And now you know...

 the Rest of the Story. 

Sorry, I had to do it. I was a kid when Paul Harvey was on the air, but he was as ubiquitous as the Kool-Aid man for a long time. 

ANYWAY...I just had to share the funny outcome of the work thing. 

My very first email of the morning was from the guy who got dragged into the Drama, telling me that this person apparently really needs what she's asking for. (Well, she's not fucking getting it, I have other deadlines. She has not explained to me why she needs it in the first place.) 

I did not respond, I did some deep breathing, and saw that my boss was back from her vacation and online. 

I messaged her: Hi, welcome back, do you have a minute for a quick call? She called me immediately. 

I started the conversation with "I'm not calling to tell you I'm quitting." (Although at going on 67, it's retiring, right?) 

She yelled, "OH THANK GOD! I was sure that was it!" And we laughed.

I then filled her in on what transpired on Friday. She agreed with me that this was not normal or okay, and added a third person to the call, who confirmed that I had not hallucinated and had provided exactly what was asked for, and even added details I'd forgotten. So it's all good.  

Skipping to the end: a Call Was Scheduled between me, the guy referenced above, the guy who got dragged in, and the source of the drama. 

God it's hard to do this without getting too descriptive, but, say somebody thought there was a thing in a museum. Your (my) job was normally to catalog things, but in this special situation, you were told not to bother doing the completely detailed catalog. So you gave the people asking what they asked for, and called it done. She was asking me to go back and catalog the entire museum. It's a big museum. The project in question was to start way too soon to make that even possible, hence the abbreviated schedule.

So I asked her if she was aware that the item(s) she needed to know about were definitely in the museum?

She paused and said she'd had a conversation with her boss, waffle waffle, corporate speak, but finally admitted that she had not even looked at the museum yet. She wanted me to do a catalog for her before she began. The guy she dragged in said a different catalog of sorts had been shared with the team, had she looked at it? She had not.

I'm very glad we were not on camera, because at this point I was mouthing many variations of the word fuck.

After a bit more back and forth, I told her that after she reviewed the museum and identified the items she cared about (AKA doing her fucking job), I'd be happy to help her obtain the information she needed about THOSE items, if they exist. I was NOT going to catalog the entire museum, but I'd be happy to help with her specific questions about specific things she cared about.

And we all thanked each other for finding a solution!  Umpty emails and meetings between parties was finally resolved when the self-important drama queen finally fucking told us what she actually needed. 

If she'd said this up front, without dragging God and Everybody into it and making it much more complicated and mysterious than it actually is, we could have worked this out in an exchange of two emails: "Hey, how can you help me with..." "Here's what we can do..." But no, she just repeatedly insisted I do something for her that the project didn't require.  There, I think I told the story vaguely but accurately.   

 God, I really must retire this year, I'm just over this.