August

This is me, in the office.
Not on a Saturday.
Not at 7:00 a.m.
This is 4:30 on Thursday.
It's August, and everyone has cleared out for summer holidays.

Last year David and I took our summer holidays at the same time as everyone else - late July and early August. But last year we went to Morocco, where the prices stay fairly steady year round. This year we're going to the south of France, where I can pretty much guarantee that 80% of my colleagues are, as well as much of the rest of the country.

Thus, The South is maddeningly crowded and wildly expensive this time of year.

Thus, we chose to take our vacation in early September.

Thus, I am practically alone in the office.

You could argue that the peace and quiet is calming, and I can get a lot of work done, and I can come and go as I please. True. That is nice. But it's also very lonely, and rather boring.

And frustrating. For example, trying to find information from someone who isn't there. After receiving five Out of Office messages, I am inevitably transferred to an intern, who shrugs and recommends I wait until September.

And I seem to have an unusually large workload for August. The project engineers who are left behind or have come back early have also found themselves almost alone in their departments, and are taking the opportunity to do some housecleaning. This leads to updating their parts in the system, and this leads to sheepish engineers I've never met before, wandering over to my desk.

The problem is, it's usually not my job to help the engineers keep their parts up to date. But the expert on my team is in the south of France, and all of a sudden I'm dusting off the parts of my brain I had stuck on a shelf and forgotten about over a year ago. Ughhhh...this is the right hand part in a left-hand drive vehicle, it's available in two different colors, three different speaker options, and not on the Mazda version?

What happened to my lazy August at work?