Unsustainable temp job

I am running on adrenaline and coffee all week at this terrible temp job, leaving me exhausted and cranky evenings and weekends. This nonsense would have been a lot easier 20 years ago. Just 2 more weeks. Good thing the paycheck will be too miserly to miss.

Coffee, then Scotch whisky

Had a cup of coffee at 6:15 p.m. so that I'd make it through a 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. meeting. Now at 10:30 p.m. I'm relaxing with a weegenerous dram of one of Scotland's finest single-malts so that I can get some reasonable number of hours of sleep tonight before heading back to the temp gig up the street tomorrow.

My time management was just fine today; it's the consciousness management that I don't think I've handled so well. Though I must say, a huge advantage of starting at 9:00 a.m. at an office that's a brisk 12-minute walk from home is that I can get quite a few chores done in the morning before I have to leave the house. Laundry ahoy!

Tell you what, the complete shitshow that is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will not be helping me get to sleep tonight (PDF).

More news than I need, less work than I need

I got nothin' on the news of the last six-plus months that other people haven't spoken about more completely, eloquently, bitingly, or dissentingly. (I'm liking Raw Story and the BBC lately; I feel actively dumber whenever I look at CNN nowadays.) Spring and summer kept me busy, just like everyone else, I'm sure. This autumn has found me temping in the legal department of a local non-profit organization.

All I'll say on that is that all happy non-profits are alike; every unhappy non-profit is unhappy in its own way.

I've worked very closely with some half-dozen non-profits over the years, whether as employee, long-term volunteer, or board member. To a one, they all had some kind of dysfunction. Even in one that didn't appear to have a dysfunction, there was a serious flaw: the strong, smart, and talented executive director, who worked well with everyone and brought in tons of cash, didn't have a realistic succession plan. So even though work was always very on-mission and more often than not successful, and even though the coffers were full and employees fairly paid, what will happen when the E.D. is no longer in place, either by plan or after a sudden, unexpected (and hopefully not tragic) departure?

To be clear and to keep my current workplace anonymous, this is not the pattern in the organization where I'm working right now. In fact, this office is far more dysfunctional, and in more serious ways. I say as non-profit governance expert.

Anyhow, the temp gig will wrap up sometime next month, leaving my dance card open for another organization that needs a Monday morning quarterback in the salt mines, to mix metaphors. Excelsior.