Today's fortune: March 2, 2011

Today's fortune: When the flowers bloom, so will great joy in your life.

And man, could I ever use it.

Today was rough. I mean, sandpaper-to-the-face rough. I-needed-a-beer-the-second-I-got-home rough. I-nearly-didn't-make-it-home-for-want-of-stopping-at-a-bar-on-the-way rough.

I didn't receive an overwhelming amount of new widgets today, but the ones I did work on were doozies.

Let me explain something about the job of a widget maker. Even though I am assigned anywhere between five and nine widgets every day on this production level, that doesn't mean I finish all of those widgets every day. In fact, most of them take several days to finish as we await widget parts to come in from the field. Some widgets do get finished in one day, but those are rare. On the other end of the spectrum, I have a few widgets I received in early February that I haven't finished yet.

So while I may have only received five or six new widgets today, in reality I'm in different stages of completion with nearly forty widgets.

The ones I spent the most time on today were extremely complicated, and they kicked my butt. I am wiped out after this day of work. And I may have hit the proverbial "wall" I hear people talking about around the office.

I was thinking about today's fortune, though, and its meaning. "When the flowers bloom," it says, "so will great joy in your life."

Spring begins officially in about two and a half weeks. Maybe that's what this fortune is referring to. By then, I'll have been bumped up to the next widget production level, and I'll be one step closer to full production.

Perhaps I'm going to find my groove by the first day of Spring. That would certainly bring me great joy.

'Cause I sure as hell didn't see any flowers blooming today.

That being said, there was one bright spot in my day. I finished my oldest widget, one that has been sitting in my inventory since my very first week on the widget floor back in January.

It was nice to put the last piece of the puzzle in place and close that sucker out.

So maybe the buds are beginning to bloom. It is nearly Spring, after all.