“Remoted” – Workday 67 / Day 91 (Monday)

Vacation Friday, pay dearly on Monday.

Monday morning after a Friday off is always, um, fun. As in, 100% not fun at all. The angst used to begin with the initial opening of the inbox, but over time, the knowledge of what usually awaits has pushed the dread even earlier so it invades Sunday evening. Today there were 117 new emails lying in wait for me, which is about usual. Generally there are anywhere from 80 to 120 emails on Monday when I am out on a Friday. It’s terrifying. Yes, I could log in and check emails on the weekend, but why ruin those days too?

Sometimes, when I see the number of unread emails in the inbox, I want to logout immediately and flee. And that’s before any of them have even been opened, when I can still tell myself there is a glimmer of a chance that there won’t be a bunch of problems hidden within. This level of delusion is required to proceed and I’m finally getting good at it.

Sometimes (rarely)  I actually get lucky, there are no problems lurking, and it’s just an extra volume of messages from newsletters to which I subscribe, or touch base emails  from people I haven’t communicated with in a while, or progress reports confirming that projects are on track. More often than not, it’s issues with vendors or media, or last minute projects from out of left field that didn’t even exist on Thursday and are already behind schedule, or projects we thought were completed but are suddenly resurrected. It’s certainly not dull.

Today, as much as I dared to hope it would be one of the rare Mondays after a Friday vacation day, it was one of the usual ones. Most of the morning was consumed with learning that things skidded sideways on Friday, trying to understand what happened and what didn’t, wrangling all the loose ends and notifying the people who need to know and the next thing I knew the morning had blown by in a blink. Fastest Monday morning ever. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Welcome to the weekly cable reset.

After work, it was time to be greeted by a blank TV screen and reset the cable box to then wander about while the box does its thing. This is a weekly event, and some weeks, the blessed joy happens two or three times. Hooray for cable/internet companies with a monopoly on the local market and no other viable options! 

On the bright side, I probably don’t have low blood pressure any more. At least not on Monday mornings after a Friday vacation day.