Argh, dammit

Extension 17 is pissing me off today. He pisses me off every time he's in the office. He only comes in one or two days a week (the rest of the time he's "working from home" even though he's an hourly employee and should be here, under supervision) and on each of those two days a week he deigns to show up, he gets an estimated 20 personal calls from his family.

We don't have a receptionist, okay? I pick up the phone when it rings because I work with people in healthcare and when they have 60 seconds to return a call to me, I want to be able to talk to them without making them fight their way through our phone system.

Nothing pisses me off more than picking up eight calls in a row in a three-minute period and having them all be for Extension 17.

Okay, it's Friday, which is good.

But the phone started ringing early this morning and I was bouncing between trying to reschedule an installation and a netmeeting to troubleshoot at two different practices because the entire town where my tech guy lives had lost power and he didn't have a computer to use, while fielding a call from someone I've been trying to get hold of all week, when someone knocks on the office door.

(When I'm here alone in the early morning, I don't unlock the door when I come in. It's a security thing.)

So, I'm on this one call for about two minutes and during the entire two minutes this person keeps knocking and banging and (I think) kicking the door on the average of every once every 10 seconds.

Turns out it’s the guy who rents office space from us and who never brings his key (I have to let him in every day) and he just says, "hi" when I finally get off the phone and go to open the door.

I said, "I'm sorry, I was on the phone" and he just walked past me, without another word.

I don't mind opening the door for someone even though I feel like a freaking doorman at a hotel for Keyless Joe. I've let him in almost every day for a year, but if he can't wait patiently for a few seconds when the door doesn't magically swing open when he arrives, I'm done being nice. I know he has a key because he's used it at least half a dozen times in the last 18 months, so it's just some kind of congenital idiocy and I'm done with it.

From now on, Keyless will be waiting to be let in every day until he buys himself a clue.

If I were a mature, rational person, I'd just tell him to bring his key, but I'm not, I'm passive-aggressive and I'm mad, so I'm going to make him work out this complicated key concept for himself.

(The phone just rang. The Tweenybopper picked it up, something she usually doesn't do. It was for Extension 17.

Technically the Twennybopper is the closest thing we have to a receptionist but her direct boss told her she didn't have to pick up inbound calls if she didn't want to. He made this decision, you understand, in direct response to her complaints about the number of personal calls that arrive for Extension 17.)

I've had a bad week. Did you ever get PMS that lasted for a week? Because if you did, you know what I'm going through.

I don't think it's a mood swing. I don’t think of a mood swing as something that lasts for five solid days.

It might have something to do with the diet. I put four pounds back on so I went back on the diet again. I'm back down 3-1/2 (or I was, before this week, when I haven't had the nerve to weigh myself) but I'd thought about going ahead and dropping another five or so, as long as I was dieting anyhow. I actually stopped about five or six pounds short of my goal when I quit dieting last fall.

Now I'm not so sure. About losing more weight, I mean. As I recall, I was eternally pissed off at the world for about two weeks the last time I started the diet, too and this time I'm really too busy at work to be able to indulge myself this way right now.

Not that I've been that productive this week. I've worked about 2-3 hours a day in spite of having an easy 10 hours a day worth of work in front of me, so I've got guilt to add to my burden.

A really bad week.

Also, I see blogger changed their interface and I hate it. I hate the perception we all need cartoon pictures to navigate our way around a webpage because we've all become such idiots we can't read. I hate losing the preview window.

And, as I just discovered, if you click "view blog" to see what your unpreviewable post looks like, it takes you out of the blogger software and to the actual blog. Coming back to the blog, it took me several minutes to figure out how to edit a post.

This is a real step backward for blogger. They should be embarrassed.

I hate everything.