Would you like a large fries with that?

I haven't been able to concentrate at all today. I must have started and stopped the same piece of analysis five times and I’m barely any further along with it than I was this morning. I’m going nowhere fast and if I don’t get my act together I’m going to end up making up for lost time over the weekend. Unfortunately my heart just isn’t in it, I feel so completely overwhelmed by work at the moment that I don’t know where to start and I’m in one of those moods where I’m close to telling the powers that be exactly where they can stick their job. It’s one of those weeks where you think, 'could working in McDonalds really be worse than this?'

At least my day started well, in a most civilized manner in fact. Rather than scarf down a coffee and a slice of toast at my desk as usual I actually sat down for a leisurely breakfast at a local diner and enjoyed a cup of coffee and a toasted English muffin in the company of Tel Aviv. It was his idea and I was initially reluctant when he suggested it, since I’m not one of those people that likes to waste time in the morning. I’m very efficient; I get up, get showered, get dressed and go straight to work and I’m usually at my desk by 8am. Time spent lolling around having breakfast or reading the paper is time that could be better spent sleeping in my opinion, however the more I pondered the idea of having a leisurely breakfast for a change the more I liked it, and I didn’t have any meetings until 10am, so we ended up stopping by a local diner on the way to the subway.

It was a funny little place that I’d passed often, but had never eaten at before. I liked it, it oozed character and there wasn’t an employee in the place under the age of 60. One of the elderly waitresses had a dowager’s hump to rival Mrs Overall’s. We took a seat in an empty booth and our waiter shuffled over with a couple of menus. He looked down at the two of us holding hands across the table and said with a wink “I can tell you two aren’t married.”

Cheeky bugger!! :-)

He picked up on my accent when we ordered and asked whereabouts in Yorkshire was I from. A surprise, because my flattened northern vowels tend to confuse many Americans and you'd be surprised at the number of people who peg me for an Australian. As it turned out though our waiter was born in Leeds, although he'd long lost his accent, but his cousin apparently still owns the Queens hotel near Leeds railway station. He'd moved to New York in the 1960s and was thrilled to meet someone who knew Leeds well and kept coming over to refill my coffee and chat to me and reminisce about the good old days living in Yorkshire, much to Tel Aviv's amusement.

Unfortunately my mood took a distinct turn for the crotchety when I arrived at the office saw I’d been copied on an email to my boss asking him if he could spare me to help on some follow up work on the pitch we worked on just over a week ago.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Given that the most recent request - ‘we just need you to help us out for a few hours’ - quickly turned into my working 11hour days over the weekend a couple of weeks ago I was in no mood to be sucked back into the pitch quagmire for ‘just a few hours’, however my boss is not generally renowned for standing up for his staff not working inhumane hours – ‘oh but couldn’t you just squeeze this in somehow?’ - so I’ve been bracing myself all day to be sucked back in and have been in a black mood all day.

Happily my boss just gave me the surprise of my life by popping by to say that he’s going to take on the pitch work himself and that I shouldn’t worry about it. Now there's a turn up for the books. I’m still reeling with shock.