2006-09-29 - 8:20 p.m.

Last night I was so tired at 10:00 I could barely drag myself to bed. Then I immediately woke up and worried about work until one in the morning. I got up about 15 times to write things down that I needed to do. This morning I felt somewhat like I had my ducks in a row about what I needed to accomplish, but when I arrived at work it was to a long email from the mail house detailing all the problems they'd had yesterday and the subsequent problems that I was going to have for the next few days to a week.

Then I had the following amusing conversation with the cocky new senior research analyst.

Him: How's it going? Is it all going smoothly in the field?
Me: No, it's one crisis after another.
Him: What kind of problems can there be? It's just a bunch of people handing out surveys.

(Trust me, the amusement factor didn't kick in until much, much later. At the time he's lucky I didn't smack him.)

Gee, I don't know what kind of problems there might be?
- every Monday morning I might have people all over the country calling me to say they don't have the surveys they "just need to hand out" and panicking.
- I might have schools drastically over-reporting their number of students so the number of surveys I'm getting is dramatically under what we need.
- I might, on some days, have my boss calling me every few hours to tell me about another problem that she expects to have fixed instantaneously.
- I might have people turning up at schools that turn out to be dirty magazine stores.
- I might have at least six people in the field calling me a half dozen times a day each to ask questions and report problems.
- I might worry about the miniscule travel budget I have against what I need to accomplish with it.
- I might have a surveyor fly into Toronto for a month and call in to report that, oops, his driver's license has expired and he can't rent a car and then when he goes to renew it he can't because an old suspension is still on the records (now there's a crisis against which every other crisis pales in comparison).
- I might be getting twice as many refusals in field as I expected to get.

But, really, what kind of problems could there be, it's just a bunch of people handing out surveys?

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