My Decathalon This Morning

I came in to work this morning and was greeted by a desk covered with file folders covered in post-it notes, with instructions scribbled on each of them.  In other words, I walked into a headache waiting to happen.

Big Boss had a meeting with a client this afternoon, and was scheduled be there by 11:00.   I had 3 short hours (and based on the looks of my desk the 3 hours would indeed be short ones) to weed my way through this mess, make heads and tails of his scribbled short hand notes, print, collate, copy, sign, file, bind, check and double check everything he needed for this meeting.  

Oh, and did I mention he’s been sick all week, can’t talk above a whisper, and the medication he’s on, knocks his ass out, so he’s been late every day this week.

Once I got the files sorted, read and deciphered the notes, I realized I had 2 tax returns to print (3 copies each) and 5 monthly reports to print (4 copies each. Cover sheet and cover letter on cream paper, the report on white), sign all of this in all the appropriate places, get mailing envelopes together and all the files needed for his meeting.  True to form, he was running late, so no help there.

When Big Boss does manage to make it to the office (at 9:30 – less than an hour before he has to leave to make the meeting on time) he looks over the tax returns and finds an error he missed at 11:30 last night.  Oh joy!  He corrects it, (that means, changing all of 2 numbers) and you guessed it, I have to print, collate, file, and sign the entire return (all 3 copies) all over again.  And this is not a small tax return.  Oh, hell no, we’re talking 259 pages!  

Did I forget to mention that my office is upstairs, his is downstairs and we don’t have an elevator?  That would be too easy, instead, we have a really fun spiral staircase!  Oh joy for me.  And today of all day’s I *didn’t* wear my track shoes, nope, for me it was the 3 inch heels.  And did I also forget to mention that during this process there was at least 15 trips up and down said stair case in the before mentioned heels?  Yeah.

Big Boss did not make it out the door until 11:15 this morning, (yeah, a little late) and apparently he didn’t make it out the door with all the tax returns, (I think he gave me the missing one to shred…oops!)  He called me and said he was missing the government copy of the largest tax return we printed today (yeah, the one we printed twice).  “I don’t think I got out the door with it today”.  I’m thinking you’re lucky you got out the door without me handing you your head and ass to you on a silver platter.