10th July, 2001.

The inevitable downside to being off for a day: the half hour update about all the "excitement" I missed. 

"And if you read this email in your Inbox..."

[pause while she waits until I open the email and read it]

"... it says this [she repeats the contents of the email]. But you don't need to worry about that one because I told them what they wanted to know."

"And this person called, but didn't leave a message. I haven't called them back."

"And then someone called about this vendor's contract and it was a really serious problem that had everyone worried. So I looked up the contract in the filing cabinet, and it said something different from what I thought it would, so I asked someone else and they thought the same thing. Then we asked a third person and they thought the same thing we did. So then I asked a fourth person, and he said that as far as he was concerned the contract meant we could do exactly what we'd been doing with it all along. So then I called the company who'd actually sent us the contract, and they said it was okay and the fourth person I'd asked had been right all along. So it wasn't really a serious problem after all." 

"Oh, and if you look at this email it says this, but I didn't feel up to dealing with her because she's just a waste of time anyway so you'll probably want to make something up to give her." (A 10 second email during the course of this diatribe takes care of the "waste of time").

Unfortunately the Cow-Orker continues along its juggernaught-like path of stream-of-consciousness conversation for another ten minutes after this...

Damn, and I had to have the non-drowsy Sudafed, too. Where did I leave that Panadeine? 

---

Unbelievably, it gets worse:

"I was looking for these - where were they hidden?"

RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FRICKING EYES!!! HAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!

I hope the chest pains are just my asthma playing up and not a sign of an impending coronary. Someone suggested via email that I try visualising a calm, blue ocean. I don't find calm, blue oceans to be inherently relaxing, so I mentally add a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy with the Cow-Orker in the middle of them.

It helps.