Weekness

[radegund]

Radegund: Ugg. It's Thursday. I never do well on Thursdays. I tend to dive into the week on Monday and plough ahead at full tilt, so by Thursday morning I'm totally running out of steam. Oooh...big dark-black-pinky tunnel of a Thursday...limbs...so...heavy...

Glitzfrau: Oh, no, Thursday has always been a good day for me. It's late opening - it's a big long day to get lots of stuff done - I'm full of energy on Thursdays.

So I'm curious: where do you stand on the matter?

Comments

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Excellent. Is that volunteering I hear?

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Swap yeh.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

You can swap with me on alternate weeks! Tuesday is the Day of Satan. It's when I have double maths. Oh, no, wait, that was ten years ago... but nonetheless the day is polluted for all eternity!

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

OK, so Tuesday morning, you arrive in, find that all the technical fixes for sportsinteraction.com from the weekend, done on Monday, have fallen over. You fix them again, a different way, slice, table and code the mailers to go out on Thursday, and start hassling marketing for the weekend's promotions. You cope with the cryptic emails from the boss in Spain and the requests from marketing that start "You know that website that does the thingy?". You do not get lunch. You do get a pile of about sixty graphics from the graphic designer that have to be replaced on the website by lunchtime, and due to late changes from the boss and marketing, they only arrive with you at 11:55. The boss and marketing will still be submitting changes for those at 16:00, but that's ok, because by then, you'll have to help someone else in the tech end figure out a table nested 8 tables deep, and convert a leftover script in the affiliate program from asp to cfm. Oh yeah, the affiliate site - that'll require a complete makeover, and then you can try to locate a popup that the marketing director thinks was on the site at some point. That takes you to about 13:00, and you're going to be keeping going in this vein until 17:30, except that it gets more frantic after 13:00, because the US is starting to come online, and the site MUST work right.

When you escape, you travel to Matt Talbot Hall off Dominic Street, where you are beaten with sticks for two and a half hours.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

No problem, but I don't talk to "marketing", and I don't have any truck with "promotions". It's against my religion. And what you do in your spare time (beaten with sticks, eh?) is no concern of mine. We're talking work here.

You, by contrast, get to edit sentences like this real-life example -

As one stands there, looking east across the waters and past the mountains of Killarney to the place of the dawn and of the Parousia when the Son of Man will shine from the East as far as the West, or turning towards the jagged island-rock of Skellig Michael - 'Christ's furthest fortress in the West', with its own monastery and hermitages clinging to the perpendicular cliffs - it is hard not to feel that one has been transported to those first Irish Christian ages, when men rigorously did penance to make themselves ready for the Day of the risen Lord, and built tiny wooden and drystone oratories because, in words of Dom Gregory that need little adaptation, they 'found no better thing than "this" to "do"...for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed' (Dix 1945, 744).

(and that, believe it or not, is the edited version) - while ruling on knotty house style issues raised by colleagues; taking phone calls from authors who have interpreted your editorial queries as attacks on the quality and meticulousness of their research; fighting for meeting space on behalf of irascible high-ups who will Disapprove Most Mightily if you fail to get it; explaining once again to people who don't seem to understand that one can't just change the look of a journal cover because the designer feels like it, and that the proffered design is not, in any case, what was agreed by the editorial committee of the journal in question; rooting through imperfectly updated files to get the latest status on a particular paper for its anxious author; fielding hassle from the powers that be in relation to a project that is now more than twenty months overdue, but you have no leverage because, in a stroke of public-sector accounting jeenyus, it was paid for out of the 2001 budget ... and so on and so on.

You will not get far with that sentence, because other things will intervene all day to prevent progress.

Actually, I rather like my job - and I sure as hell couldn't do yours. But I'm tired, damn it!