GAAAHHH!!

How can it only be Wednesday?

This already has been a week. I can’t go into detail about my job, but the pace is escalating and the workload is more complicated and I’m sorting out more problems (oh wait, that’s not a corporate approved word – I am dealing with “challenges”).

I have someone who is supposed to be helping me. I did not ask for this person to help me, but that’s a long story. She’s determined to “help” me, but I swear to God, it’s become like cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 30 with the “help” of an earnest non-cook with ADD.

I said a year ago that she needed training I didn’t have time to provide, and was told she could just sit in on meetings and learn that way. A year later, I discovered this week that she…um…hasn’t learned anything. Again, I can’t give examples because too work specific, but, yeah. This is not working out. But by GOD, she’s determined to “help” me. Every time she “helps,” I discover another basic thing she doesn’t understand, despite sitting in on project calls for a year. A YEAR.

And so now I am in the position of having to speak to my boss (who isn’t quite her boss, it’s complicated) about how yes, I could use a hand sometimes, but these aren’t the right hands. I have to stop what I’m doing to show her how to “help” me when she asks, and every time I do I find another thing she didn’t actually understand, but pretended she did. The situation is coming to a head.

Meanwhile, Sophie. I am not sure what to do next about her either. She was really bad on Monday. She threw up basically her entire stomach contents and had bad diarrhea multiple times, but by late Monday afternoon she had rallied, ate dinner, slept well.

Last night she had middle of the night liquid diarrhea. Bless her, she did try to put most of it on the potty pads, but it was bad. It’s a measure of how I’ve become numb to this that I saw it this morning and waited until I’d had a couple of big mugs of coffee before tackling cleanup. I needed to caffeinate and meditate first.

Today she ate well, drank a lot of water, had more liquid diarrhea OUTSIDE, but I just stepped into a puddle of pee on my office carpet. That’s a depressing new thing.

My office carpet is very utilitarian, not something I really care about, it’s more of a mat than an actual carpet. It takes abuse and was quite cheap, but to my knowledge, this was the first time it was peed on. Sophie has always been really good about trying to hit the potty pad, even when her aim was off.

But she’s still eating, still rallies if I say the word “Treat.” Which makes me think her deafness and confusion is at least partly selective – some words still penetrate. I just don’t know how to judge whether she’s done with this battle, and whether I’m forcing her to go on after she has stopped caring. I’m getting the sense that she only cares 20 minutes a day at this point, and I’m the one keeping her going, and then she’s on her feet and literally springing up and down like a puppy for treats. I just don’t know. She’s mostly checked out, if I’m being coldly objective. She doesn’t seek attention or affection, she’s not jealous of the other animals anymore, she’s just…existing. I just don’t want to declare this over, even though, objectively, I am getting the feeling it probably is.