pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THIS BUZZING CONFUSION Samuel Beckett writes I didn't invent this buzzing confusion. It's all around us . . . the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess. My life is a busy mess of buzzing confusion today and, believe me, my eyes are wide open and I see it. Thought I was done with this fiscal year's budget, but the associate dean handed my reams of paperwork back to me a few minutes ago and said that the dean has decided to use new forms this year and to extend our line-item budget deadline to early September since we'll have a new CFO in place then. (Whee! Why was I giving up all my weekends last month then and why didn't it occur to our esteemed dean to let the folks who create our budgets know about this before these changes????) Have been in long conversations with four illustrators today, trying to figure out if there's any way we can afford (time- and money-wise) to create a comic book version of a series we will market to teens. I'm trying to identify a top-notch but inexpensive Spanish translator who understands that changing the meaning on legal advice has huge ramifications. (Yeah yeah I did take three semesters of Spanish, but never used it and so hablo Espanol un muy poco—certainly not enough to evaluate a legal translation). I have some good leads on this one though. Let's see. What else has occupied my whole damn day? Well, two authors showed up with books they've been writing for at least two years—surprise!—wanting to discuss some particulars in excruciating detail. Then I looked at jobs I did know are in the pipeline, calculated the number of hours left on a huge in-house printing job, and discovered that one huge single job we're working on now will tie up the machine for another 99.75 hours ... and this while the print-shop supervisor is out for 6–8 weeks! Am also frantically compiling paperwork due by the end of the day because the HR director is working on my reappointment paperwork—and, I hope, on my annual raise (which will no doubt be two or three percent, since this is a state position) and she needs some specifics. Meanwhile, I discovered this morning that my mobile (which is also my home) phone is not receiving calls and that callers receive a This Line Has Been Disconnected message. My payment is autodeducted, so this is not a nonpayment issue ... Tried to think of the last time I used it (since I'm not a big talker), then logged into my Verizon account page where the Web interface is so screwy that I couldn't discern anything useful..... Now I have a call in to Verizon, but have no idea how they can reply to me except at the office. Hope people stay away from my office for the next hour so I can deal with this—especially because we're heading into a long weekend and Filmgrrl is supposed to call and let me know when she will arrive. Anyway, forgive me for ranting. Too many deadlines and not enough me right now and I am thinking it's not even worth taking a vacation because I'm too emotionally exhausted to enjoy the time off.
All righty. On to my Verizon dilemma. More later. 4:26 p.m. - 2005-06-29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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