Somehow I think it would not be cool to be on a conference call from the safety of my den, with our sales people and a client trying to troubleshoot a numbers issue they have that I can't replicate on my machine. "Actually folks, I'm home sick today, and oh, can you excuse me for a moment while I throw the cat off my lap and dash to the powder room to dry heave over the toilet?" I can't see that going over too well.

Fortunately, I was able to avoid getting stuck in that situation by explaining to our sales people that it's virtually impossible to do any troubleshooting from the confines of my den when I can't even replicate what the client's seeing when I'm logged into my office computer. It's just going to have to wait until tomorrow morning. But that didn't hold up our sales folks with getting them my methodology document this afternoon. I found it on my office computer's hard drive and copied it up to the network for one of them to make a couple of minor changes, save it, and convert it into Adobe .pdf format for the client.

Then the EVP of programming in Utah was all over me this afternoon with flying email. I don't think he even realized I was working my office computer and email from home. He probably assumed I was right there in the NYC office. It really is best to try to fly under his radar as much as possible. I don't have that much actual contact with the guy, but he is prone to pop up out of the blue and go on an email bender like he did this afternoon.

Working from home is convenient, and saves 3-4 hours that would otherwise be spent commuting, but has drawbacks as well. The cat can't leave me alone, and I have to keep tossing her off my lap or drag her off my computer mouse, which she likes to sit on, just so that she has my attention. Then there's the neverending back and forth from my lap across my keyboard to the file cabinet and windowsill. Back and forth ad nauseum. The little pill. It's none too easy to be trying to reply to my office email via remote connection with a bundle of fur that won't just park it in one spot and be done with it. Running Notes remotely means that the text is so tiny on my monitor at home that it's tough enough to read, let alone compose a reply and be able to tell the difference between a comma and a period.

My boss was out of the office on business, I was home throwing up, my assistant's cruising the Caribbean this entire week on a vacation he booked months ago, and the only guy left holding down the fort today's a part time employee who's already got one foot into retirement and plans to get the other foot there, too, in a few months.

Something's bound to snap, and if it turns out to be my sanity, then for all practical purposes, we don't have an analytics department anymore. My boss and to some extent, sales, are out selling our services, but there won't be any warm bodies to produce the deliverables. And my department is being relied on to singlehandedly increase the company's revenues? Not with the staff we have, we can't. And every client project that sales saddles us with takes three times the amount of time and labor that anyone anticipates. We each have our own expertise, and we've been short one body for three months now, which leads to situations in which if somebody's out of the office, there's nobody who can cover for that person. Nobody can afford to get sick or take vacation, which is why between bouts of throwing up this morning, and dry heaving a good part of the afternoon, I was working my computer as if I were there in the office. This job's sucking the life out of me.