Fridays suck the wind right out of the clouds. Sales people always promise to sell something that operations can't produce. We have apples and pears, but they sell bananas and mangoes, then come back and tell us we have to produce tropical fruit because that's what they sold. And they have a nasty habit of sending out laundry lists of clerical tasks they want taken care of by COB at 4:59 pm every Friday. Analytics deals with mathematical modeling and numbers issues. Sales can spend their time making phone calls, sending email, reformat and convert a Word document that already exists into .pdf format just as easily as we can, rather than wringing their hands that they are powerless to do anything further without our mathematical expertise. Besides, they have far more time to do that than we do.

Sure--throw me to the lions on Good Friday, when the only people in the office of 50 are 11 Catholics and one Jew. There's something seriously wrong with this picture.

I've stopped answering my phone after noon on a Friday, and won't answer any email that comes in after 4:45. Co-workers who have an issue with this simply need to learn to contact me well before that time. With a client, it depends which one it is--I will make exceptions if it is an urgent issue we've been back and forth on, but not if it looks like someone's just clearing their desk, so to speak, on a Friday before they jet out the door for the weekend. Those can wait until Monday morning.

I'm sick to death of putting in 70 hours a week for one client who is a thorn in one sales person's side, when I have six other active projects that demand my time, in a capacity that really is part of my job description, and nobody else can do.

On a good note, however, I was able to inform one client late in the day that we had their new data uploaded to our new server and had tested it using their logon/password, and it looks good, so they should be able to access it just fine. Bingo. They could.