Mimicking a Puppy

Normally I am a very good sleeper. I once slept through a tropical storm while tied to a mooring in Newport Harbor. I woke up after the storm had gone by, rubbed my eyes, looked up at the sun and said “So, did the storm miss us?” Todd shook his head and laughed. He’d tried to wake me up so I could see how the wind was blowing. No dice.

But when busy season at work hits, my brain wakes up at ridiculous o’clock and says “Now you are going to obsess about really dumb things that you cannot possibly change at this hour. Ready? And NOW!” And then I focus on things at work that I cannot possibly change. Even when I think about it and come up with a solution, I still think about it. Even after I smack myself on the forehead and say “StopitStopitStopitStopit you’ve solved the problem now go to sleep.” Boing, the eyes remain open wide.

Today was another fun busy season day. I had gotten my inbox down to 60 messages, down from a high of 108. (This is a lot for me. Normally I only leave what I am currently working on in my inbox, if it gets to 20 then that’s a lot for me.) I was on top of my game, and then all hell broke loose around 3 PM. The emails came flying in, my heart rate started to rise. The phone rang and rang. And then I found out that vendor I work very closely on a major part of my job made a very careless mistake. And of course the person in charge who works for my client got to see the result of this careless mistake. And then, of course, she cc’d my boss on the “What the hell is this???” email.

The email from the client came in as I was on the phone with the vendor. I saw it and gasped. “What’s wrong?” she asked me. “Holyshitholyshit, Holy. Shit.” I forwarded the email to my vender who also gasped and said “Holyshitholyshitsholyshit.” Then we hyperventilated as we tried to figure out what went wrong.

We hung up the phone at 5:30. We know what went wrong, but that won’t be good enough for the client as it should never ever have happened to begin with. And tomorrow morning will be messy when my boss is back from her day off and asks me what the hell went wrong.

I wonder how the obsession session will go at 3 AM tomorrow morning. I came home and jogged the better part of 4 miles. Then I ate a lot of food. If there was milk in the house I would totally drink a warm glass of it. I hope that I burned enough energy to sleep all the way through.