It never rains but it pours

For most of the past couple months, things have been relatively slow and easy. My projects haven't demanded much from me other than attending meetings. I have filled in for other writers or peer-reviewed their documents, but either way it's not as stressful and doesn't require as much careful attention as projects of my own do. I took a week-long vacation for Thanksgiving, and then on the first day back, had a medical emergency that kept me out of work for most of the following week. And right now it's the middle of the holiday season. There are holiday parties interrupting work and every project is slowing down because key people are on vacation or are about to be.

Except for those projects that are speeding up, in hopes of squeezing something out before the vacations. Like one of mine. A new project I was assigned to is trying to get things moving, and there's a kickoff meeting this afternoon.

And several projects of another writer's. Not only is he unusually busy at the moment, but he's going to be out for a while due to a medical problem of his own. My boss asked me yesterday if I could fill in for him on one of them. I said I wasn't sure, because of that kickoff project, but I was given the assignment anyway and told that things could be shuffled again afterwards if necessary. So I'm working on that now, and it needs quite a bit of work. It's not a huge rule, but it has a short deadline. I got started on that today, and it's been keeping me busy. Needs a fair amount of work, and it's a type of document for which guidance is lacking.

And then this morning, H. called to tell me about a meeting for the doomed project. It's been outside the building under the review of another agency for a couple months now, but someone just noticed overlap between the doomed project and another one. (I feel a bit guilty about this, because I had helped with the other project briefly, so maybe I could have called the problem to someone's attention earlier.) The two project teams are butting heads a bit about which one should change to accommodate the other. There was a meeting about it. It conflicted with the kickoff meeting for my other project. So I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out which meeting I should go to, and then preparing other writers for the other one.

So after a month of having nothing worth mentioning to do, I get a new project, do a lot of work on someone else's project, and have something go wrong on my most important project, all in one morning. How exciting.