I’ve had it up to here.

I woke up this morning with a “We’re not gonna take it. NO! We ain’t gonna take it! We’re not gonna take it – anymoooooooore!” kind of an attitude. Actually, I was totally dragging @$$. But deep down inside I felt like Dee Snyder. Without the make up.

Mike also wasn’t feeling his chipper best when he got into work. I was wondering what crawled up his butt and died, but before I asked, I realized that I felt the same way. So all I said was, “you look like I feel.” That made us both laugh.

So I have this white board behind my desk. I wrote down all the tasks that I had to accomplish today in one column (short jobs), and packages that I haven’t even started in the second column (long jobs). I busted my butt all day and slowly knocked off about two thirds of my short jobs. No long jobs even started. I even added a project on the long job side.

Finally, at about four thirty-ish I grabbed my whiteboard and headed over to Spencer’s office. I gave him my “I’ve had it up to here” speech. I told him that some of these tasks were not going to happen and I needed to know what the glass balls were. I’ll drop the damn rubber balls all day, but I didn’t want to drop any glass balls. And I damn sure wasn’t about to kill myself and work 16 hours a day.

Spence’s response was something like this, “Mike, I’m your damn boss. If anyone else gets mad, then **** them. I’ve only got two guys (me and Mike) who do what you do. You’re doing good, and you keep doing what you’re doing. If anyone want to say something, I’ll tell them where to stick it.”

We outlined my top four priorities, I hung my whiteboard back up, and we went to the gym. It was ‘back’ day. Back and Biceps. Keith and Mike were already there, and so we joined them for a bit. After leaving the gym I felt a lot better. We went to get something to eat and all I wanted was a big salad. But something didn’t taste right, so I left discouraged.

After dinner, Mike asked how my meeting with Spence went and I told him what Spence told me and Mike laughed. Spence is very old school and, if there are no women present, his language can be very colorful. Then I told Mike that I was excused from the Monday mandatory manager’s training until further notice. Then Mike was kind of ticked that he wasn’t excused. And from what Keith and Mike told me, tonight's training especially suuuucked! Hehheh!

And I got a phone call from my new office in Washington! Jon, my future predecessor, has been with that company for three years. They travel more, but for much shorter periods of time. It sounds like it should be a more stable environment than what I’ve been used to. I can’t really get into it tonight, because I’m still digesting what he told me, but it sounds like a really nice job. In the past three years, he hasn’t been away from home for more than a month. And usually, it’s only two or three weeks at a time.

So over the next few months, Jon and I will be e-mailing and calling in order to get me ready to take over, when I get there, he’ll be in Iowa for a while and won’t be there to meet me. That was nice of him to reach out and find me.