I took last week off from work and spent all of today regretting it. It is just not a good idea to take “vacation.” Or a sick day. Or, god forbid, a personal day. If I want to keep up, I should probably get a sleeping bag and camp out under my desk. This is what happens when you take a week off (and, note, since the whole office was closed last Monday it was technically only 4 days):

1. You return to three mountains of work in your office. Yes, three. Much of it was due today (and will still be sitting there tomorrow).

2. Your poor employee looks like she might defect if you ever leave her during such a stressful week again. (You should take her out to lunch.)

3. You are unable to tackle the three mountains of work because, while you were gone, the entire email system was prepared for a migration and there was an archiving seminar you missed. Thus, the IT guys who have come from New Jersey to do the migration stare in horror at the 23,000 (!) messages in your inbox and it takes until 7 at night to finish updating.

4. You overhear the IT guys making fun of you in the hallway.

5. They have also told anyone who will listen about your 23,000 (insert obligatory !) messages.

6. You can’t respond to emails (the migration makes using your computer unbearably slow), but you do happen to see the multiple emails saying such-and-such needs to release and where is it and oh right it’s in one of the three mountains in your office.

7. It takes some time to find each thing.

8. Speaking of projects releasing, you notice that design has released projects without showing corrections to copyediting and the projects have to be pulled so you can look at them, thus adding to the first of the three mountains, but it’s a good thing because the copyright years have inexplicably changed from 1984 to 1969 and no one would catch that but you.

9. Which you do, the only catch of the day.

10. Because you are the idiot who never archives her mailbox and has to figure out what to do with the 23,000 messages tomorrow.

*ugh*