Look, yes, I know I should be writing on more adventurous topics. I really should. Like for instance, that time I wrote about filling in for my supervisor, and got my first taste of management, and how that was pretty cool? Yeah, well, my buyer has been travelling in New York all this week. Also the department planner is in Europe somewhere. Probablygorging on good beer and schnitzel right now, the fink.
Anyway, this left yours truly alone to hold down the fort…rather in the manner of Custer at Little Big Horn. Really. Vague delightful visions of cool efficiency and calm authority vaporised the first damn day. Which, incidentally, was Tuesday, thanks to the stat holiday.
So there I was, alone on the Dark Side of responsibility. Past weeks of being friendly and helpful when I had the time to be all came home to roost. Everything was a problem. Nothing had a simple solution, nobody could intuit anything; they all needed me to find it out and spell it to them in turn, generally using words of very few syllables, if the drift is clear.
I churned out Monday’s late reports and created SKUs and sorted routing issues for new vendors and sourced contacts for other new vendors’ packaging questions and tried to figure out why the report numbers didn’t match for other vendors and returned samples and tracked down missing samples and fended off another new vendor’s anxious questions about when their contract would be finalised…
…and it goes without saying that all of this needed to be attended to RIGHT THEN AND THERE or the world would naturally come to an end. It’s funny in hindsight, how your priorities get screwed up in retail admin. People are dying, wars are raging, Lindsay Lohan still has a career, but you delay one lousy day off approving a PO for sparkly tops and it’s like, Atlas wobbles.
All of this, mind, while battling a raging case of PMS. Oh, and a course of Louisa May Alcott. Why I thought rereading the Marches’ saga would be a good idea at this point I do not know. Hanging around actual Transcendentalists must’ve been just an incredibly annoying experience, back in the day. "Now, now, Shoe; impatience is your greatest fault, of which I’ve made a helpful list. No, don’t thank me; too many young women have gone astray through want of a helpful word to guide them through a proper understanding of their duty…"
Yea-ahh. By Thursday, I had just about got caught up to the point where I could actually consider starting any of the projects I’d planned. By end of day today, my stomach was knotting every time I even thought about checking my email. I ended up hiding in an upstairs lounge, playing Gem Drop. It was pitiful.
So, this weekend? Is all about the R&R. I refuse to even consider the possiblity of serious thought until Monday. And this is where having a smart, sweet, curious, just overall incredibly cool new kitten comes in just incredibly handy.
Soothing kitteh-ness coming right up…