This is the time of year that I hate at work. Instead of spacing everything out over the course of the year, most of the major projects come in the October to December timeframe. Calculation of salary increases, union issues, database upgrades to automatically update everyone's benefits for the new year, annual employee evaluations... it's all happening at once. The problem is, doing any one of those tasks precludes me from moving forward on any of the others, and it becomes a vicious cycle of falling behind.

We spent a good part of last week doing database testing for the benefits re-enrollment. During that time, in which a co-worker and I were literally staring at a computer from 8am to 5pm and willing it to cooperate, all of the other projects went untouched due to time. I've since been trying to catch up on them, and it's meant getting here at 6:30 and leaving later in the evening. I think - and I'm not 100% sure on this one - that I'm making a bit of progress.

Unfortunately, it also means I've been running ragged, and I'm getting physically exhausted as a result. I'm getting here in the morning and literally counting down the hours until I get to go home again, and when I get back here the next day it feels like I just left only a little while beforehand. And that wears on you, which manifests in a dull ache that just pervades your entire body. Not a good ache either, like when you work out for a while or run a marathon, but that creeping, draining, fatigued ache. It blows.

In the span of time that it's taken me to write this entry, another foot-tall stack of papers has manifested on my desk. It's always papers, and it's always a foot tall. I'll feel a lot better about it if something useful or entertaining started showing up in foot-tall piles on my desk... you know, like Twinkies or hundred dollar bills.

The time has come to hunt down the beast known as "coffee". Wish me luck.