prescription I’ve ever gotten and usually have something high potency floating around in the back of the medicine cabinet.

For the last couple of days, my happy pill du jure has been oxycodone left over from the summer’s sprained ankle. To be honest, it didn’t just dull the toothache so much as it made it completely unnoticeable, which was just fine by me. To say that it improved my mood, even on a Monday morning is a profound understatement. Even with half a tooth missing, I was feeling downright chipper when I rolled into work. I can see how one might be tempted to keep these little gems on hand at all times. Sadly, my stock is now depleted and since I have no intention of turning into prescription junkie, I’m holding the last few in reserve for whatever great pain comes next. And when you’re me, you’re only ever a week or two away from a new and interesting pain. I write it off to the indignity of middle age settling in.

It’s probably for the best, really. If my mood were to improve dramatically for any extended period of time, I’m seriously concerned that it would be curtains for any kind of decent writing you might see around here. The best stories always seem to come out when I’m just short of being agitated enough to punch someone in the nose. Being chipper on Monday mornings just isn’t worth what I’d be giving up.