Here it comes…

In the latter half of last year a giant project descended on my place of work, settling over the horizon in a vaguely threatening shadow, a portent of many dark days in the distant future.

That future?  Is now.

For months I’ve known it was coming, this specter of a bloated messy dossier looming around the edges of reality.  For months I’ve done a pretty good job of not freaking out about it and the chokehold it was bound to have on my life and the lives of all of us working on the project, and even now when I’d like to freak out it’s not an option because there’s just so much to do that freaking out would make me lose track of what it is I have to keep control of, so NO FREAKING OUT.

And, if predictions and history hold true, this is only the start, so freaking out at this point would be laughably premature.

Is it possible to schedule a nervous breakdown for sometime around next May?  Because from now until then, I’m going to be one barely-contained sweaty bag of not NOT FREAKING OUT.

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In other news, I have stopped listening to new radio or NPR when the news is actually, you know, ON.  I can’t stand it, all this Syria.  I’d have an opinion on sending in trains, planes, and automobiles to ‘intervene’ (OH HELL NO!) but of course I don’t understand all the complications and political mess and global implications of a squirrel passing gas in the Golan Heights, so will refrain from pretending  know what’s going on (but still, OH HELL NO!), and thus have stopped trying to keep track of who is tickling who behind the back in exchange for certain future favors/not being wiped off the face of the earth.

It’s much more important that I fret about the upcoming cubicle move at work, and who is getting the good spots and who is getting screwed.  My move is kind of lateral, though I will be sitting one cube toward the walkway (on the end of a 3-fer instead of in the middle) and more toward the front of the building but about equidistant from the coffee area so nothing really gained or lost.  At least I’m not IN the hallway right in FRONT of the coffee area like they wanted to put me in last time.  Because what could be a more perfect place to stash a writer than that, eh?  Just the noisiest place of all, and this cube had the added bonus of being right outside a conference room!  SWANK!  So, I guess this move could be worse – there wasn’t even the barest whiff of being co-located to the fishbowl this time.

In a show of I-don’t-know-what, all the bigwigs at the front of the building who have big offices with doors and everything are being relocated to what were formerly small conference rooms, and their offices are being converted to conference rooms.  This is like all the way to the TOP kind of relocation, with some folks giving up offices that equal 6+ cube spaces (about 6x8 each , if I’m any guesser) with a space that’s essentially 2-cubes big.  Still with a door, so there’s some vestige of hierarchy remaining, but oh, what a comedown for some of them, I"m sure.

We are teetering one step closer to just going full-bore open plan, but in the bright-side way of thinking, we’re not there yet.

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I’ll leave it there, with my tales of work woe (and remind me to tell you about a very nice award recently received).  Just wanted to get it here for posterity and future memory-jogging.  And also because I wanted to complain to someone.  Anyone.  Even you.

Tiff out.