Back To The Freakin' Grind

I have always been kind of sad at the end of Labor Night.  It's The Unofficial Death Of Summer.  I've been conditioned to dread that night because The First Day Of School usually was the next day, and that meant nine months of captivity.

It sort of gets easier when you're an adult, but not really in some other ways.  For some reason, this past Labor Night hit me hard.  As arduous working as a gopher for the Gopher football Game was, it was a break from my main job.  It was like taking a weeklong vacation, except you were making money.  The end of that gig led into the long weekend (after I took Friday off), and so I enjoyed four days of freedom and bliss after another four days of not needing to go to work.  Seeing that that's all over and I would have to go back to work after such a long period made me sad, to be honest.

Compounding that misery was what I had been through before my gig at the U. and what I had to look forward to once I came back.  Training for this brand new department, apparently the fourth and final department I'll be working in, has been both a bear and a bore.  It's tons of work I don't understand, and try as she might, what she says is mostly going over my head.  I think the part of this department I will hate the most is that the work that comes in, and it'll come in sporadically through the day, has to get done that day.  I can see myself staying late by an hour, or two.  If I dread the work, such a day will be hellish for me.

That's the saving grace of having the kind of Monday I usually have.  Mondays bring in a skeleton crew; the forms we received were filled out on Sundays, and obviously there aren't many businesses open on Sundays, so not only is there less work and more time to go through it, but fewer people that make me feel boxed in.  Yesterday was even better because it was a Tuesday after a holiday.  Usually Tuesdays are our busiest day of the week -- work comes in from all the stuff businesses wanted to get through on Monday -- but not this Tuesday because the work came in from Monday, which was Labor Day.  Also, the workweek was a day shorter, and that's always nice.  Moreover, there were these other forms that had been backlogged from previous days, but that made yesterday even more better.  That meant that I could come in and bury my nose in, for the most part, only one job: Entering the data for all these forms that needed to be done days ago.  You give me one simple task that I know how to do, you give me my space, and I can work and I can breathe.  That doesn't always happen, but if it does, it happens on the first day of my workweek.  And that sets me on a glide path to deal with the more hectic four (three for this week) days the rest of the week.

Unfortunately, I have training the rest of the week.  It is back to a tedious yet difficult grind whose processes I need to remember after taking a whole week to forget them.  And I will be thrown into the deep end, ready or not; I am off on my own in this new department starting next week.

I did nothing on Labor Day but sit in my bedroom and think if I really wanted to brave all those anti-maskers on the way to and from the State Fair.  I was torn in my decision to stay in bed, but right now, I would rather face that agony than march in in the morning to more training of this stultifying crap.