this could have been an email

— पांच हजार छह सौ बाईस — Well isn't this just what I need: after taking an unexpected day off on Monday and that fucking up my week, we also have trainings this week for a major system implementation coming up next month. The first was a two-hour session on Wednesday; the second was a one-hour session this morning. That wouldn't be so bad, except I've been sucked into a separate cumulative two hours of five other meetings today, four of them half-hour and one of them one hour, both before and after lunch. How the fuck am I supposed to catch up on shit? The critical deadlines I am still managing to meet. But other ongoing things, like certain twice weekly reports or a daily task reconciling invoice discrepancies—I have been unable to touch these things since the middle of last week. It's very annoying, but, soon enough I'll get on top of it all again. I just need to keep reminding myself that it's not that important. I really don't know how people who have meetings all day get anything done at all. Well, I guess a lot of them have underlings to get the menial work done for them. That historically has been my role. The problem right now as that my 22-year tenure has made me a kind of resident expert by default, putting me into countless meetings while my work load is largely unchanged. I used to brag about how little stress there is in my job. There still isn't that much stress, to be completely honest, but there is definitively more than there used to be. And this is a fucking slippery slope! — पांच हजार छह सौ बाईस — This wasn't technically a meeting, but in a way it felt like one as it was another virtual session with someone in the middle of several others today: I just had my biweekly Zoom lunch with Karen. Well, not "just," it ended half an hour ago—I had my final half-hou meeting right after the lunch hour with Karen, which mercifully ended ten minutes early. On top of that, Karen had gotten stuck on a work call with a client and wasn't able to join the zoom until about 12:15. And I ended half an hour early at 12:55 so I could at least go refill my tea before the meeting. So I was on with Karen for 40 minutes rather than the usual hour. We still managed to cover plenty though, including her apparent desire to take a short trip with a friend to Victoria at the end of the summer. So I need to follow up with her with some recommendations based on Shobhit's and my wonderful trip there for our anniversary in 2022—another year, incidentally, that I had tried hard to convince Shobhit to take an anniversary trip to Toronto. But then he countered with the idea of going to Victoria instead, and since we hadn't been in 14 years I was all about it. And I had a really, really good time on that trip. — पांच हजार छह सौ बाईस — — पांच हजार छह सौ बाईस — I had hoped to get a last-minute ticket to the live taping of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me last night at the Paramount Theatre. I had gone to the box office on my ride home from work Wednesday, where I was told I should come back 90 minutes before showtime last night. I rode home yesterday, made myself a bagel sandwich, then walked back down to the Paramount and was in the ticket hopefuls line by about 6:10. At first I was sixth in line, but over time a few people left. The showtime was at 7:30, and they didn't open tickets to my line until 7:25, by which point I was only third in line. The woman at the front got her ticket, after which the SOLD OUT sign was put up. That was it, I waited 80 minutes for nothing. Dammit! If I had known earlier that the show was coming to town I would have bought a ticket ages ago. I even looked up a tour schedule like a week or two ago and saw Seattle nowhere on it, but I must have been looking at a wrong website or something. Now it'll probably be a year or more before they return to Seattle again, as they do their shows all over the country. So, I walked back home, read some more of my book. Then I spent the rest of the evening writing up this post about my ten favorite skylines, which I posted to the "World Cityscapes & Skyscrapers" Facebook group, probably my favorite group I've ever joined. Facebook really has become a microcosm of the entire Internet (somewhat unsettlingly the goal all along), and no matter what niche interest you have, you can find a Facebook group for it. The only part that was annoying was how long I had to wait for an admin to allow the post to go through—it hadn't happened by the time I went to bed, at around 11:30. I was up late because Shobhit got home from work and it was close to 9:30 before we even started watching this week's two (and both excellent) episodes of Hacks on Max. I had four "alt" photos of the ten cities I posted about that I wanted to add as comments on the individual photos, but I couldn't do that until an admit allowed the original post through. So I did that before work this morning. — पांच हजार छह सौ बाईस — Now it's around 1:30 and I have all of two hours left to work today—backlog be damned! I am leaving at 3:30, an hour early, to kick off my Memorial Day weekend. I have a very appointment at 4:00, with a woman named Furiosa. — पांच हजार छह सौ बाईस — [posted 1:27 pm]