Tuesday, April 17, 2007

OK. I was going to regale you with tales of my trip to Wal-Mart last night, which I'm sure would have entertained you.

But instead, I'm going to have a little meltdown for the whole internet to see.

Last week, I had a proposal due. It had to be shipped by 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon, parts of it were still being written, and I kept getting changes to stuff I already edited. Plus, I was still getting new graphics to insert. Now this wouldn't be a big deal, but the technical lead on the proposal is a non-native English speaker. Now, he is an extremely smart guy, and pretty well-spoken, but his written English is...interesting. He doesn't use articles, for instance. Ever. And he tries to turn every sentence into a compound/complex sentence.

Now, if I had had more time, this wouldn't be a problem. But I literally spent 36 hours straight editing it between Monday morning and Tuesday when we shipped. I worked all day Saturday on it, and I didn't even make it to church on Sunday (Easter) because I was just too tired (I had put in about 50 hours the week prior as well) and I had to go into the office anyway. I poured my heart and soul into that proposal. It isn't my fault that the technical lead didn't agree witht he schedule I proposed for writing and reviews, knowing that there was a holiday in there and knowing that there would be a ton of editing involved on my end. I did everything I could to convince him. After the first review, 5 days before it was due, almost the whole thing had to be rewritten. We got it off in time, though, and it wasn't too horrible.

Well, after sleeping the sleep of the dead for 16 hours, I came into work the next day. I had an e-mail from the technical lead. Some of the cross references to captions on graphics came back with error messages. Now, I had someone double check me the night before to make sure there was nothing like that in the proposal - I was so tired that I didn't trust myself at that point. He didn't find anything, so we printed and shipped. I have no idea where the error messages came from. If I inserted new graphics, the cross reference should have automatically updated. Frankly, it was only two cross references, and it really shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Well, today the boss says to me right before he leaves that sometime when we both have a few minutes tomorrow, he wants to talk to me a little about the proposal. I asked him if I did something wrong, and he said it was no big deal.

Now, I know I should take that at face value, but I am currently in a state of controlled panic. I really wish, even if I had screwed the whole thing up, that he would have just grabbed me tomorrow and reamed me out with no notice. Instead, I have all night to worry about it.

That is a really cruel thing to do to someone with an anxiety disorder, I have to say. Of course, he doesn't know that I have an anxiety disorder, and that the little voice in my head that tells me I'm just a complete screw-up just got activated. He doesn't know that I am currently scared to death that I'm not going to have a job after tomorrow.

Sigh. Maybe going off the anxiety meds is a bad idea.

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