Today is my last day of work for the next four weeks and, you know, I’m still not really sure how to feel about that.

On the one hand, yeah!  Time off from work!  Four weeks is a long time and I don’t have to go to the office for that whole time.  I get to sit at home, playing games, reading books, watching tv, working on projects, finally hang the pictures in my office, focus on my small business, and so many other things.  This is great!

On the other hand, oy.  Unemployment.  Four weeks is a long time and I’m not getting paid for that whole time, except that I’ve been told I’m going to get unemployment checks of about 1/2 what I’d normally be making.  I guess that one little form I completed was all I needed to do for that because they never asked for more information, but I still don’t really know about this whole unemployment check thing and I really hope that I get paid that money because otherwise this month is really going to stink.

Money, it’s how’s for dinner.

Anyway, I’ve got like six more hours of work before that starts and I’ve got some stuff to get done before then.  I’ve actually been doing really well at getting things wrapped up and ready for this time away.  I had two preliminary documents that were gong to be due over the furlough and I finished one yesterday and the other is my project for today.  It should be fine.  And I had three other projects to finish up this week, too, and they’re all already done.

One of them was a monster.  They moved the deadline up by over a month, so instead of doing the preliminary draft and having a month between that and the final draft, I had to jump straight to the final draft, with only 2 days between the notification and the deadline.  We hadn’t even started on it.  We finished it, but it was a monster.  (And I’m not totally sure we did it right and maybe I should ask about revisiting it once we get back and doing a revision and making sure we actually get the right information to the customer….)

Anyway, I got the other preliminary this morning and I have to get it sent out by about 4:00 this afternoon and I have a bunch yet to do there.

Which is why I haven’t really started to think about what this really means, being out of work for 4 weeks.

I’m going to take my picture frames when I leave tonight.  We were told to lock up everything else, like our staplers.  I’m trying to make it so if there’s a hurricane while we’re away, all that needs to be worried about is the computer and phone.  Everything else should be in a drawer and that should be safe if rain gets through.  Plus, you know, locked so no one can steal my stapler.

I keep looking around and thinking about where everything’s going to go and thinking that maybe I should start on that, but I know it’s only going to take 10 minutes and I’ve got a lot of stuff to do before then.

And then I won’t have anything to do, except I’ve made this long list of things I’m going to try to work on over the furlough.  A list that starts with organizing the closet in Justin’s office and ends with finding a better way to organize the photo files on my computer.

Anyway.  I should get back to this preliminary and make sure that the supporting documentation is all in place.  The sooner I get this done and delivered, the sooner I can sit here looking at my picture frames, thinking about packing them into my bag to go home.

Today I’m feeling accomplished about everything I’ve done in the past couple weeks.

Tomorrow I’ll feel excited about not waking up at 6:00 in the morning.

I’ve been answering a lot of questions around my office about my trip to Atlanta.   A lot of it is just casual interest, wanting to know where I’d gone and what I had been doing and how it all went.  They’re not terribly interested in what I was doing, just typical office chit-chat.

David, my manager-boss, the guy who volunteered me and sent me up there, actually hasn’t asked about it at all, but I suspect it was because he was heading out of town yesterday afternoon and had a lot to take care of.  He’s out for the rest of the week, along with several other guys from the office and it is crazy quiet around here.

My director, however, did ask about it when I passed his office to make sure he’d been able to find a document.  He seemed pleased that I’d been able to help out and hopefully manage to get the people I worked with to get a little bit ahead.

What gets me really confused is the attitude that I feel from people around my office toward the people who I went up to help.  My director’s comment was that they are so unbelievably slow.  Another coworker described the office where I was visiting as “the lion’s den” where I should be careful because they’re likely to grill me about what we’re doing over here.  He was joking, and the director’s comment was light-hearted, too, but I’m struggling with it.

I understand that the office where I went last week is a government office with oversight responsibilities for our company.  As such, they’re known for picking on what we do to make sure that we’re doing it “by the book,” so to speak, which is precisely what they’re there to do.  And the people I spoke with were both incredibly overwhelmed and buried underneath the massive amounts of paperwork that we send to them on a daily basis.

My suspicion is that people down here have no idea what’s happening up in Atlanta.  But it’s “the Man” and they’re not going to just sit back and take it.  They’re going to say little insidious comments and jokes and complain about it and look at the whole situation as an Us vs. Them situation.

I just don’t get it.

Now, part of the reason why they’re so slow might be because they’re buried under mountains of paperwork that they haven’t found ways to effectively corral.  Part of what I did while I was there was to try to make headway into that problem.  I didn’t get nearly as far as I would have liked, but we made some progress.

And now that I’m back here, I’m trying to work with people here to make things work better for people up there.  There are small things that we can do that make things easier for the people in Atlanta.  And, coincidentally, easier for a handful of people down here, too.

In Atlanta, I never got that Us vs. Them feeling about the situation.  What I got was enormous gratitude for my willingness to help and the sense that they were trying to do something similar for us—that their position in their office is to help my company succeed.  And they’re working as hard as they can to make sure that’s possible.  What do they get from us in return?  Complaints and bitterness.

Why is that?  And what can I do to help change that?