[Work] Oolala (long)

I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.

Specifically, when I was a few hours younger.

Today is a final test day at work. Which means that I have no classes to teach, and could have used a vacation day and stayed home.

Which I totally would have done, seeing as how I'm totally completely exhausted.

My sleep schedule is totally completely thoroughly messed up.

It started after the mid-year conference, which was last week. I was so tired on the final day that I went home and was asleep in bed by around 8:30PM. You have to understand, I'm a night owl, so that's early. In fact, sometimes I'm still at work at 8:30PM. Anyway.

I was also a bit sick. I won't go into overshare details, which basically means that I can't tell you anything about the level of sickness I was experiencing. I can say that it involved frequent (sometimes nearly constant) trips to the restroom.

So, that was the weekend following the conference. Why is this important?

Because, it's the end of the month.

I have some bills that need to be paid back home in America, that can't be paid online. So ever month I have to call international long distance and pay them.

Which means I have to either stay up crazy late or get up crazy early, because of the time difference.

Well, I'm a night owl, so I stay up crazy late. Usually, I do this on a Friday or Saturday night, so I can sleep in the next day, and it won't affect my work. But last week was the MYC, so Friday night I was in bed at 8:30PM and Saturday night I was sick. So, it didn't get done.

But it HAS TO get done, so I did it Tuesday night. I stayed up until 1:00AM, and made the calls.

I had PLANNED for this to take no longer than an hour, AT MOST. Usually, it's just a bunch of short calls. The guy in the financial department at my university (his name is Stuart) who takes my calls has sometimes recognized me. Those are usually REALLY SHORT calls.

Me: Hi, I want to pay my bill.
Stuart: Is this Phoenix?
Me: Yup.
Stuart: OK, what's your card number?

That's pretty much the entire conversation.

But sometimes...

During the course of Tuesday night's (technically, Wednesday morning's) business, I ended up making a couple customer service calls. These calls, like most customer service calls in America, were re-routed to India. Well, apparently not all businesses can afford to outsource their customer service to Indian companies that can afford to hire English speaking representatives.

They couldn't understand me, I sometimes couldn't understand them, it was a hassle.

Long story short (too late), I was up until around 5:30AM.

I normally get up for work at 7:00AM. I reset my alarms for 7:30AM, to get that precious extra 30 minutes of slumber, but the situation couldn't really be ameliorated.

The damage was done, and with but two hours of sleep, I went to work the next day.

Somehow, I'm not sure how, exactly, I managed to get through the day. I can't remember much beyond that.

My dilemma hit when I went home. Should I go straight to bed? Try to stay up and get my sleeping schedule back on track?

I tried to get my cycle under control by staying up a bit, even though I was VERY tired.

I remember it being 7:00PM at one point, although I'm not sure if I managed to stay up even later.

What I =DO= remember is waking up at 11:00PM. At some point, I had decided to lay down on my covers with my shirt half-off, drooling on myself. At least, that's what I can assume I decided, given how I found myself when I awoke.

I tried to go back to sleep, but now my cycle was totally completely thoroughly utterly destroyed.

I'm not sure how many hours I lay awake last night, staring darkly at the ceiling. Many.

So now, the next day, I'm totally completely thoroughly utterly exhaustively? wholly exhausted again. I'm not excusing this; what I =should= have done was take a nap after work on Tuesday, so that staying up late would be no big deal. But I didn't. Because I'm stupid.

AND, I have no classes to teach. I actually have FREE TIME today, which would be great, if I were awake enough to work on any of the thousands of projects I have open.

Alas.