I was really starting to get used to those four-day weekends. I've had two of them in two weeks, so coming back to work today was shaping up to be an unpleasant task from the moment I got up.

The moment I got up, mind you, was my normal time to wake up for work during the week - 6:30am. After numerous days of sleeping in until noon, dragging my ass out of bed before the sun came up was not something I was looking forward to. And guess what? I was right. It sucked.

Everything kind of started going downhill from there.

I got to my car this morning, spiffy new iPod Nano in hand so I could listen to something other than the radio in the morning. Got in, started the car, plugged it in... and nothing happened. The iPod seemed to be playing, but there was no sound coming from the speakers. Shut it off, turned it back on... still nothing. The adapter worked perfectly well with our main iPod, and I was listening to music from it yesterday on the earphones, but for some reason it just wouldn't play anything. I can only assume (and hope) that the adapter we got a while ago just isn't compatible with the newer Nano.

Got to work with a minimum of traffic, came into my office, and made the mistake of turning on my computer. As expected, my e-mail notification symbol comes on, letting me know that after 4 days out of the office, someone had actually e-mailed me. I'm lucky I can go ten minutes here without a new e-mail, so this was by no means unexpected. However, the fact that I had 531 new e-mails was a little shocking. I think 20 of them were Journalscape notifications, maybe 10 were actual work-related items, and about 500 were various e-mails letting me know the following:

a.) Someone has added this e-mail to a Paypal account,
b.) I can get Viagra through the mail!
c.) My eBay account has been suspended,
d.) I can get more Viagra through the mail!
e.) Thanks to all of the above, my account was over its size limit.

Took me 20 minutes to sort through all the crap. Utter waste of time.

Apparently one of my New Year's presents was a pile of paperwork that I found on my desk this morning. How it got there, I have no idea. I was one of the last people to leave my office last Thursday, well after the front door was locked. Didn't have any paperwork then. I was one of the first people into the office this morning, before the front door was unlocked. Yup, paperwork. Lots of it. It's like it randomly spawned in my office over the weekend (which I wouldn't be surprised at).

So right now, I get to sort through all of that, while being interrupted every couple of minutes by a phone call or a request that absolutely has to take precedence over everything in the world and needs to be done now Now NOW!!!

*deep breath*

God, I hope the rest of the year isn't like this.