Remoted - Hybrid” – Day 576 (Wednesday)

Not quite a rabbit hole.
More of a tunnel.

Today delivered a lot of spreadsheet work to compile info requested from a vendor. The original request was for a report of total orders by branch for a period of a year. The report I imagined receiving was a listing with one figure for each of 26 locations. The report received listed every individual order from each branch for roughly a year and required a bit of adding and organizing and compiling to finally get to the magic totals by branch. These numbers would tell how many envelopes were used in order to estimate quantities for another project. It felt like I had asked the time and been delivered a box of clock parts. There was a fair amount of whisper swearing during the unplanned excursion down the rabbit hole of spreadsheets and data and flashback to my days as a treasury analyst. It’s a nice place to visit. Sort of.

The biggest quirk of the day may have been the unexpected text from the guy at the chimney company saying he was at the house to clean the chimney. Unfortunately, I was not at the house, had no plan to be at the house, and did not know there was a chimney cleaning scheduled for today. Maybe someone at the office of the chimney people woke up and thought today was a grand day for cleaning my chimney and ran with it and in the excitement, they forgot to clue me in to the plan. Or maybe it was supposed to be a surprise. 

Sadly, this sort of thing happens more than I would like. It might be an innocent oversight, or someone else’s piss poor planning that suddenly becomes my emergency, or a deliberate attempt to surprise me. Most of the time I end up stressed out and scrambling to rearrange things.  There was no scrambling or rearranging today. Not over the chimney anyway. Chimney cleaning was scheduled for a day I actually know about. 

I feel you, broken bike.

There was a pleasant afternoon walk downtown in lovely weather. There were photo-worthy moments. The sparkling water in a canal. A waterfall bursting from a cluster of greenery. Flower pots along a brick building. A partially dismembered bicycle which has been tethered to a sign for weeks, a feeling to which I can often relate. A man I passed on the sidewalk said, “Hello young lady” and I almost laughed out loud at the “young lady” part, but it was successfully stifled. Sometimes my self-control surprises almost as much as my random lack of it.