ninanevermore

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I’m around a new group of people in a new workplace and this means one thing: keeping the whole “my body doesn’t make any insulin” thing under wraps for awhile. I usually wait 6 months, at least, before I let it slip out in casual conversation. It seems silly and the disease is not that big a deal to me, but experience has shown that I need to let people get to know and see me as a person before they hear about any disease. They need to get used to seeing me eat the same stuff they eat and do the same things they do so that when they learn about it I am "Nina, who happens to have diabetes" rather than "a diabetic whose name happens to be called Nina." At my last job, I brought it up after only a couple of months and lived to regret it.

( Oh, come on, you know you want it. Have some cheesecake! )

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about how there really is no such thing as a free lunch, and that the lunches your boss buys you are the least free of all.

One thing I like about my new job is that there is a comfortable distance between where I sit and where my manager sits. That distance is the approximate 1100 miles between his desk in Michigan and my desk in Houston. This is the most comfortable distance I have ever had between me and an immediate supervisor, and I'm not complaining. The only way the distance could be any more comfortable would be for me to telecommute. But about once a month, my boss flies into Houston to remind himself what everyone in my department looks like, to touch base with us all, to schedule even more urgent conference calls than usual, and to feed us lunch.

He feeds us a nice lunch, too, in a place that I generally wouldn't spring for on myself. I can't complain about the food, except that it wasn't actually free. A lunch break with the boss just never feels like a real break to me - it feels like work, with food on top of it. To start with, as soon as someone whips out a spreadsheet and starts talking about sales projections, lunch officially stops being lunch. A working lunch is an oxymoron. You can eat lunch, or you can work. Any food consumed while working looses all flavor and the act of chewing becomes labor that you ought to be getting paid to do.

As a result of my boss being in town for 2 days, my lunch in the nice restaurant the place where the universe ends was the only real lunch I had this week. I've been working during the rest of them on a couple of projects that got dropped in my lap. Each project was even more urgent that the other, and each took priority over the other one, depending on who I asked or who was emailing me frantically wanting to know when the project I wasn't working on at that moment would be done. Both projects are now finished (at least until someone discovers that they were both done completely wrong and throws them back at me to correct), which means that my regular work has managed to pile up in a nice 6-inch stack next to my computer. And that, boys and girls, is where I've been and what I've been up to this week.

If I weren't drunk and listening to Saber Dance the whole time, this week would have driven me nuts. The intoxication and music have softened it from maddening to merely exhausting.



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