Even with Bernie leaving me alone, this job wears me out sometimes. Since I've been here, I've been coding about two survey jobs a month. In the first two weeks of September, I've coded five so far.

I'm taking a break at the moment before I put together a survey revision for yet another client whose three jobs, thankfully, aren't due until early November. Two of these are huge - 150 questions +/-, mostly due to the client's insistence on repeating themselves multiple times on successive screens. It's a pain to code that one.

And while I wait for approval from a client whose survey, if approved, I need to load and test on fifty boxes by Tuesday.

And while I wait for a shipment to arrive, from a client who announced today that they need their results in 4 days, instead of the usual ten. (I need to practice pretend-uploading for that one - it requires using a program I haven't used in that way before and, as I understand it, doing it wrong will erase all the client's data. Very exciting to contemplate, no?)

I simply cannot imagine, if I'd gotten in a snit and walked out, I simply cannot imagine how Bernie could have coped.

So, Lotto is up to, what? $137,000,000? What would you do if you won it Saturday night? Would you show up for work on Monday? Would you give notice and work it out (I mean, really work)?

The R.C. and her co-workers have apparently been debating this. Her supervisor is so convinced of her own value to their company that she announced she'd stay to see out the end of the project due in Februrary, 2007.

The R.C. said she'd leave a voice-mail announcing her never-to-returnness.

Me, I'd stay here through the end of September. While I can't imagine finding myself so irreplaceable that I'd stay in a position for five or six months, I also couldn't reconcile it with my conscience not to stay a measly couple of weeks for a company that's in a bind and that has, by and large, been good to me. (Yeah, okay, Bernie hasn't been especially good to me, but let's remember that Buehler owns 75% of this enterprise and he's been very good to me.)

I don't anticipate winning Lotto this weekend, even though the R.C. has actually remembered to purchase a ticket, but I'm hoping to win my own little job lottery next month. Just as soon as I've quieted my conscience (which I'm anticipating will be around September 27), I'm hitting the job sites daily. (Yeah, I could do it now, but in the unlikely event I ran across a company moving fast and they called me in a couple of days for an interview, the bottom line truth is that I don't have time to go on interviews between now and the 27th.)

(For those wondering about today's blog entry and my work ethic? This has largely been written in two-minute intervals while I wait for a program to periodically rebuild. So I'm not wasting company time. Precisely. And if it reads sort of choppy, well, that's the explanation.)

(When did some of us in this society actually become so firmly programmed to believe that if we're not doing at least two things at once, we're not doing anything? Why can I not just sit here, stare at the wall, and ponder Plot Point Problems while I wait for the program to rebuild? Why does thinking not count as "productive"?) (Okay, I consider personal time spent thinking as productive. I just realized that I don't think of work time spent thinking as productive.)

(Apparently I'm having one of my parenthetical days.)

Yes, as a matter of fact, referring back to the opening paragraph of this little entry, you'll see reference to Bernie "leaving me alone." He has, in fact, refrained from annoying the hell out of me ever since the day I told him I wasn't having fun and I wasn't planning to stay.

It's very odd.

It'th altho a thame that you can't bandagth your tongue.

I bit the heck out of mine the other evening and it still hurts.