Without revealing too many personal details about my job (which I hope until now you have all been picturing as door-to-door hooker, per my uber-plan to create a fun secret identity), let's just say that it involves pitching ideas to a client and then overseeing various projects to completion.

Normally this is an enjoyable, creative occupation...right until the moment when a disconnect between us and a client rears its angry head. For example, our current client has been anywhere from a week to a month late in giving us feedback about certain things, plus they ignore us when we bombard them with emails and phone calls asking them to sign off on ideas or tell us what they are looking for out of each product.

Recently they decided that they no longer wanted to see our proposals in the idea stage; they wanted to wait until we had full-fledged outlines...and even then they might scrap the idea and make us start it over. So then we tried to point out that our writers work very hard on these outlines and spend a lot of time doing research.

Unfortunately, this led the client to conclude that we are time-wasting morons. A day later one of the big bosses over there sent us an email telling us all about a wonderful internet research tool called 'google'. Apparently on this 'google', one can perform searches using certain 'key words,' as he showed us by writing down some of the information he found using this miraculous website.

So we all deleted that email. But two days later, while vetoing another of our ideas (using lots of ALL CAPS and clearly thinking out loud as he was typing), he did another google search for new ideas, and this time he just cut 'n' pasted his search page. And, surprise, it turned out that the oh-so-helpful results he sent us had absolutely nothing to do with anything even remotely related to our project.

The final slap in the face being that he prefaced this email, "Foor for thought for your writer. Search time: 14 minutes 20 seconds."

Then he sent it to us a second time so he could change "Foor" to "Food."

My thought when going through this email being "It took you 14 minutes 20 seconds to do this?" and the mystery being how he has all this time for 'research', and yet no time to answer our queries or to communicate information to other people in his office, as quite often we get emails from them killing projects that he killed days ago. I guess they are just willing to go that extra mile to make sure that these projects are dead and gone, ground into the dirt, spat upon, and thoroughly turned away from our door forever.

I should have suspected a week ago that bad times were coming when he pitched back to us an idea that we had pitched earlier to him that he had ignored, except to subconsciously thieve it, apparently.

Maybe he just thought it sounded better once he had written it in ALL CAPS!