What a day ...

It's been an emotional rollercoaster today - I spent the morning getting quite teary-eyed from all the gorgeous comments and personal emails I've been receiving (love you all!) ... then at work I had a stressful 6 hours, which ended up turning my entire mood into almost fits of giggles!

I've been involved with a big issue at work that I initially dealt with two nights ago - that was a huge involvement and ended up with me and another girl off the phones for a number of hours trying to fix something. I emailed a spreadsheet of all those bookings that were affected etc to our Head Office before I went home at 11pm ... then they continued to work on the problem overnight. The next day the problem was still not resolved, so they asked the morning shift to continue the same way that I had the previous night, and to send new spreadsheets every 4 hours so they could continue to deal with them. I was called at home at 8.30am yesterday morning, after only getting to bed at 2am (not impressed), then again at 10.30am, just before I was getting ready to come into work (and I still can't work out why the phoned me, 'cos we didn't discuss any of the procedures etc) ... anyway, when I get to work I find out they'd found my original spreadsheet, and added all the new problem bookings to the list (rather than making a new spreadsheet which had been requested) ... to add insult to injury they then put the entire list in alphabetical order ... and saved the files ... so when I came in I had to spend almost 4 hours comparing the old file in my email, to pull out all the new bookings - and because they hadn't processed the 'fixes' properly, I had to go into each and every new booking and fix them up as well. Another office then topped it off yesterday by not ignoring these particular bookings on the queues, and queue-delaying them until today, which means we had to wait until this morning for them to pop up again, then start going back through the queues to find them all and starting again today.

Well, the final straw when I came in at lunchtime today for work to see if they'd managed to find them ... I'd ended up having to stay an extra hour at work last night fixing the problems before emailing the entire corrected list to our Head Office - then left an email plus a printout of a spreadsheet, with lines wide enough for someone to write on them, asking for someone to write up any new bookings (the queue-delayed ones) onto the forms, then to fax them to head office for the final tally. What do they decide to do? They said among themselves, "that's really silly, when we have this great spreadsheet already set up, let's just do the same as yesterday, and add them all into the old spreadsheet, then sort them alphabetically again!" ... My face when I came in today to be told that was a total picture!!!

So, today I spent another 4 1/2 hours cross-referencing through the same lists yet AGAIN (of over 300 bookings), and having to go into every single new booking yet AGAIN to fix them up ... only to get a call from Head Office from an extremely apologetic manager saying not to worry, as the company we're dealing with had finally managed to pull their own report from their own system, so they'd just use their own data ...... aaaaaarghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry for the loooooong version ... anyway, the upshot of all this, is that I've had a shitty few days at work just because of sheer incompetence of other staff members, and tonight's call just sent me over the top - I couldn't do anything else but crack up laughing and got the giggles. Two of my work colleagues have given me "Luv Ya Work" awards 'cos of everything I've been doing for the last 3 days ... here's hoping the smile will be here to stay for a while longer ;) If nothing else I got some great compliments from the manager in head office I've been dealing with for 3 days :)

I had a good talk to Mum on the phone before work too, and she agrees with me that I should basically forget Christmas (stitching-wise particularly) until after Christmas, and just treat myself to some selfish stitching "just for me" - so that's the plan ... I've listed three projects that I'd really love to stitch, even if it's just making a start on them (I'm still missing a couple of threads/beads), and that's what I'm going to focus on until after Christmas ... then I'll get back on track and get stitching ornaments again ready for 'whenever' and back to my rotation. As Mum says, that way it takes my mind's focus off the negatives of what I can't do for Christmas, and puts it back onto something more positive :D Thanks to everyone's suggestions on that score - they've all been taken on board :D

This weekend I'll be doing a list of the entire contents of the freezers - which won't take very long going by what I saw yesterday LOL - and a bit more menu planning to get me through the next three weeks at least. I've just cooked up the 1kg mince I had into spaghetti bolognese sauce, so that'll last about 6 main meals - and I made beef stroganoff in the crockpot yesterday (I only had half the meat required but I still made the full recipe), so that'll go into the freezer for another 3-4 meals (I just have to add a bit of sour cream after it's been reheated). There are still 3 chicken breasts in filo pastry left ... so that's pretty much covered two weeks of meals ... I'm just not sure what else is in the freezer.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a more positive post for a change - thanks again for all your lovely comments and support, and thanks for hanging in there while I'm going through my less than positive phase :D {{hugs}}

Now I'm off to start kitting up one of my projects ... the four at the top of my list for starting are (in order of preference):

• Coffee Menu - Little House Needleworks (I have everything, just have to choose which fabric to use)
• Sapphire Star - canvaswork by Laura J Perin (I still have one thread on backorder from Dragonfly Dreams, but otherwise ready to go)
• Fire sampler - The Victoria Sampler (pretty sure I have everything)
• Angel of Love - L&L (have everything, I think, except I only have one packet of each of the beads, and from memory there are about 3 colours that need more than one packet ... if I get time to start this one I'll just stitch as far as I can until I run out ... by the time I get to that stage I should be well and truly over my 'poverty line days' and should be able to pick the last few beads up from Spotlight or somewhere)