Today is the last Monday I will be spending up in Fort McMurray and under the employ of this company, and I have been both dreading and eager for this week to get here. My eagerness is obvious - I really don't like this job and haven't for a few years now. I'm really anticipating Thursday, around 4.30PM.

What I've been afraid of, and what apparently has been a founded fear, is that everyone is doing their darnedest to dump all the work they can onto me during this last week - it's their last chance to get the Do-Anything Guy to do their work for them. This, on top of cleaning up my own stuff. Thanks for the wonderful sendoff, guys!

One of the more annoying issues is from a particular customer of mine who has a common enough problem amongst people - he expects me to be telepathic. Now, I can be highly intuitive about what people need, but sometimes I'm completely dense. I'm also cautious, and don't want to assume things about people that I am unsure on. Hundreds of thousands of dollars cross my desk; I can't afford to make mistakes or assumptions.

Apparently, though, many of my customers don't seem to appreciate this fact. They've got an annoying tendency to assume that, when they've asked to get a price from me on something, that I've gone ahead and ordered it for them. Even if they're expensive, explosion-proof, custom-built light fixtures that cost several thousand dollars each. He called this morning to see "whether they were on schedule," even though he hadn't ever actually placed the order for'em. Highly frustrating.

I suppose this gets into the bigger questions of communication, and how hard it is to monitor our output streams. We too easily run on assumed "common knowledge" whereas the information was never actually relayed. While I'm no communication major, I'm of the opinion that this sort of misfiring is a large factor in workplace inefficiency - and interpersonal troubles.

I'd ask how it could be fixed, but I don't care quite as much about it at the moment. I just want to get out!