or a clone, maybe? are clones cheap?

All I see, everywhere, are undone tasks. Laundry that needs to be done. Papers that need sorting and filing. Items that need instructions in the explanatory paper I’m leaving behind. Emails that need followup. Stuff in my office that I need to take home. A fridge that needs filling; an itemized grocery list that needs making so I can ask BF to go while I’m gone this weekend. Trash that needs taking out. Shelves that need organizing. The pile that passes for my inbox, which I’ve tried going through eight times and which still needs to be reduced to nothing. Personal emails that need answering. Family shit that needs sorting out. Panic that needs reduction. A suitcase that needs packing. Yoga that needs practicing. Clients that need calling. And all this must be done before I put my head to my pillow tomorrow night.

I usually plan ahead so well. But I also never travel so often, trips so close to one another, and it’s all falling apart.

But I remembered to soak the beans.

—

I completely lost my cool yesterday afternoon during a somewhat mundane work-related task. Our of-counsel attorney gave me some extremely upsetting photos (an infant born badly deformed who later died) that needed color scanning so that we could send them to our bankers. I took them to our usual business for this task, but they were busy, so I went to a small business I’d never been to before.

If you have a handheld scanner, you know that it doesn’t take very long to scan something into a computer to email to yourself. If you have used a copier/scanner, you know that that’s even quicker. I expected this task to be done and paid for in about ten minutes. Instead, I was there for almost an hour. And while usually in this situation I’d be glad to be away from the office, at that time I had approximately 20 hours of viable work time remaining at this job and needed every minute of it, and I also could not imagine at all what could be taking them so long to scan eight fucking pages and email them to me.

The kicker was that this task cost $85. $9.95 per page plus tax. And guess who was paying for it out of pocket? I’d thought it would be about the cost of color copying, you know, $1.00 per page maximum. The other businesses in the area I’d worked with charged about that much for similar jobs. I was thoroughly shocked.

Thank goodness OG was willing to reimburse me right then and there for this cost. But I was even mad that the firm had to pay for such highway robbery. $10 a page is what our normal copying outsource folks charge us for scanning X-rays, which are, you know, a little larger than 8 1/2 x 11 and require much more specialized equipment.

When I got back to the office I called BF and BITCHED for about 10 minutes, and then immediately felt bad and called him back to apologize. I had zero inner calmness about this whole thing: no ability to sit and enjoy the present when I had clients coming to see me and work to do back at the office, and no idea what could be taking so long; no capacity to understand how they could see fit to charge so much for such a simple task (if we’d had a color copier/scanner, it would have taken me 30 seconds and $0.02 cents of electricity to do this task); any ability I have to overcome the petty idiocies of life was totally lost to me yesterday.

All this is by way of saying that I do not recommend Free State Press, on West Street in Annapolis, Maryland, for any of your scanning needs. While I was waiting, several customers came in with small copying jobs, and the owner (?) saw fit to do those with speed and even not to charge one lady who appeared to be locked in a custody battle. So if you have copying, feel free to go there. But color scanning, not so much.

—

Last night I got California Tortilla (which has redeemed itself after a very rocky start) for dinner and sat in front of the TV and watched TNG for the whole evening. BF got home at nearly 10:00. I should have been doing some of those undone home tasks I mentioned above, but I am so burned out from work and travel and my mother and being laid off and everything else that I thought I needed the evening to rest. I think this was a bad decision, thinking about everything I have to finish in the next 48 hours, but hey, I can sleep when I’m dead, right?

BF getting home at 10:00 is troubling, as well. If I explained what they’re doing with him at work I would get all balled up in that, so suffice it to say that I am extremely concerned that he’s going to start working the kind of hours he was working for about half of last year. That got old real quick, and I did my share of hurting out loud about it here on this blog before he started reading it. I’m concerned because I see the chores in the house starting to slide already – although a lot of that’s my fault for being out of town and out of my mind lately – and I don’t want another period of that whole burden on me again. Also we have to start looking for a new place to live in the next month or so, and that tires me just to think about it, especially if BF will be working 16-hour days again and I’ll (hopefully) be at a job where my commuting time is ramped up significantly.

Maybe I need an assistant. A cheap assistant, of course. Do hobos make good assistants?

—

Wow, this is a fun post! And I haven’t even gotten around to the email MM sent me yesterday that made me feel angry and frustrated and totally batshit about this job loss all over again. TB had to talk me down from that one, because I actually started to think my mother’s conspiracy theory could be true. Thank goodness TB is eminently logical.

LYL!