I'm having one of those weeks--months--where there are so many 'special' projects on my calendar that the time between projects--which is the time I have left over to do my job--is almost non-existent.

Whiny 'Nuts on interminable conference calls, end-of-quarter reporting, sending out stats to 'Nuts, dealing with the inevitable flood of responses, creating and launching useless and time-wasting "test" campaigns of one kind or another, meetings, research projects, etc. It's all a bit much for me this week.

In fact, this morning I pushed all the "special projects" on my calendar back a couple of hours and swore to myself that I was going to work on my job for a little while, only to realize that it's been so long since I had a decent stretch of time to focus on that sort of thing that I couldn't quite remember what it was I should be doing.* (Checking my calendar, I see that I haven't had a lot of time to do my job, not for more than an hour at a stretch, since late February, before I left town (twice).)

I say all of this by way of justifying myself.

NewBoss Anais came to my desk yesterday and wanted "five or ten minutes" to show me the new website pages (like I care) and I told her to schedule a meeting on Friday or maybe one day next week.

I'm good at scheduling my tasks, okay? I'm sometimes, but rarely, over-committed, but I'm careful to leave time between projects so that if one runs long, it doesn't throw my whole schedule off.

What I can't do, is prevent NewBoss Anais from promising meetings to time-wasting losers** (like Moaning Martie) and shoving them onto my calendar, regardless. Including an hour for a very boring phone call, I lost four hours on Monday, trying to "prove" that the problem is Moaning Martie's unwillingness to spend the money it takes to succeed.***

So, four hours of Monday's projects got pushed to Tuesday but I could only push three hours of Tuesday's projects back and had to just work faster to get the rest done and now it's Wednesday and I can only fit two hours of Tuesday's projects in, so the other hour was slated to be pushed to Thursday except that I had a little hissy fit and pushed all of this morning's projects back two hours and now Tuesday's pushed projects and one Wednesday project are scheduled for Thursday and, sadly, Friday, a day when I'd actually "booked" time on my own calendar to do my job, something that no longer fits into my schedule.

So very annoying.

Two hours later

Aarrgghh. I'm going to run out of things to complain about.

Moaning Martie is moving his account to outside management so, no longer my problem. MadBoy is just plain going away. (Going away! Hooray!)

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* This, as I'm well aware, since she told me so, is precisely how Gidget got to the point of needing them to hire me. She was doing the job and got sidetracked onto so many other projects that they had to hire someone to do her original job--and then when layoff time came, they decided the 'special' projects weren't that important but that her original job, which I was now doing, was. So, she went and I didn't.

The big difference between her and me is that I rather like the work of this job and she hated it. And she's an actual (and expert) marketing, while I know nothing.

** I know, that's awfully rude. And I don't really mean to be insensitive, but working with bipolar people is just exhausting. Especially the kind that give strong evidence that they don't take their meds regularly.

*** Yes, I do realize that $300 bought him the sun, the moon, and the stars, in January of 2008, when he began. But it's now April of 2010 and things have changed.