![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
this week in things that suck
I went to see my co-worker in the hospital last Thursday (special shout-out to Himself, who when I asked if he could put the prince to bed so I could do this visit hesitated precisely not at all before agreeing), and I was glad I did, because he was alert enough to recognize me for a few minutes; his wife said my timing was great because she was off down to the lounge to take a phone call with a hospice-experienced friend and with me there she didn't have to leave him alone. So I sat with him for a while, and I hugged her and his sister, and it was really good for me to have gone because it reminded the part of my hind-brain where all the Dad stuff was being reactivated that this particular terrible thing was—as the forebrain had, of course, known this whole time—not in fact happening to me. Put another way, it was an excruciating visit that made me feel quite a lot better. Which I guess is weird, but whatever, I certainly didn't want to wish I had done it, so I did it, and it was good that I did, because Monday morning we got the news that he was gone.
So those of us who were able went out for lunch Thursday and hoisted a couple of drinks in his honor, and our manager (whom I've known since college) is reviewing résumés, and hating it, and he started packing up the dude's desk, and hating it, but what else can you do? And meanwhile, along with picking up some of the easier layout-related tasks while we're down to one designer, I still have what is or shortly will be a full roster of editing-related tasks, including one that isn't for a grantee at all but for another division of our organization, for whom we sometimes do some work more or less as a favor, I guess, because they don't pay our contract but our bosses lend us to them on occasion? Anyway, what normally happens is they send us their manuscript and we mark it up and send it back and they sit on it for at least a year before replying to our edits and it's possible that eventually they get through the whole publication process and something they've written gets released, but no lie, we've got about a half-dozen things with their name on it that are at the bottom of everyone's priority lists right now because (like I said) we don't work for them and they never respond to us anyway.
Except right now! The author of this one thing keeps turning his drafts around in less than a calendar week and apologizing to me for his delays. I first clapped eyes on his work the week before Christmas and here it is February 3 and it's ready to go into layout, which would be lightning speed for something in our shop for the folks we do work for. He's been right on the ball and very pleasant, and every time I see his name in my inbox, I think "Dude back off we've been counting on you to be way lower contact than this and also my friend just died could you shut up"
. . . none of which is fair to him. (Wouldn't be fair even if he knew, which he doesn't, though everyone in our building who does has been really awesome about our team maybe needing a minute.) So I put his documents in the workflow and go on about my business.
Sigh.
no subject