Gnome Rule

I hope that the rest of this year is not going to be like this week was. It started off bad and just kept getting worse. It started off with that meme with the baby who couldn’t decide whether to sleep, cry or eat her oatmeal. As memes go it so perfectly captured my feelings about having to go back to work after a long two weeks off. Then once I made it to work, I couldn’t remember any of my passwords there, all on National Password Reset day, great timing.

Then there were the markets this week, one bad trading day followed by an even worse one and nothing to do about it all except watch my money disappear. I may have to work longer than I hoped, just to cover my losses from this week, but that may not be entirely my decision. I learned that there had been more layoffs, just before Christmas break. News of one of them in particular really hurt. He is a close friend. After next week, when the people who were given their notices in November leave, I will then be the second oldest person left in what was our old department. We don’t have departments anymore, just skill codes now, but I like many others still hold on to the idea of them, if only for nostalgic purposes, besides claiming to be the second oldest person in your skill code just doesn’t have anywhere near the same amount of cache. I’ve been warned about this, but I have become the office gnome. Anyway, it’s a job.

This week’s final insult was self-inflicted. Earlier this week, I had scheduled a meeting with my boss for today. I wanted him to review the work that I have been doing for the last month and hopefully approve of it too. Anyway, he would see that I hadn’t been just goofing off. Then last night, I discovered an error in my work. Last night I obsessed about it and this morning I marched into his office, told him about the problem that I had found and rescheduled our meeting for next week. Upon further reflections, through the course of the day, I discovered that my mistake was not as big as I had originally thought. I could have gone ahead with the planned meeting anyway, but this way everything will be better next week. At least, I hope so.