What I need is to go back to 4-10s. I used to work a job where I worked ten hours a day, but I only had to work four days a week. Thus, I had a three-day weekend every week.

What my life needs is more three-day weekends. I need more days off.

Granted, I already have difficulty staying motivated or interested in what I'm doing for eight hours a day, so I can't honestly say my employer would gain, or even come out even, on the productivity scale if I were sitting here for ten hours, but this is All About Me, so I'm not so much worried about that part of the equation.

Yesterday, for instance, Bernie requested a 1:00 meeting. (He always requests 1:00 meetings. He, like many people, takes it as a personal affront that I eat lunch at 1:00 instead of at high noon.) That, and the morning's conference call, were the only things on my agenda. I had things I could dink around with, but no actual work to do that inspired the slightest amount of enthusiasm in my Monday Morning Brain.

Oh, wait. I forgot. Bernie wanted me to find out how much it would cost a client to run a Google Ad (keywords undetermined) in one, or maybe two major markets (not really chosen yet) for some time period that he's not sure about yet. I started to try to do the impossible and figure this out, but then common sense kicked in and I just told him he could run a really quality experiment for $500/month. (Who knows? Maybe he can. If and when he decides what ad to run in what market....) I was pretty excited about that one.

Okay, I don't mind working with the Merely Stupid, especially since I fall into the category myself, from time to time, but working with the Stubbornly Clueless really annoys me. (One time I told him it wasn't possible to do a similar project under these circumstances and he got in a huff, called the vendor himself, gave them all the details he told me that he didn't have, and then returned, triumphant, to my desk to announce that he hadn't found it at all difficult to complete the "impossible" project. How I refrained from slaying him, I'll never understand.)

Yesterday's other Ridiculously Vague Project involved giving him a time schedule for how soon this week I'll talk to some people who have, as he well knows, refused to answer my e-mails and phone calls for several days already, and what results I'll get from them if and when they do ever talk to me. (Yeah, let me send Og The Enforcer over to their offices and force them to talk to me and, while I'm at it, let me gaze into my crystal ball and find out what they're going to say when they do.)

And, finally (there were several idiot projects, once I stopped to think about it), I had to find the names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and specific best method of individually contacting 40-50 people in his latest brainstorm, an industry we have no experience with. Mind you, it's not enough to identify the specific organizations and their contact info - he wants me to call and find out the name of the people he should talk to.

You know what I dislike? I dislike working with a "sales person" who doesn't want to do the work associated with making a sale. If "selling" involved nothing but calling a vetted list of names in a narrowly defined field of potentials, anyone could do it. At least half the battle is figuring out who you need to talk to inside any organization. The ability and the willingness to do that kind of thing is why good sales people make $150,000/year. (I've had this experience before. What happens is I call and ask who we should talk to about doing X and instead of getting a name, I get transferred to this person's voicemail or, worse, to this person directly. So I wind up doing the sales call.)

Subsequently, in our 1:00 meeting he expressed disappointment at my inability to learn to write SQL queries on the fly, to get into a client's database so we could copy it, to produce creative and original marketing plans at the drop of a hat, to create forms in .asp or .php for use on another client's website, so that newly submitted data would write directly into the database being maintained by a database guy somewhere else in a format/program I'm not sure about, and my unwillingness to work for 5 hours on Labor Day, on a project that could just as easily be done later in the week.

It isn't that I don't actually have the time to do some of those things right now, and it isn't that I'm incapable of doing at least some of them, because I do and I'm not. I just resent doing half his job, along with the half of DiamondGirl's that I inherited on top of the two people's jobs I was already doing.

I'm grouchy this week, aren't I?

What else? Anything good to report?

Last night I wallowed in the comfort of the Newly Tidy Living Room and thought smug thoughts about all of those bags of stuff in the dumpster instead of underfoot. It might have been a better wallow had the R.C. not kept mentioning all of the things left to be done, but I managed a decent wallow anyhow.

I was not online at any point. By now I'm so hopelessly behind on reading my usual online sites that I have no hope of ever catching up. I like those sites and I'd like to get caught up. I just don't have any hope of doing so.

Nope. I don't think there's that much good to report at the moment.