Nothing today worked out as I'd planned. Not for the first time, or the only time, but this was one of the most disappointing days in a while.

I had a few things I wanted to get done today. There was even a list, so I fully expected to make a decent dent in the backlog of busywork on my desk. Even so, my main goal had nothing to do with my job. My main goal today was to get to the mall and cross some items off my Christmas shopping list. It wouldn't have taken long, because I knew where I was going and what I wanted. It would have been so easy, only...

The Boss is in Texas. That's a long way from where he should be, in order to run a construction company that does most of its work (currently all of its work) in California. It's a hard thing for an obsessive micromanager to have his eyes and ears that far from the business. As you can probably guess, that doesn't make my job any easier.

A few days ago I mailed him a package of paperwork. I do this once or twice a month to keep him up to date on what I'm doing. He trusts me, I think, but he also needs to see copies of all the checks I write and the bills I pay. He wants to pore over every time card looking for errors. If he hopes to find them, he's usually disappointed, but that only serves to make him happier when he does catch me in a mistake.

This package was bulkier than the ones I usually send him. I was gone for ten days last month, and then before I could get my bearings and start getting caught up, he lit out for Texas. By the time he knew where he was going and had given me an address, it was more than a month's worth of papers that had to be mailed to him.

He got them today. And instead of all those other things I wanted to do, I spent the day responding to his questions as he went through two pounds of paperwork, page by page and line by line. That's my job, I suppose, and I really shouldn't complain. But oh my, is it ever draining. When he gets down to nickels and dimes, it seems so pointless. When he asks me for the third or fourth time a question I've answered two or three times already, it turns my insides into a volcano.

I know I should handle it better, but I'm working on three other things that I consider more important at the time, not the least of which is my Christmas shopping. By tonight all I wanted to do was bang my head against the wall until it started to feel good. It has sapped all the spirit out of me, at least for now.

I didn't know whether to write an entry at all tonight, because I knew it would end up like this. This is bound to happen when I feel compelled to post every day. It's a little like baseball. Even the best teams lose about sixty games during the season, but there's always a game the next day. That makes it a whole lot easier to get over the losses. Maybe I'll come up a winner tomorrow.