Stressed and Loving It

Yesterday started out appropriately, stress filled.  I decided to turn off my alarm and then burrow back under the quilts for just another minute.  An hour and a half later the sunlight streaming through the window informed me in the most diabolical fashion that I was in serious trouble.  I never oversleep and the few times I’ve tried my wife is usually there to remind me that one of us has to get up and go to work.  That gentle reminder was not present and therefore the trouble was manifest.

I bounded out of bed a mere thirty minutes before I was supposed to leave for work.  I checked off all the normal morning activities that needed to be sacrificed to my sloth and Buddy sensed something was going on because I was rushing everywhere and he wanted to join in.  He helped by tripping me only a couple times.  I felt I was going to make it with a little bit to spare when I remembered that I had an important meeting downtown with the politicos that was even earlier than my normal work day.  I entered another level of stressed out speed.  I am the acting boss this week so my absence would surely be noted and commented on.  I set a land speed record and whenever I ran into traffic I used some broken field running through the back streets of Worcester. 

I arrived two minutes late which I thought was impossible when I awoke less than an hour earlier.  Little did I realize that the stress for the day was only beginning.  Based on the success of the earlier changes I made to the schedule the politicos decided they wanted to attempt further changes ahead of the scheduled January update.  This means an incredible amount of work for me in another very compressed time period.  They also want to start some new service in three surrounding towns and not use the unionized work force in Worcester for two of them.  I was given the task of informing the union of this development.

This was all happening when I’m doing my job as well as my boss’ and just picked up a huge project of completely revamping the company safety policy in wake of one of our buses taking up residence in someone’s kitchen.  I informed the politicos the day before that I was confident I could get the major task done by the end of October and now they sprung this on me.     

The upshot of this meeting was that I lost two weeks of the four I had planned for the task.  We’re talking some pretty significant stress imposed on an albeit well rested guy.  The weirdest thing is that I relished the opportunity.  I’ve told some friends that I feel like I’m stealing money sometimes because the routines of my job are fairly easy.  This surprised me more than anything else when I became a civilian – how foreign a work ethic is to a lot of people.   

I become very bored at work some times and look for things to keep me busy.  At least for the next month I don’t have to worry about a lethargic work environment.  I must be weird because a couple subordinate managers came by to commiserate at my plight and were a little mystified why I seemed so energized.  This is just what I needed to get an edge back.  So a lot of stress, not to mention getting the house back up to cleanliness standards expected by the spousal unit and I am just reveling in it.  I’m a little strange.

Before the stress set in I did finish up the latest Nelson Demille book, The Quest.  I’ve loved all of Demille’s work so I eagerly awaited this latest effort.  I was a little disappointed this book didn’t include his legendary funny NYC detective John Corey but it concerned a quest for the holy grail so I was psyched. 

The strength of Demille’s work has always been his characters and the further I got into this the more impatient I became waiting for one of his characters to click with me.  The story involved three journalists, two men and a female, in war torn, 1970’s Ethiopia.  They catch a rumor of the location of the real holy grail located in a mysterious black monastery in the remote jungle and spend the rest of the book looking for it.

This sounds like a good set up and there are glimpses of Demille’s usual tight prose but overall I was immensely disappointed.  It could just be Corey envy but none of the main characters were that likable and the ending was a bit trite.  In the afterward I read that he actually wrote this back in the 1970’s and pulled it out of mothballs, updated it and published it.  That made a lot of sense as this was obviously the work of an artist before he became the superb writer his later books bear testimony to.