No wonder!

My skin's messed up right now. It doesn't help that a tenacious strip of red remains from where Reynaldo scratched me (though I'm sure there won't be a scar), but mostly I'm upset about the two new zits.

I blame them on stress.

First there's been serious drama at work. Two of our three account executives resigned. We only have three, and that third one is about to give birth. Uh-oh.

Though I'm not sorry to see these two go. One is the Chocolate Covered Spider. She always appears goody-goody on the surface but that covers a will of iron. Unfortunately she isn't motivated by doing good work. She has to be in control. She has to be right. Consequently we clashed all the time. Spidey is moving to Indianapolis because her husband was transferred. She'll be working remotely from her new home throughout February and, as I understand it, by March 1 she'll be out of my life. Yea!

The second is Blondie McBlonderson. She lives and breathes stress. When the smallest thing doesn't go as expected, she unravels. She's leaving before January 30 to work with her husband at his new start up. He's welcome to her.

So why aren't I happier? My boss. He's completely freaking out. A man of 60, he works overtime to be charming and relevant to the 35 year old Spider and 29 year old Blondie. I bounce between thinking it's cute and thinking it's sad. At any rate, he's going to miss his girls a lot.

That's not my business. But this is: He's going to vet new job candidates before they go to HR, and he told us that "the client" would "obviously" prefer to work with "young, well dressed women."

Um ... that's illegal. Even if it's true, and I'm not convinced it is. And what if our client had expressed an antipathy toward African Americans, or Jews, or Hispanics? Would he have shared that with us? Would he restrict the candidates based on race or religion? Of course, none of that is relevant. My boss simply wants to replace his blonde mafia.

My boss' unprofessional behavior left me feeling very depressed.

Then there's my downstairs neighbor. I came home late Saturday afternoon to a note taped to my front door. Both my neighbors on the second and third floor are having trouble with "dirty water" backing up into their kitchen sinks, and she wants me to tell her "the outcome of this situation."

My drain is running just fine, and I don't dump anything down it except the occasional half pint of milk that's past it "use by" date, so I'm not convinced this has anything to do with me. It seems far more likely that either the resident of the second or third floor jammed too much into their garbage disposals, or perhaps the sewer line damage I keep hearing about at condo association meetings has had a negative impact on their pipes. (This would also help explain the infestation of drain flies I had to deal with.)

At any rate, it's not up to me to do anything to affect "the outcome of this situation." I'm certainly not paying a plumber Sunday/holiday rates to look at my operational sink. I left her a voice mail telling her that we could discuss this with our condo management company at the next meeting on Tuesday. (As if I didn't hate these meetings enough as it is.)

Oy!

Once again, I'm not liking 21st century life.

Ben! Saddle up the horses. I want to ride off with you and the boys.