I've been back at work for a whole week and haven't had a chance to complain yet. That's so wrong. Since I got back, I've done month-end reporting (12 hours), six "special projects" taking from 15 minutes to 4-1/2 hours each. I've had to do two conference calls and have two more scheduled for today. One meeting. Two data projects for the new website, four hours total. What I have not really had time to do is my job. (Oh, I've had an hour now and then when no one wants anything or comes over to "discuss things", but that just allows me to glance at accounts and make notes for which ones need work done--it doesn't allow me to actually do the work.)

I did work over the weekend, Saturday I sat down to Gidget's stuff, where seven hours was barely enough to scratch the surface. Mostly I just, again, made notes about what needs to be done. I'm planning to work this coming weekend again to try and get some of it actually done.

Sunday morning, I was on to the account analysis for the Freethinker. Six hours and 95,000 lines of data later, I had what I hope was wanted. Recommendations. (Work with me, people. Let's all send hopes that I am not asked to manage this one. Senior Central, the Woofmen, and the BunnyHouse are as much or more than I have time for already. I can't be adding gawd to the mix. There is only one of me.)

The report reflecting what people actually typed into the Webstrainer window was interesting. I mean, aside from the bazillion irrelevant searches his too-generous campaign settings allow, there were quite a few searches for his actual book/foundation.

The word c-u-l-t came up quite a lot. Queries around jeebus's children came up with frequency. Also, a-l-i-e-n-s. I'm not really certain if this b/f postulates a-l-i-e-n intervention in jeebus's life or if it was the movie A-l-i-e-n R-e-s-u-r-r-e-c-t-i-o-n those people were searching for (r-e-s-u-r-r-e-c-t-i-o-n is a high-traffic word for the Freethinker). At one point I was almost tempted to go read the Freethinker's website, to see what, exactly, I was being asked to facilitate the marketing of, but then I realized that I didn't really care. I trust Bernie's assurance that the Freethinking isn't advocating violence of any kind against anyone. That's about as far as my interest in gawdliness goes.

On the Webstrainer forum I hang around, I answered someone's question yesterday and today they're demanding that someone else verify that what I said is correct. I feel dissed.

I'm rambling on about random, uninteresting things because of what I'm trying not to think about, but it's the main reason I logged on to complain today, so….

MadBoy is back. Yes, the beast has resurfaced. The good news is that he'd like to sell his corner of the Argonut Café and so we might someday be rid of him entirely. The bad news is that, in the interim, it did occur to him that his corner would be easier to sell if it was actually making some money, so he's decided he wants a new Webstrainer campaign--managed by me.

He's willing to commit to about 1/3 as much money as it would cost to be successful, is demanding that we block the highest-traffic sources of leads we have, and doesn't want calls or emails from people before nine or after five, Monday through Friday. I just do not get paid enough for this level of stupid.

Although, seriously, I was going to try to work up a head of steam about it all, but I don't find that I really care that much.

Yesterday was the Café's monthly all-staff meeting, wherein I announced that I'm seeing an inexplicable but frightening drop in the number of inbound leads so far this month. I've glanced through all of the accounts--there are no problems, and there's traffic. There just aren't any leads. I've been wigging out about it for the last week (in my spare time) but no one in the meeting seemed to care.

"You'll figure it out," CEOJason said. "You always do."

Whatever

And then later he had the brilliant idea that all of the 'Nuts spending enough money to be successful will be moved to outside management and the lame duck, whiny baby, and incompetent moron accounts can all stay with me. So, you know, the fact that I'm not really famous for giving myself a lot of pats on the back (I tend to assume that success is become of something/someone else's work and failure is my fault) is probably good because I'm likely to have many fewer opportunities in the future.

I've been back on the diet for the last week. I've lost 1-1/2 lbs but I've also lost my sense of humor and most of my patience. Today I visited the junk food machine on the first floor and bought two bags of chips. And I ate them both. Now I'm eating chocolate.

The world is starting to get brighter!