As soon as it happened, I knew I had to find a way to take it back. I laughed at the Boss today. He was in one of his nitpicking moods, tearing apart (of all things) our chart of accounts, thinking that he could fine tune it so it would be, I don’t know, better? Better in what sense, I couldn’t say.

“I think I need an account for garbage,” he said, deadly serious. “And one for the power company.” It’s not really funny, unless it’s the thirty-seventh in a long series of similar phone calls ranging from the surreal to the bizarre. I think by the end of it we had a separate general ledger account for every single bill we’re going to pay this year. That’s a lot of subcategories. If you can’t laugh, you have to cry.

I covered up pretty well, I think. First I coughed, but that wasn’t going to work. “No, no,” he protested, “I really need to get this handled.” Which made me snort my root beer even more, but I remembered to cover the mouthpiece so it really did sound like a cough this time.

Anyway, if he asks me in a week why the Big Project isn’t done, I can point him back to today and remind him of the very important nitpicking that we took most of an entire Wednesday to accomplish, at the expense of Everything Else, including the Big Project. The funny thing is, I probably will get it done that soon. Losing a day will make me work harder over the weekend, if history is any kind of a prophet.

I don’t know if the work the Saturn dealer did today was really covered under the recall bulletin. Maybe they were humoring me, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by coming in to the dealership and waiting an hour just for a light bulb to be changed. That’s how I would have handled it if roles were reversed. I can’t stand to see someone else embarrassed, even someone as naïve and incompetent as I am. (On the other hand, I snorted a whole can of root beer at American Idol tonight, so I guess on top of everything else I’m a hypocrite.)