Straight No Chaser

News from the Inferno

i am swimming through a hell of ill-conceived spreadsheets.

whoever worked on this project before i came this summer must have had some kind of psychic vendetta against me. either that, or a giant pile of horseshit for a brain. i found one decent set of numbers like twenty minutes ago, one tiny little cluster of cells, an excel embryo, if you will, that hadn't been mangled and miscalculated beyond the point of recognizable usefulness. if not for these heels i'd have done a dance on my desk. i had been looking for that for, literally, the entire day. and all of yesterday.

i got up to answer my phone, and when i sat back down, it was gone. gone! erased from the network. snuffed out by the same nameless neighbor who smears his idiocy all over everything i try to keep pristine and intelligible.

it's four hundred thirty-six degrees outside and negative nine in here. i'm keeping my hands warm (and by warm i mean just above their freezing point) by hovering them over my laptop. thank god for that broken fan.

i have never become quite this inexplicably grouchy in so short a time with such little warning. there are two days left on the countdown; like an irate prairie dog, i am burrowing in the promise of thursday. these office people have a collective aneurism if i accidentaly brush the sleeve of one's jacket with the back of my hand. i miss touch. the mantra goes like this: "it's almost thursday. it's almost thursday. it's almost thursday..."