Oops...

Couldn’t sleep this morning, so I woke up around 6, fought it for an hour, then decided to check out what was on the Discovery Travel and Living Channel (I’ve been watching a lot of it lately, especially the travel shows). Eventually got dressed to go running, as D and I were planning to meet at 11:30 to go play downtown, and I wanted to get a run in before then. Came back to the apartment, was in the shower, and I heard my phone ring. It wasn’t a really logical time for anyone to be calling me from home, so I didn’t think it was an emergency, and figured I didn’t want to leap out of the shower for it. I got out of the shower and saw that I’d missed a call from a coworker, so I called her back and she said that there was someone at the office (the person with whom I’m staying to overlap) and when was I coming in? Oh, and the PM wanted to talk to me.

Umm…

When I had asked the old PM on more than one occasion if we were supposed to work Saturdays, he said no. This is apparently not the philosophy under which the new PM is operating, and apparently we’re supposed to work a half day on Saturday. I don’t have a problem doing this – one of the things about field work is that long days and working on weekends are quite common, and we tend to work 10 – 11 hour days here anyway. It was just the not knowing about it that was irritating. So I called D and told her that actually, instead of doing what we had planned for today, we needed to head to the office. So we piled in a cab and got here as quickly as possible, both feeling a little frustrated that we weren’t told about it. Ah well – no harm done, I think, but it’s not the kind of impression I like to make.

So now everyone else has gone out for lunch, we’re having food delivered, and since the office is empty, we’re playing music loudly and being silly. Of course, it’s really hard not to be silly when you’re listening to Tom Jones and the Cardigans do their cover of “Burning Down the House”.

It also started to pour with rain, so we figured it was best to be at the office anyway. We’ll head out in a couple of hours – no great loss. As I said, we were both mostly just frustrated because it was unexpected. I like good surprises, like “hey – you just won a million dollars!” or “didn’t you know that Monday is a holiday?”. But Saturday morning “hey, why aren’t you at work?” phone calls don’t fall into that category. So here we are, on a Saturday, she’s working on some maps, I’m entering statistical data so I can make a socioeconomic profile of the region, and we’re both kind of wondering when we can head out for the day. However, it doesn’t look to be any time soon, because no one else is leaving any time soon. Plus, this is the kind of work where I could sit here indefinitely and still have stuff to do, so it’s not as though I’m likely to reach a logical stopping point. My brain, however, is totally somewhere else. For the moment, I’m doing something that will allow my mind to wander without major consequences – I just check my numbers at the end of each table to make sure they add up.

(I’d like to take this opportunity to note that it’s almost 5 pm, and no one has left yet. What is wrong with these people? There’s a lot of work to do, but there’s also tons to do in this city – all work and no play, blah, blah, blah…) I wonder – if you do this kind of thing all the time, does everything just start to blur together? Do you stop appreciating the cool places you get to see because you feel like you’ve already seen all of them? I really hope not – that kind of defeats the purpose, as one of the major perks of the job is that you get to see the world. Seeing it from the inside of an office doesn’t really count.