Temperatures still cold, snow on the ground and the roads, but the sun is shining. The next storm isn't moving in until tonight.

The eye doctor people called and my new contacts are in. I put in a request today to get them mailed to me (it's a 45 minute drive from my office to there, even in good weather) so hopefully I'll have them by Friday.

Blah, blah, blah.

Why do I have no trouble churning out 1,000+ words a day on the idiocy of co-workers but I find myself stalling and thinking of other things when I sit down in front of my novel?

Passion, I guess. Aggravating people inspire a certain heated passion in me that compels me to abuse them. I need to go back to my novel, and the world I built for it, and reread my notes. See if I still have any passion around those ideas. I've been talking with a friend, Mallory, about it just recently and I'm sort of inspired to at least look at what I was doing.

Work-wise today, I was fashionably late. I wandered in around 9:00, after stopping at Starbucks. (If you're already late, no reason not to have good coffee.)

Bernie showed up today, too. His big project at the moment? He found a pile of unloved, unlabeled keys. He's trying them in all of the filing cabinets so he can throw away the ones that don't go with anything we own.

I'm sure, in his mind, he's being amazingly productive but since I'm blogging, I shouldn't really be throwing stones. (I'm also backing up the files on this PC to the network server, so I have 22 minutes to kill.)

Later, I will be working on the Tiny, Little Book Of Company Information. I already made a Big Book Of Useful Information and a Smaller Book Of Client Information. This one is largely duplicates of information in the other two books and some other miscellaneous stuff but no one will be able to say that I walked out of here deliberately carrying off all of the information someone would need to have in order to do my job.

Websites, user names, passwords, program names, I have them all. Now I need a quick, one-page introduction that describes each of the proprietary software programs we use frequently and whoever takes this job after me will have 300% more information than I had when I started. Everything isn't in there, but a total core dump really isn't feasible. I know I could pretty much have done this job with the stuff in these notebooks, so that's something.

Granted, Bernie has now decided to bail on the most complicated of the proprietary programs (along with handing a lot of my job responsibilities back to the people who used to do them) but I'm making the effort. (I'm still at a loss how he thinks he can get clients to pay him for the privilege of using a commercial, easily recognizable alternative to our own survey program but whatever.)

I'm beginning to wonder if he really thinks he has me doing a ridiculous amount of work, or if his plan is to free up some of the time of my replacement so he can get the personal assistant and secretarial duties I refuse to provide? If he was the kind of person I could talk to about these things, I'd advise him against that. While I know it materially damages the quality of his life or something to have to send his own faxes and stamp his own envelopes, the person who could really make a success of this position is someone with the experience and abilities that aren't really appropriate to waste on dialing someone's phone calls for them.

Because, let's face it, I'm sure Bernie keeps himself busy, busy, busy being busy a lot of the time (I've never met anyone who worked so many hours with so little to show for it) and he wastes endless hours on projects that are clearly going nowhere, but he does very little of the actual work around here. Whoever he hires will have 95% of the work of keeping all current clients happy, all current projects moving ahead, and most of the business of running the business besides.

Okay, I really am in a better mood today. So why am I whining like this?

Maybe because I've spent two hours over the last two or three days trying to find that copy of my resume, without success. I know I saw it recently. Not more than a couple of months ago. And I put it away safely (always the kiss of death) so that it would be handy when I needed it.

Now I can't find it anywhere. I have a lead on a possible job but I need my resume before I can apply.

I also have a meeting with Bernie in 10 minutes. I sweartogod, if he asks me again what I plan to work on right now where there's no actual client work to be done, I'll slay him. I really get sick of him acting like he's doing me a favor by paying me when he's not bringing any business in the door. I'm also going to ask him what he's planning to do to correct the "no billable work to be done" situation. He should have to justify that $90k salary to someone at a time when he's threatening to close the doors once a week because of lack of business.

You know, if someone asked me what Bernie actually does around here, I'd be at a loss to tell them.