Sunny Day

Robbie is working on a presentation for a conference we're holding in July. He was working on just one half of it, and my former cube neighbor A was working on the other half. But she quit suddenly a few weeks ago; and it turns out that she hadn't really done anything on her half anyway. So he now has to do the whole thing, and he's working like a trooper and doing an amazing job, and I'm not just saying that because he might read this and I owe him lunch.

Rather oddly, our supervisor appears to be blaming him for not being finished so close to the deadline (though his half, before A. quit, was finished ahead of schedule). She's also putting a lot of extra pressure on him and snapped at him recently for a single brief lapse in organization, which only occurred when the whole burden was initially dumped on him.

Competence will come back to bite you in the ass every time.

The second half of the presentation requires a full complement of illustrative photographs, and because we're under such a tight deadline, another coworker and I went out into the field to take them today. The weather conditions were, perhaps, not completely ideal for photography. It's been either heavily overcast or pouring. I found myself photographing asphalt under a dark and lowering sky much of the day. It's very much like watching grass grow, but still beats sitting around in the office.

What's funny is that the first half of the presentation, being done in plenty of time, has photographs taken under ideal weather conditions. All the pictures are clear and bright, sunny and cheerful. The second half of the presentation is going to look as if it was put together by Tolstoy.

Anguished Russian authors had vodka to assuage their Weltschmerz, or whatever the Russian equivalent is. I, on the other hand, have kind friends who find for me the things that I couldn't. I come out way ahead, especially seeing as how I wasn't all that anguished to begin with.



Thanks for once again making my day.