exhaustion.
I had great plans for the letter E. It was going to be a post about entropy.
en-tro-py ...broadly : the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system...a process of degradation of running down or a trend to disorder
Yup, that's what I was gonna do. I was gonna have tasteful photos of my desk, a monument to my ability to pile papers higher and higher; the floor of my office, a museum of everything I have touched in the past six years; the dining room table, buried under piles of mail and discarded packing materials and various other incoming detritus; the front entry, filled with the artifacts of a months-long sorting of the tools project that has run aground on the reefs of distraction.
Entropy is kinda like gravity. It's always lurking there in the background, just waiting to screw with me. One little stumble and gravity is right there to pull me hard to the ground. A few days of not paying attention to keeping things picked up and entropy is right there to multiply the disorder.
But that post ain't gonna happen. The pictures didn't get taken. And if there are no pictures, there is no post. I think that is written somewhere in the Manual of Me.
Instead, E is for...
exhaustion.
This is quickly becoming the tax season from hell. Occasionally a tax season breezes by with only modest amounts of overtime. More often, there are systemic bugs that complicate our work lives. One year there were so many computer issues slowing the process that there was literal panic on April 15th. One year the network crashed on April 10 and everyone sat for three days until the tech guys got it back up. (Happily, that was the year before I started so didn't get to enjoy the experience.) Some years the balance between incoming work and the staff available to do it tips toward the staff side; overtime drops (but staff worries about layoffs). Some years it tips the other way, and we burn the midnight oil (and staff grumbles).
This year is one of the latter kind.
This series of numbers:
10, 10.1, 11.3, 11, 10.3, 0, 11.8, 12.5, 9.2, 11.2, 8.3, 11, 0, 6.8, 12.33, 11.1, 13.6, 11.1, 6.5.
represents how many hours I have worked on the days since February 26. There are a couple zeroes in there; those are the two Sundays I took off, but notice how I worked 10.3 and 11 hours, respectively, on the Saturday preceding each, in order to gain myself that blessed day of rest.
And it is only March 16. Four more weeks to go. ::Le sigh::
