chaosvizier

Yes, when work's good, it's real good. When it's bad, it's real bad. But when it's crazy, hooooo boy!

We'll start simple: in the past 31 days, I have been at work for 29. Yes, that counts weekends. And I still have the next 8 straight days to go. It's been quite a while since I've had a workload this heavy. My body aches; I am sleepy. I am punchy. It took me half an hour Sunday morning to figure out that I needed to shower after waking up. Right now even the awesome combined power of coffee and Mountain Dew are not saving me from the dreaded Head Bob (tm).

The focal point of all this work is the 60th session of the UN General Assembly, blah blah, bunch of meetings and speeches, whoop de do. This in and of itself is not such a bad thing. Of course, someone always has to say "Oooh, it's a number divisible by ten, let's make it special!" and voila, it was made so, and Yahweh smiled, and it was good. So oodles of VIPs decided to attend. Insert "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?" joke here, because Prince Albert is, in fact, just a nice funny guy.

As a direct result, ten other organizations and departments thought, "Hey, all these really important folks are going to be here, let's host our own special events to coincide with that and maybe get them to come!" And they did, and they thought that it was good. Yet lo, it was not. At least, not for us, as we are directly responsible for handling the organization of most special events and functions at the UN, in addition to our regular duties, and in addition to the normal General Assembly duties. So, in summary, workload expanded by a factor of five at least. All my hair fell out.

For a decent portion of August, my responsibilities were very technical in nature- manage website, test electronic equipment, help out other people, and generally keep on trucking. That's cool. I like that job description, even if my very stubborn and not-totally-knowledgeable supervisor did her best to make my life complicated with things she did not understand.

Then I got moved to accreditation. Accreditation, I believe, is a Latin word for "front line of a battlefield". People die in accreditation. It ain't pretty. It's like a war, except you're undermanned and you have 191 countries arrayed against you. And they're all very angry. Three weeks of that has aged me forty years. I look like a raisin. For more details on what happens in accreditation routinely, check out this entry by

angledge, in which she transcribes a conversation we had.

Then the nights grew long and dreadful. Late indeed was the hour that I chose to remain. Leaving work at 11 pm and later makes for a painful homecoming. Eventually I had to stop going home and just stayed in the city to make travel and rest easier. Hard to get home after the last train takes off, after all. Sleep deprivation turned me into a zombie.

So, in summary, over the past several weeks I've transformed from the ridiculously good-looking and dashing individual that I once was