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Weekend Werind: Back to the Old EtWYCPR

I'm just winding up a five-day weekend. The missus and I are putting our house on the market soon -- as I may have mentioned once or twice -- and I wanted to get a head start on some of the backbreaking work involved there.

Also, there was college basketball to be watched. I'd be lying if I said I did less hoops-watching than back-breaking, but I got in some of each. The details aren't important. Sixty percent to forty percent, eighty to twenty, ninety-nine-point-something-something to some-infinitesimally-small-number-usually-used-in-subatomic-calculations... what's the difference, really?

And anyway, what I really needed was a short break from the office. I like my job. I work with good people. And the work is interesting and meaningful. That doesn't mean I don't want to run screaming from it sometimes and forget it exists for a few days. So that's what I did.

"By noon on Wednesday, I was unshowered, unshaven, sitting at home in my underpants and frankly, a little hungover. And it was all downhill from there."

Well, without the running. There's no running in the office hallways. Strict policy.

And I didn't do a lot of screaming, come to think of it. That'd be pretty disruptive. I may have let out a little 'whoopee!' in the elevator on the way out on Tuesday, but that's about it.

The forgetting it existed for a few days? I was all over that. By noon on Wednesday, I was unshowered, unshaven, sitting at home in my underpants and frankly, a little hungover. And it was all downhill from there. It was beautiful. I should have thought of this mini-vacation thing before.

Now that it's time to go back, I've got some mixed feelings. Oh, it'll be good to catch up on work email and office gossip and whose turn it is to pay into the coffee fund. But there are still those little things, those gotchas!, that will be waiting to suck little bits of soul right out of me, like they do to every office worker at one time or another.

And high up on my list of gotchas is the Email to Which You Cannot Possibly Respond. Or EtWYCPR, for short.

Not that short, obviously. But short-er. Barely.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the Email to Which You Cannot Possibly Respond, please to be having a perusal through the archives, where I explained the notion in a post entitled No Reply Is Good Reply. That'll clue you in to the phenomenon -- and to why I'm not quite as punch-pleased as I'd like to be about hitting my old desk tomorrow. There's always a chance of those EtWYCPRs is lurking in my mailbox, even now.

And now, I'm out of vacation days with which to avoid them. The horror.

It's almost as scary as all that house cleaning-up work I managed to mostly not do while I was off work. Looks like the lesser of two evils involves Microsoft Outlook and a bit of patience and restraint on Monday morning.

Or I could sort through six-year-old boxes of knickknacks packed in the attic.

Hrm.

Hit me with your best shot, mailbox. Hello, office, here I come!