Changes

It has been a few days since the announcement came down at work about our summer furlough. Naturally the mood and morale in the office are fairly low right now. I think that everyone is starting to realize that we are getting paid less to do more work in what amounts to a shorter amount of time. It is difficult to accept, but, again, we have to look on the bright side, no matter how dim it might be, and recognize that we're all fortunate to still have jobs right now.

Right now things are a little more difficult in our department because two editors resigned. With them gone, the rest of us are picking up projects that they had to leave unfinished. In addition to this, new projects keep coming in. Within a few days, my own workload went from about 7 projects to 15. But I guess it is better to have too many projects rather than none at all, and I suppose having too much to do keeps me indispensable.

I am mostly sad this week because one of the people who left is a very good friend. We've worked together before at a previous job—my very first publishing job, in fact—and she was the one who did most of my training. I think I owe her a lot of credit for what I've done with my career over the past five years. But I'm losing more than a mentor; I'm losing an absolutely wonderful friend, one of my best friends. So it made me really sad to see her go and it was sad to say good-bye. But I'm happy to know that she is leaving us to do something more exciting, like getting married and moving to Australia. Heck, if I were in her position right now, I would quit and move out of the country too! It is nice to know that she is leaving to go on a wonderful new adventure, but I am still going to miss her.

However, in spite of losing one best friend at work, I'm lucky that the person who is going to replace her is another one of my best friends. We've also worked together before—the publishing world around here is very small!—so I'm looking forward to working with her again. We ruled the office at our previous job, so I assume that it won't take long before we rule this office. I'm looking forward to it!