I love my job, I love my job, I love my job....

Disclaimer: Venting ahead that may seem unreasonable, but trust me it's not, and trust me that I could prove it if I had the time to write a novel.

Wednesday morning I find out I get to attend an out of town meeting for work... on Thursday (awesome notice time right?). I'm in a manager's meeting with all my superiors including our company's president and my manager says, "Oh by the way, can you go the this meeting tomorrow?" It's great being put on the spot in front of this group of really "happy" people (aka the reason I need to refuel on optimism on the weekends). Me: "Uh..Sure, just give me the details and I'll prepare for it." Manager "That's great.... its only about 2 hours away so it shouldn't be too bad." Not the most ideal situation, but just one of those things you can't get out of so you have to make the best of it.

So I tell myself... I'll just get up a little earlier than normal (30 mins max) and I'll ask B (husband) cover Scout duties for that morning, I'll be back early afternoon, it'll be nice to be out of the office, I'll get mileage $$ added to my paycheck, insert other attempts to be excited about this trip here.

That gets MUCH more difficult to focus on when my manager sends me the information for this meeting.
1. It's 4.5 hour away instead of 2 hours.
2. I get to take our Sales Assistant who only works here because she's related to the President with me for "experience."
3. In order to get there on time I have to leave at 4am.
4. My personal favorite - This was the 2nd of two meeting times. The other was Wednesday at 1pm. Now obviously I wouldn't have made it to that meeting by the time I found out about it, but with a little more advance planning (my manager knew about this meeting for 2 weeks prior and NEVER mentioned it) we could have attended the meeting that kept us working during normal business hours.

I have a moment with this, vent to B, try to focus on how to make the best of the situation, calm down, breathe, compose myself, return to my office.

Then my manager has an important announcement to make. She is getting married in the spring, and they decided to rent an apartment together about an hour from where we work. Wonderful. Great. Really happy for the upcoming excitement for them as I've just gone through a lot of the same things recently. 100% serious. Well, because she didn't want to drive a longer commute than her current 15 minute one, she convinced our president to allow her to work from home 3 days a week.

Now this may not seem like that big a deal, but this is monumental for this little company. Our president is VERY rigid about the work day beginning at 8am and ended at 5pm M-F. You can come in 2 hours early in order to have 30 minutes extra at lunch, and he will get ill that you took 30 extra minutes at lunch. You can travel all over creation for him, experience 2,700 flight delays, get home at 2am after traveling since 7am and if you aren't in by 8:30 the next morning he makes note of it and makes sure to give you extra "projects" that you could have completed had you been in the office on time.

Anyways....moving on. While I am happy that things worked out really well for her personally it guarantees a significant increase in "crisises" for me to deal with on top of my already full work load. Wednesday was a wonderful day... ha ha ha.

Fast forward to Thursday.... my WONDERFUL DOESN'T EVEN BEGIN TO DO HIM JUSTICE husband gets up with me at 3 am and makes me breakfast so I don't have to drive on an empty stomach. Seriously this man spoils me soo much. The driving isn't horrible, the meeting went as expected, our president's niece got her "meeting experience,"(only spilled 1 cup of coffee on herself while yelling "OMG look what I just did! @%#$!"...) the drive home was long but smooth (only the last 2.5 hours were rough as my early morning began catching up with me while my co-pilot snored and her cell phone rang 27 times), and I took my chances and took the rest of the work day (a whole 90 minutes) off.

Insert happiness here: The best part of the day was when my husband surprised me with another early Christmas presents (I'm beginning to think I'll have nothing to open at all by the time December 1st gets here).... Tickets for this! I'm really excited because I wanted to do this last year and we never had a good weekend to go.

Now to today... didn't get nearly enough sleep but I'm functioning so I'll survive. I go into another manager's meeting in which my manager's work from home announcement gets made to all the other managers who will not receive such a sweet deal (imagine the tension in a room full of already miserable people).

Our president says "Manger was forced into a situation that caused her to have to move an hour away...." and proceeds to explain that she will not be in the office here 3 days each week.

Yes she's getting married and that is exciting, yes she's moving and that's a serious decision, yes the place she is moving to is an hour away... but to my knowledge her fiance didn't threaten her family or her life to get her to agree to such events. She CHOSE to accept his proposal, she CHOSE to move and she CHOSE to look at and agree to lease an apartment far away from her job. No one forced her to do anything.

The reaction.... dead silence and a lot of really icy cold glared directed right at her. I felt a little sorry for her in that small present moment because I know it was awkward, but it passed as soon as the meeting was over. She chose to put herself in that situation too.

Blah, nice to have that off my chest... At least my weekend is filled with lots of out of town friends visiting and a homecoming football game and hopefully a little extra sleep. :-)

Anyone out there have any "I love my job" stories?