no-vember

this is getting out of hand.

i sat down with a calendar yesterday and realized i'll be in the office 5 days in november.

that's one day the week of the 13th, three days thanksgiving week, and one day the last week of the month.

i'll be traveling the entire rest of the time. it's very safe to say that'll be a personal, single-month globetrotting record.

admittedly, a week of that will be vacation time. no complaints about that. and really, i'm not complaining about the business travel either. it's a busy time at spaceneedl sprockets*, and the company is doing well. which means everyone is running around like crazy.

compounding the hubbub, we're relocating to new offices the first week of the month. three separate facilities will be thrown together under one roof, for the first time ever. that'll create its own excitement, in many and unpredictable ways. it'll be a weird experiment in sociology as the new product development people learn to interact with non-engineers, the marketing team gets crossways with the finance folks, and the famously cranky IT types field frantic calls from everyone.

but that fun will have to begin without me, for the first little while, anyway. i'll be in boston and washington, d.c., and points beyond, attending trade shows and telesurgeries and sitting behind two-way mirrors drinking bad coffee and stress-eating m&ms.

okay, that sounded a little complain-y. which i don't mean to do. really.

fact is, this upcoming field work is important and necessary and part of a big "strategic growth" thing. yada yada. i'm glad my superiors feel my contribution is at least semi-essential in the big scheme of things. it's nice to be appreciated.

this doesn't exactly dovetail, i realize, with my previous epiphany about work, and my need to be closer to home. but these issues will continue to be kind of intractable for awhile.

as noted, november's booked...and it's historically impossible to get anything accomplished between the first of december and the first week of january. our national sales meeting is mid-january, so in effect we're jumping from late october to february. wheeee!

this is getting out of hand.

* not the company's real name. nor is it, strictly speaking, "my" company. i just work there.