Sometimes I have to wonder if the people I work with are testing me. I mean, I know they’re testing me, but I wonder if they’re doing it consciously. It’s almost as if they’re trying to break me, or at least see how far they can push me before I push back. When I do push back, I stop as soon as I catch myself. I know how lucky I am to have a job, even if it’s one that drives me over the edge.

It’s not the quantity of work that bothers me. I’m used to having an overflow in my inbox and a multi-page to-do list. It’s actually two things, sort of related to each other. One is that I get demands from three different directions, and they all want what they want at the same time. The other is that some people know my schedule, and know when I’m happy to meet their demands on my time, and yet they habitually wait until they know (or should know) I don’t have enough time to give them what they want when they want it.

That’s how I ended up doing payroll well into the night, and then still having to fax over eighty pages of billings to the Kennel, while I would have much preferred watching the Star Trek movie that came in the mail from Netflix. One thing I know for sure is that nobody I work with cares that I had a block of time lined out to do something like watch a movie, even if the block was carved out of what was supposed to be my own time.