So, I finish my nice lunch (a bowl of chili, a French bread roll, and some carrot sticks) and twenty minutes later I glance down at myself and realize that, at some point (probably when I was stirring by the microwave), a long string of chili has bounced down my person. (Yes. Bounced. My version of chili isn't all that liquid.)

I scurried to the bathroom, of course, and cleaned myself up, but still. It's so embarrassing, to be seen in public as someone who doesn’t know how to feed herself properly.

Other than that, last week's head cold seems to have passed off. I wasn't nearly as ill as most of the people around me (including the R.C.) seemed to have been.

I'm a little concerned about other health matters, though.

Like, I'm fairly certain I've fallen victim to some kind of alien invasion or maybe just a mutated terrestrial plague. I finished lunch a mere 40 minutes ago and I'm already so hungry again that my stomach is gurgling. (It's not the chili, no.) Every day for the last four or five days, at around 10:00 in the evening, I'm suddenly so hungry that my stomach hurts.

I'm picturing this plague as a kind of massive tapeworm thingy, roiling my stomach--banging on the walls and demanding sustenance or it will eat its way out of me and take over the planet. (Not to self: The Alien movies are bad for your psyche.)

Also, I'm tired a lot. More than I would expect to be. Working an eight-hour day should not be this difficult.

Today I'm checking the performance of the new campaigns I uploaded during last week's massive Change Everything frenzy. I can't make up my mind--some accounts are doing much better, some are doing a little better, some are about the same, and a small handful are doing worse.

I'm a person who likes definite results, but I'm also a person who finds it very entertaining to scoop up a massive amount of data and try to boil it down to something sensible, so I guess that's ok.

Anyhow. The alternative project waiting for me is worse. There's this handful o'Nuts, the Bowery Boys. I've mentioned them before--a collective marketing group that has been, collectively, the bane of my department for the last four months.

Basic situation (a refresher for y'all) is that there are more of them than there is business to support them in their area. Also, the Head Boy is getting 70% of the business and the other Boys lack the youknowwhats to tell him that they think everyone should pay in proportion to the return they're getting. They've been subsidizing him for six months and bitching to us about it--but when we give them the opportunity to tell the Head Boy their concerns directly (as required by the terms of their collective marketing agreement), they go all coy and quiet.

Their most recent idea is that I will create separate campaigns for each Boy and they will pay separately. Which is fine, but they're leaving the bulk of their marketing money in the shared campaign, which primarily benefits the Head Boy. And this at a time when all the Boys are struggling to make a go of it. How--noble. (Or do I mean cowardly?) They're putting their leftover pocket change, about forty-eight cents each, into their new campaigns. Which is pointless because the new campaigns are targeting under-inhabited areas where people, if they want our services, will always go to the Head Boy's location.

Basically, I'm going to have to find an entire day to create four very complicated and highly targeted campaigns that (get this) have zero chance of working. I am, as you can imagine if you bothered to read this far, entirely unexcited about carving eight hours out of my overfilled work week to complete this project. I've done the CYA part of the project already, though.

I sent this, in an email to Vela and Gidget:

I am happy to set things up as requested under the clear understanding that there will be little or no traffic to the four new campaigns. Once the campaigns are set up, I do not want questions or complaints because they do not produce traffic or leads.

You might say that's pretty snippy, and maybe it is, but I like people to understand, up front, what to expect.

I could seriously use a nap right about now.