What am I?

What can you make of an e-mail from your boss with the subject line You're It!, ? I thought Oh damn, what am I? The guy now in charge of re-filling the water cooler, a company representative at a conference, the new office monkey? What? What am I!?

As it turns out, I was just the back-up for the day. Not the boss, mind you. I couldn't start giving orders or arbitrarily tell people to go home or anything. Nope, I'm just the back-up. Not in a vice president kind of way, more like the president's secretary.

Whew. This was good, because I don't want to be the boss. Her job seems pretty hard, and we have great team members. I was once the boss in my previous job, more specifically a team lead. We did not have so great team members. Team members who came in late, left early, and made plenty of mistakes. Fun mistakes, for me to correct. Like deleting entire directories of files, accidentally. Fun times. Even more fun, my boss decided I was just the person to scream at for this, even though I had almost no input on the hiring of these people. The stress level there made my jaw clench and my arm go numb, like right before a heart attack. In fact, that's when I had my first heart attack. Did I say heart attack, because I meant panic attack. I haven't had a heart attack yet, but I imagine I won't be too surprised when it happens. I feel like I'm back at that shitty job...oh fuck I'm having a heart attack...still, better than that job.

Back to the e-mail, though, it would have been nice if I had been the chosen one, or even the new office monkey, or if the e-mail had finally told me what my purpose on this planet was.

Anyway, things are much better now. It's good to be tagged 'it'. My co-workers are great. If they were a band, they would be The Beatles. The best I've ever worked with. I don't know which ones would be John, Paul, George or Ringo. I think I'd be Stuart Sutcliffe.

It was still about 70 degrees today, but I wore my new fall coat anyway. I bought it two weeks or so ago when it was just freezing every morning, and it's been warm spring weather ever since. I like the coat, I like the way it looks, and I'm wearing it, body heat be damned!

Well, that's enough out of me. If you need me, I'll be sweating in my stylish fall coat.