A nice thing about work being so stupid crazy right now is that this week has just blown right by. Yesterday I did come quite close to losing my shit, though. It's never a quantity of work that gets to me - I'm already there, right? Much as I'd rather browse the Daily Mail and learn how to make my own vodka, I might as well work if I'm already there, and when Mistress La Spliffe gets working . . . well, I may flatter myself, but I work. Mighty projects fall like Goliath and inextricable tangles of bureaucratic razorwire are hacked through like the Gordian knot. There's a reason people keep paying me even though I can't complete a sentence without saying 'fuck' and can't sign off for a delivery without evaluating aloud exactly how much of a peice of ass the courier is. I'm quite good at doing things, and doing lots of things at that, well and fast. So the workload, though remarkably heavy this week, has been fine.

No. What nearly made me lose my shit is other people. To sketch things out, my company has a few media offerings. Some make their revenue from advertising, and some make their revenue from subscriptions. Our offering makes its revenue from subscriptions. Hypothetically, this is quite nice, because it means our main compositional goal is to truffle out the truth - to write the news, in short - to make our words and numbers mirror reality as closely as possible.

In reality, however, the economic crisis is quite understandably turning the people in sales into chickens with their heads cut off and we all have to deal with that. Yesterday one customer complaint got passed along as a Chinese whisper from one non-English speaker to another until it landed on our laps in an absolutely indicepherable form - wherein it was literally impossible to understand. The man who brought it to our attention had no more idea than we did what the fuck it was about (to the best of our knowledge, it looked like the complainers were mixing us up with one of our competitors, which shows you how fucking awesomely competent our marketing team is, but that's a whine for another day). And even in this form, it sparked off hours of soul-searching and a request that we, the editors, set up a meeting with the company with the complaint that we didn't understand at all but which seemed to be about one of our competitors because our marketing team fucking sucks cheese cock.

The request was kiboshed later, or at least put off, by our Yankee head of department, but when I first saw it - as I wrapped up one report, started another, worked out some numbers, checked some other numbers, did the other million little things I have to do every Thursday to make our formatting deadline, and had the pleasure of dealing with one opportunistic, useless French information provider - I seriously considered losing my shit. It seemed like a reasonable option, all of a sudden. First idea was to smash things, but then my salary could get docked, possibly . . . Screaming abuse? The last woman in my department who lost her shit via screaming abuse got a half-year payout to leave that day. Hmmm . . . screaming abuse. But then I realized if I was thinking about it so calmly, I couldn't, in good conscience, lose my shit. My shit was already under control. Losing my shit would be an insult to the thousands of people who really do lose their shit each day.

I have to stop looking on nervous breakdowns and getting fired as an escape from 'all this' . . . I have to take more responsibility for my situation. Nothing is going to rescue me, or if it is I mustn't wait for it. I have a plan and I'm following it, and right now that plan means working through an economic crisis that has people acting like headless chickens. And if that's hard and infuriating, well, at least it's Friday. And my parents are bringing me a new computer from Canada next week.