Friday Working De-tox

One thing I won't miss about working in Boston (yes, I am going there, yes I am, with seven more weeks of it) is the way people walk around the city.

Granted, some people are tourists*, by which I mean anyone who doesn't usually come in to the city, whether they live within range of the T, or on another continent. The variety of languages spoken around the Back Bay has been eye-opening!

*I used to be a tourist, and I will be again. A considerate tourist.

Tourists don't always know where they're going or how to get there, they're often not in a hurry, they stop when something catches their eye or to look at a map. It's understandable behavior, but the unpredictability can be a bit annoying when you are just trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Excuse me, random person who just stopped with no warning directly in front of me, I'm trying to get to work.

But the really annoying ones aren't generally tourists. They're office workers, students, residents. They're also, unfortunately, Oblivious. (Not all of them, and not all the time, but often enough.)

Oblivious People don't always walk in a straight line. If they're coming toward you, they almost walk into you while looking in any direction but forward.

If they're walking the same way, in front of you, and you're walking faster so you start to walk past them, they're suddenly in your path again, so you almost walk into them.

They walk out of a store and across the sidewalk without even looking to see if anyone is there.

Oblivious People will walk in front of you at an intersection even though their direction has car traffic and has to wait, while in your direction pedestrians can cross.

A group of Oblivious People will walk three across on a sidewalk wide enough for three, and not make room for those coming the other way (let alone those behind them who might wish to pass).

They're not just outside, of course. Inside, Oblivious People stand directly in front of the elevator waiting to get on (and are So Surprised to find they're blocking people from getting off; who could have foreseen that?).

Oblivious People walk up the stairs in the subway, at rush hour, swinging their arms so they nearly hit the person walking behind them (this happens far more than I would have predicted; funny what you learn).

An Oblivious Person will step out of a revolving door and stand there, right in front of it, rummaging through her bag. Or stop right before getting into the revolving door. Or in the middle of a hallway. It's like they're playing a game: how many people can I block, by stopping here? What about here?

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I've spent the last week at work on a mammoth project, which had me pulling my hair more than once, and I handed it over with a strange mix of relief and regret. There was no way I could do a thorough job in the time allotted, and I hate not to do a thorough job. On the other hand, it's better than it was before it got to me, which will have to be enough. (And that's probably as much as "they" expect, but I strive for more.)

I first heard about this project mid-last week, when the catalog manager sent an e-mail to me and to BR (the other woman in the group who does some proofreading), letting us know that it would be coming our way by that Friday, and that we would both need to go through it before giving it back the following Friday (that's today).

Oh, and it's 600+ pages.

Hmmm. I think I'm going to need a bigger desk.

Mid-day last Friday, she brought it to me (THUMP). I started to go through it.

Friday afternoon.

All day Monday.

By Tuesday morning, I was feeling stressed. Very stressed. I was only just reaching the halfway point, and the clock and calendar were both chiming "impossible deadline" in my head. I talked to BR for a sanity check (this is impossible, right?), and then went to the catalog manager and said basically, "I know I don't have to tell you that it's big, but it's really big, and even a rush job takes more time than this." She told me* that the deadlines for the catalog(s) had been pushed out about a week, and did we think we could get it in by the 19th-20th? I said we could do a better job with that, anyway, and went back to work on it with a lighter heart.

*Only later did I wonder, was she going to tell me that we could have more time? Or just wait and see if we turned it in by the 13th?

Tuesday afternoon.

Wednesday.

Thursday morning I was feeling pretty good considering the constraints, and was getting to the end of the still-semi-rushed read-through*. The stack of unread pages, which seemed unshrinking earlier in the week, was perceptibly small. Almost there, almost there...

*Ideally, it's better to go through a catalog multiple times, looking for one specific thing each time. But that takes longer.

Waterloo. I came to the index, and found it to be 18 pages of small print, listing not just the programs but every individual title. By my rough count, more than 4000 items. This was a job in itself.

I dove in (what other choice was there?), and discovered some problems with the overall index, such as the fact that titles starting with The, A, and An were alphabetized that way, instead of being properly sorted ("The Making of a Marchioness" belongs under M, not T). I also decided that I would barely have time to check the programs, let alone each title. By doing this, I was able to finish and pass the work to BR Friday morning, so she has enough time to go over it as well.

What a mess, though. And it certainly added to that Friday-afternoon, why-do-I-have-to-be-here feeling. But the work day ended, as it always does, and I am home and preparing for my day tomorrow.

I just charged the camera batteries. I'm ready!