Hell Week

The Journal has been neglected. It's been Hell Week - or, really, Hell Two Weeks.

My boss is away for three weeks, which increases the amount of stuff that needs tending to around the office. My boss's boss is new, which means she feels a need to stay on top of everything, which means weekly workload meetings. I'm hiring research assistants, which means phone interviews and many back-and-forth discussions with other people in the office. And two cases of mine appear to be steaming toward litigation, with a third in a hopeless mess caused by the confluence of being ambushed by a set of lawyers and a friendly fire incident with my own staff guy.

Here's a little levity, though: the weekly workload meeting, which is usually held in my office building, was scheduled for this Thursday only to be held in the Big Boss's office, in a separate building, several Metro stops away. My colleague and I dutifully arranged to arrive early at said building, had a cup of coffee, and waited until the appointed time....Only to find no one there. Hmm, odd. Wait a moment. Nope, none of the three people that work in that building who should have been at the meeting were there. They couldn't have gone to the other building, could they? Check email. Oh yes, the could indeed.

All three of them. Independently. Each showed up, wondered why the two people critical to a workload meeting were both gone. Not one of them noticed that the meeting location had been changed...and one of them must have ordered the change. Back on the Metro we go!

I said at the time "only in government could something be screwed up that badly," but I suspect that's not true. Only in a big, dysfunctional organization could something be screwed up that badly.

Maybe next week will go more smoothly. One can but hope.