An honest to goodness update!

Sometimes you just have one of those Days. You know the ones I mean. There's just not enough time in them. Really.

So I got in early, which was one of the few good things today. My boss has left me a voicemail: could I send an email inviting these people to the web seminar I had just registered us for the day before, which by the way means I need to find a room with A/V incuding an internet drop, because no way can 8 people squeeze into Susan's office and watch on her little flat screen. Well I do that (at least most of it - I forgot to cc two people, but hey, it was a Voice Message, for chrissakes), and then get back to the other things I need to do today.

There's a contract that needed to be signed and assigned a PO# and faxed back to the vendor TODAY or it would be off the table. Fortunately, the senior management (and by that I mean the CFO, the President, my boss, etc.) were all involved in reviewing it, and in fact our President had signed it at the end of the day yesterday. So phew. I had a call in to the director of Purchasing asking her to let me know as soon as she got in so I could bring the contract over for the PO# - this because I had emailed her the day before, asking if there was any way to expedite things, and she said No, she had to have the original after it was signed.

Right. So I call her at 8:30 reminding her that I called last night, please let me know, etc. Nothing.

We had a candidate for Infection Control Manager come in this morning, too, so I'm taking her around - oh, and incidentally, had to squeeze one more person into her interview schedule, last minute, thanks - and I'm trying to track down Purchasing for this contract (and a couple other things). Finally LC in Purchasing calls: "I'm in and out with meetings all day, but the best thing you can do is bring it over right away and then I can get to it when I get to it." Hm. Okay, thinks I, and I faxed the two pages with our signatures on them to the vendor - because at least that way, they know we've signed it, and we can worry about the PO "eventually."

Well, I take the contract over and she's all "Well, I've never seen this, I'm not familiar with it, and how can they bring me something this complex and expect me to assign a PO today?" I told her I was sorry, but N (our CFO and, by the way, HER BOSS) was supposed to have reviewed and signed the contract earlier this week, and he didn't, asking J (the President) to sign it instead. I explained that I only got the signed contract back at 4:30 yesterday afternoon, and she had told me she needed the original contract to do anything with it.

She told me that she would try to review it today and asked me to send her the vendor contact info so she could see about talking him into giving us an extension on the PO. Fine. I also talked to one of the Purchasing managers about another couple questions I had on totally unrelated subjects, and then got stopped by BY, our research director, who wanted some advice on editing a slideshow that Susan will be presenting to the IRB (Institutional Review Board, yo).

I got back over to the main building, once again got sucked into the interviewing process (ferrying the candidate), and forgot to forward LC the email with contact info, temporarily. But that's okay.

Meanwhile, G (our Pharmacist) has arrived for another meeting with my boss and is insisting on trying to be "helpful" about meeting scheduling techniques, becuase due to a snafu weeks ago, I missed two people on a distribution list who didn't come to a meeting yesterday. Le sigh. I finally said, "Yes, I know how to do it, but I've been told several times to do meetings in a number of different ways, and since I was scheduling about 10 at once, which is not unusual, I lost track of who was on which list and who had already been notified via which method." Jesus! Grrrrrrrrr.

Anyhoo. So then LC calls from Purchasing again, and wants to know the Cost Center (which I manage to get accidentally from someone else not to0 much later) and has other questions, etc., which I answer as best I can. She also tells me they need to enter this vendor in their system because they're new. At this point I realize I haven't sent her the contact info and I say so and I do so. Everything's going swimmingly there. Hooray.

Now, I get back to the office for a bit (having taken the interview candidate to lunch, there to meet yet another person she's interviewing with), and moderate the Park real quick, before it's time to go set up the room for the Webinar. Remember the webinar?

Yeah. Well, we figure out how to connect the computer to the projector, log in to the webinar, and off we go for about 90 minutes. During this time, I surreptitiously test two of the puzzles etakyma has made for our HBP release party, but I have to keep an eye on the web seminar, because if I don't move the mouse every few minutes, the screen defaults to the screensaver.

Right. We are now done with the web seminar and it is 3:30 PM. I get back to my office and my cell phone has apparently rung while I've been gone and now the voicemail notification is going off. I dig out the phone, go to voicemail (figuring it's heidi8) and lo, it is heidi8, who has called to tell me to look in my email inbox, because... get this... the galleys for the print version of the Nimbus - 2003 compendium are back from the publisher! FINALLY! It's only been, like TWO YEARS since the conference and, oh, SIX MONTHS since we got them the manuscript. The first time, anyway.

But... no sooner do I exit voicejail (and in fact, I'm trying to punch all the right buttons to exit the system) when LC comes storming into my cubicle, ranting about how this is NOT the way she does things and she's NOT going to put her staff through this again and NEXT TIME, she HAS to be brought into the loop sooner. Now, she keeps saying she "knows it's not my fault" but still really seems to want to lay the blame for this at my feet. I keep saying to her, "Well, I'm really sorry, but you know N, your boss, was the one acting as our financial liaison on this, so if anyone should have known to loop you in sooner, it would have been HIM." This is clearly not what she wants to hear (nor, I am certain, does she want to hear that she *could* have told me fucking YESTERDAY to get her a copy of the contract if she wanted to review it early), so I just let her ream me out one more time, say nothing, and let her storm back out.

However. Because Susan likes to know when people have been inappropriate with me, I happened to go over there for something else and I just happened to say to her, "By the way, I just got my ass handed to me by LC."

Hee. Susan proceeds to ask for the details, and when I tell her, she completely agrees with me - N and she and J were all handling it at the top levels and it's not LC's place to decide that she needs information - all she has to do is assign the PO number, nor does she need to review the contract. Now, I can understand her wanting information so she can categorize her PO correctly, but still... mainly I was just annoyed because she was acting like I somehow had the power to have "brought her in" ahead of now, when to my knowledge, N was planning to have signed the contract TWO DAYS before he left for vacation, and besides that, why the hell didn't HE apprise her of the situation, the urgency, AND the details? [Incidentally, she tells me that this is the second time TODAY she's had to speak to LC about her way with people. Apparently she was also incredibly rude to the VP of Nursing (!) who is *never* short with anyone.]

Grrrrr. So that little crisis over, I got back to proofing the galleys. Was there until just after 6 PM doing that (and an odd job for Susan or two as well).

And what happens? JUST as I'm getting up the hill to the shuttle spot, it's pulling out into the street. No ride for me. And half an hour until the next one. Since I happened to have on good walking shoes, my hose were already toast (oh, yeah, by the way - all day with a run in my stocking (black stockings, mind you, thanks) and the elastic kind of half going on the waistband), and it was partly cloudy and not all that hot, I walked.

There are two streets that dead-end against the side of our parking lot, both of which end in fences and you can see the cars beyond. Sure enough, I had just reached the first of these when I saw the shuttle make the corner to head back toward the hospital. It passed me just about as I was turning in to the footpath back into the lot. So good call, me, and plus I got a walk in.

Went to Target, as had been my plan. Last night, etakyma and I went to the one in Framingham and I bought a really sweet oscillating fan (remote control, timed auto-shut off, and a "breeze" function that is just too nifty), a couple surge protectors, and some sleep wear that has shorts instead of long pants. Tonight I went to the Watertown Target and bought a good bookshelf, two padded folding chairs (yay!) and a framed print that I'd liked a lot when I first saw it, then it sold out, and now it's back, so I got it.

Came home. Made cereal. Paid bills. Read my flist.


Oh, and yesterday I got my replacement phone. Only it's NOT my replacement phone because my phone was blue and this one is silver. I was really hoping they'd do what I asked and order me a green one. Guy at store admitted that they fucked up and never actually ordered my phone like they were supposed to. "Does it matter if it's silver?" "Well, not for nothing, buddy, but if I'd wanted a silver phone, I'd have bought it a year ago."

I know, I can get a face plate. What a pain. I shouldn't be so attached to the silly, external trappings of technology, though.

Maybe when I'm ready for my next phone, they'll have purple ones. That would make this all better.