More Work Crap, Blah, Blah, Blah

Suddenly realizing that it was less than two weeks until Christmas, I decided to duck out of work early to do a bit of shopping. Because I work from home these days, I am always leery about leaving early for fear of getting a call from my boss, thereby confirming his opinion that I am a total slacker. So of course it was around 5:30 that he called me as I was strolling aimlessly through the aisles at Best Buy. Panicked and not wanting him to hear the shopping crowd and audio-visual background noise, I sent his call to voicemail. He left the following message:

Bipolar Bear (BPB): "David, (boss' name). Give me a call at home, 555-555-1212."

Fuck. Me. What the hell is so urgent that he wants me to call him at home? Did he want to talk about his last email that I never responded to? Am I going to get yelled at for something I did wrong in his bizarro-world opinion? Have I been fired?

There's no way that I can avoid calling him back. I finished my shopping and headed to the car to figure out how to answer his question "I tried you in your office, where are you?"

I waded through the parking lot, hopped in the car and rang him back. After a few minutes of chit chat, we got to the actual meat of the conversation which went a little something like this:

BPB: "Next Thursday, the VP of Marketing will be traveling to St. Louis to discuss (insert inane project). She's only going to be here for that one day and I am out of the office starting that afternoon, so we need to hold an early morning meeting that I'd like you to join."
Me (gleefully over his upcoming vacation): "Okay, sounds good."
BPB: "So we've scheduled the call for 7:30 a.m. next Thursday."
Me: "Uhh, is that Pacific time or Central time?"
BPB: "Central."

Hello 5:30 a.m. conference call next week. I'm estimating that he over-under on the actual hours of sleep I get on Wednesday night is about 3.5 hours, as I invariably have trouble sleeping when I have to get up inordinately early the next morning. I also put the over-under on the number of cups of coffee I drink that morning at 17. If I die from some crazy caffeine-infused overdose, it was good knowing you all. (Of course, no one would immediately know since I only seem to post here once every 12 days).

Oh well, at least the BPB will be on vacation and I'll be able to enjoy a nice holiday respite from the work nightmare. Which leaves me plenty of time for my daily nap and job searching.