“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 766 (Thursday) – what the Twix

The workweek is flying by but is hasn't exactly been easy. It's involved a string of days filled with an overabundance of short-notice requests, insufficient information, miscommunication, and an abundance of annoying crap that makes the simplest thing ten times harder. 

By the time I logged off today, since Monday morning there had been, by conservative estimate, 1,257 utterances of “What in the actual hell?”. Today was the worst, but I won’t get too comfortable with that idea because there is still tomorrow to shatter the record.

Survival rewards.

This morning, a newspaper forgot to run our carefully crafted ad that was specially designed a month ago and strategically timed for today. Another newspaper, after three weeks of running ads, suddenly started asking questions about the rest of the lineup that got me so spun around I was second guessing the entire campaign ad lineup. 

After three or four rounds of back-and-forth emails it was finally settled with the ads at the second paper running according to the original schedule sent before the inquisition began and I still had no idea what prompted the entire thing. There was no time to ponder it, because it was one of those days with fires erupting everywhere.

The sudden media madness might not have been that bad if not running concurrently with a juggling act involving pricing comparisons and multiple not-so-clear projects and shifting and conflicting priorities. This consumed the first couple hours of the day until my chest was tight from not breathing or maybe the not breathing was because the chest was tight. A real chicken and egg philosophical debate, but again, there was no time to analyze it. This can be done during one of the 1,000 times I wake up all night long.

The flood of incoming emails and Team chat messages didn’t let up until around 4:55, meaning there were five whole minutes all day long in which to catch my breath before it was time to log off.

Over in the plus column, well, my head didn’t actually explode, even though it felt like it might. It was not my favorite work day by any stretch, but it was also probably not the worst and at least it finally ended. The prize for survival was impersonating a hungry jackal and devouring all six mini Twix bars from a package bought the other night when getting baby diapers for Winston. The day was not fun, but the Fun size candy certainly helped.