If a cow ever got the chance...

I am an associate editor who is scared to answer her phone, for all the usual reasons but mainly, today, because of this project that I dealt with for a month by pretending it didn't exist. Now the acquisitions editor and the author are up my ass. It's a 600-page college financial textbook that we are "adapting" for the professional market; the authors have "adapted" and updated it by paper-clipping random inserts and tables they found in the newspaper to the old edition's page proofs (without indicating where they should go or how they should be tied in). There are also incomprehensible web printouts at the end of most chapters. Soon I must query them about this, and about Chapter "7", which appears to be taken from an entirely different book. Also, we don't have the Quark files. Also, the acquisitions editor (not the politest man) responds to perfectly reasonable questions like "Will there be a new preface? If not, are we to use the old front matter verbatim?" with the following two-letter e-mail: "No." Also, I don't understand a word of the manuscript (which contains sentences like "Although the overall market P/E ratio is the collective average of individual P/Es, those factors that influence the market P/E do not necessarily affect P/E ratios of individual companies consistently from one industry to another.").

Hyperventilating and in serious need of Scotch. Considering moving back home and becoming a substitute rural mail carrier, which is what my dad keeps telling me to do. He makes $18 an hour and gets to drive around all day in his dorky right-hand-drive Subaru station wagon, waving at the neighbors and bringing them interesting packages. I would have a dog! And a garden! I would have to drive fifty miles to buy ginger root! I'd probably never get laid ever again!

There is a bar in the basement of the building next door (it's where my company held the Xmas party) and I am seriously considering going over there for "lunch". Better that than sitting up here bored and incompetent and wringing my hands, which has been the activity of choice for about two hours now.

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