This week was the one during which I cracked. I struggled with all the stereotypical hallmarks of bureaucracy as seen through the filter of Gilliam’s Brazil this week, and it almost broke me.

While the fiscal year ends with September, the fact that the acquisition shop needs time to actually buy the things means that July is the crazy time for program managers in my particular organization. As I’ve said before, because I have training and experience in both program management and contracting, the bulk of setting up the acquisition packages for approval from the C-suite for my corner of the organization falls to me because I’m reasonably good at it, in theory. In practice, it’s me flailing at creating documents with only about 60% of the information I need from the key players, aiming for constantly shifting standards, and dealing with the various departmental gates to get the package (that honestly, nobody with authority is going to read anyway) to approved status, who are often ill-prepared in meetings, and can’t seem to be able to read.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been aiming to have our branch’s last two packages for the fiscal year teed up for the end-of-the-month approval-palooza review board, the submission deadline being Thursday (today) at noon. I spun bullshit, catered to every stakeholder’s whims (often contradictory), and mostly suppressed my passive-aggressive responses when people showed up to meetings having not taken five minutes to brush up on the topic and insist on asking irrelevant questions while treating me with disdain and condescension, not unlike asking an honors AP English student if they knew their ABCs….

This, on top of my whole other job of making sure the data keeps flowing through the pipes and ends up in the right format at the end, and trying to wrangle funding to get that process in line after all kinds of discussions with lawyers and stuff to make sure what we wanted to do was on the up-and-up; And dealing with personally ramping myself back up on my prescription meds and serious allergies that had one side of my head completely jammed all week to the point that I couldn’t hear out of my left ear for about 24 hours….

So yeah, I was dealing with some stuff.

About 150 emails into my day on Wednesday, my boss called, and basically asked “Are You Okay?”, because one of the memos I wrote that came across his desk not only didn’t live up to my usual high standards, but upon reviewing it myself, it was basically incoherent; like the numbers weren’t actually numbers incoherent.

Thankfully, my boss and I have a pretty good relationship, and he notices stuff like this, and basically talked me down to the point where I wasn’t vibrating and babbling, and encouraged me to step away for a bit, because for a while, I forgot that no matter what anyone says, there’s nothing in this job that can’t stand to wait until tomorrow.

So, I put some stuff to bed, went to my fortuitously timed chiropractor appointment, where my guy with the magic hands cracked my spine like a zipper opening (and cleared some of the pressure in my ear), then took a drive into the city to have a pint at Castleburg and eat a soft pretzel with pub mustard for dinner, and talk to my staff friends there about what exactly it is we’re going to do about open mic as this whole world outside business keeps happening, and felt a little better afterward.

I did break one of my usual rules by logging back into work in the evening before bed to check to see if finance guy had any more ridiculous requests, which he did, but they were simple to address, and then I went to bed, confident that things were sorted enough to wait until morning.

Morning came, and I found that the app which shall not be named (but anagrams to “hate PriSon”) had wrecked my access to load things for the point of sharing…again, so a ticket got submitted that I expect won’t get fixed today, and I handed off my final packages to someone else to load, a full six hours before the deadline.

And honestly, unless something else stupid comes up, I should have smooth sailing through Friday, at which point I take a long weekend, spend my 22nd Wedding Anniversary on a date with my lovely spouse, and enjoy my application of annual leave on Monday for no other purpose than a mental health day.

Thank you for listening to my venting. Carry on.