Is it too quiet? If I'd had another day like yesterday, I would have been rendered inoperative. I would simply have stopped functioning, crawled under the porch and let the worms do their worst. So I'm not saying I wish Tim had badgered me all day with inane questions on subjects that I didn't want to talk about. I had enough of that yesterday to put me halfway under the back deck.

But where was he? Was he solving those problems that he so desperately needed my help with? Was he solving them without my reluctant input? Was he solving them in a way that would mean he didn't need my help at all, ever again? Was I being phased out without even knowing it? It was too quiet.

If I'm being hammered like yesterday, I'm overworked. If I'm getting ignored like today, I'm undervalued. There's apparently no way to make me happy and secure with my job.

I have to admit that I got a lot more work done today, and I feel good about that. I even got Tim to fax me the time cards, so that I could finish the payroll the day before I have to mail out the checks. He probably doesn't quite understand, even yet, how much that means to me. But you do, because I harp on it all the time.

I certainly don't expect anyone I work with to think about my feelings. I'm way past that. Oh, the Boss tries once in a while, when he thinks about it. He knows my limit, how far he can push me, but he thinks of it more as a necessary evil, one of the constraints of doing business in the real world. He can't write if his pen runs out of ink, and he can't get anything out of me if he bleeds me dry.

But as far as Tim is concerned, there are no limits. He thinks nothing of phoning me on a Saturday afternoon, apologizing for interrupting my weekend, and then launching into a longwinded lament about something of little consequence. Maybe my status as a good listener will keep me in his good graces even after he's finally realized that I don't care a fig about what he's saying.

Today, though: nothing. I like it when he leaves me alone, but it scares me some. I'm sure the silence won't last long. It never does.

The Boss, on the other hand, was still faxing me letters to type as late as five this afternoon. His drafts get less and less intelligible as the day goes on. I had to call him about the last one and ask him to read it to me. I had no idea what "adsnort" was supposed to be. (It turned out to be "adjacent." I have no idea how he got from there to "adsnort.")