The insanity doesn't stop when the Toronto office closes at 3 pm for the Civic Holiday Weekend. Toronto #2 was chasing me down by phone all day.

A couple of hours after I sent the email at 9:30 pm with the attached document she needed last night, I was able to connect via LogMeIn and get to my office email. She had sent me an email at 8:30 pm complaining that she was still in the office waiting for my email, because she had trouble connecting from home, and wanted to know where it was. Tant pis, mon amie.

I didn't reply to that email, because by then it was in her inbox. Whether she could get to it or not wasn't my problem.

I had just gotten out of one meeting regarding another crisis du jour, and went back to my office to grab a smoke and go outside for a quick break before my next meeting. The phone rang. It had a 416 area code. Never answer those unless you are prepared to deal with a rabid Canuck. I let it go to voice mail. The phone rang again just as I got back and was ready to grab my pad and pencil for the next meeting. It was 416 again. Voice mail got it. I dashed to my next meeting, which was a two hour long conference call with our Utah office.

Three times during that meeting the other line buzzed. Quality Assurance & Development #1 looked at the ID and said "That's Toronto #2. That's for you, Froggie." I got out of the meeting only to be told by my Advanced Analytics #3 that she had called him twice looking for me while I was in the meeting. She probably tried calling my Advanced Analytics #2 a time or two as well, not knowing that she was out sick today.

I hit the restroom, took another butt break, and walked back into my office as the phone was ringing. You guessed it--416. I picked up the phone and said "Hello, Toronto #2. I just got out of the meeting in QA&D #1's office. I'm just pulling up your email now." That's a minumum of eight documented phone calls looking for me within 2.5 hours.

The upshot was that Toronto #2 wanted me to approve some minor changes to our document for her client. These were truly petty changes that at most involved clarifying a sentence. No, she didn't misstate anything, and no, I'm not proprietary about my syntax.

I spent nearly 20 years of my life working for various advertising agencies in media research. In that role, I did research and wrote white papers. Sometimes I submitted them to the 4As, the ARF, ESOMAR, etc. If I got lucky, I got to present them at a conference, and score another feather in my company's figurative cap. I'm used to having them edited by others, whether it's someone circling a misplaced comma and making the swirly sign for delete, or penning in something as vague as "awkward" next to a circled sentence. Edit me, baby, if it helps clarify something vague, corrects a typo, or simply makes it "read better."

I got out of the ad agency racket a little over five years ago, but now work for one of my former software suppliers. My clients are now ad agencies and media companies. These are the same people with whom I've dealt my entire career, especially if my main contact is the head research person. That's fine in the U.S., but until a few years ago, I never really had to deal with Canadian clients.
I have one message for Toronto #2 (and Toronto #1, for that matter, aka Torpedo Tits): if you depend on me to throw you a lifesaver, don't piss me off, because I'll make sure you get an adequate amount of water up your nose before I drag you on deck.