I deeply regret the loss of my brain. Never more so than when I wander into the office on a Monday morning and am abruptly reminded that I made some commitment to do something for work over the weekend...and forgot all about it by the time I slid into my car on Friday afternoon.

I hate walking into a firestorm, even a small one, first thing on Monday morning. It starts the week off so awkwardly. This time, after I talked someone else into doing a draft of a project over the weekend, I was supposed to read a proof and forward it to the client by Sunday afternoon. I...completely forgot about it. It was all there, in my in-box, this morning. And on my voicemail. So embarrassing.

I never used to have this much difficulty remembering that I'm employed. It used to be a routine thing for me to check my business e-mail three or four times over the course of a weekend.

Should I pretend this is a good thing, that I've learned to focus on my personal life as diligently as I do on my professional life (when I'm in the office), or should I be concerned that this is some danger signal from my abruptly aging brain and start taking quack herbal medications to stave off dementia?

If I cared more, I'd probably be concerned. At the moment though, I'm leaning toward the, "there is only one of me" defense.

Bernie was leaving for two consecutive Conferences and I had Friday blocked out to produce all of that last-minute paper that inevitably becomes critical before such a trip. After producing an estimated 6 inch pile of such paper, and at about 2:00 in the afternoon, Bernie announced that the Project Database (due 9/28) suddenly just had to be done by Monday morning. He e-mailed me 41 files with a request that I convert all the data to spreadsheets and clean it up to go into a database by the end of the day. Project Proof, the one I should be been shepherding over the weekend, slid right out of my brain.)

It's so annoying because this project has very flexible deadlines and I know it. After all, Bernie's been intending to produce the database for the last three years. It would hardly have stopped the sun in its rotation, reversed entropy, and destroyed the universe as we know it to offer to send it to the client on, say, October 2. Just because, after all these years, the client was actually asking for the aforementioned database does not make it an emergency to produce it. (The fact that the client requested it two weeks ago and Bernie forgot for a week still doesn't make it an emergency.)

Of course, this all comes back to the same root. There's no reason we can't do two projects at once except that there is only one of me. With the best will in the world (which I freely admit I do not actually possess) I cannot pretend to be four people. And, since I'm neither 20 any more, nor do I see any incentive to put in 12-hour days or work weekends, I cannot see any reason to product more work than, say, the average two employees can during any particular week.

(If you're wondering? Yes. There was a point at which there were three people doing the jobs DiamondGirl and the Tweenybopper were doing. Then it went down to just the two of them and some of the work just stopped getting done. Now there's just me - I've picked up much of the stuff the Tweenybopper couldn't get done and I'm doing part of what DiamondGirl did. So I am at least two employees every day already.)

And yet...human nature being what it is...I fear the job hunt. I fear the rejection of potential employers gazing at me across the imposing expanse of a paper-filled desk and mentally filing me away as, "too old" or "not technical enough" or "unlikely to be flexible" or "probably won't work hard" because I am not too old, I'm nore technical than most people, and I'm a lot more flexible on the job and work harder than my rants about Bernie would indicate.

(After all, my complaints about it all today aside, I did actually convert 37 of those files and send them to the Database Guy Friday afternoon. The only reason I didn't do them all was because the remaining ones didn't include that that matched Bernie's datamap in any way. ) (And I'm flexible. Of the last four jobs I've had, all four of them required me to learn one or more proprietary software program, most of them well enough to train other people to use them.)

Still. I fear rejection. It came as a very great shock to me earlier this year to realize I'm Very Nearly Getting Old, you know.

Also, I really, sincerely regret that I forgot Project Proof this weekend.

___________________

P.S. I like good bread. You know how I know I'm eating good bread? I'm eating good bread when I like the crusts.