Do you ever say to yourself...

You know, sometimes, I just can't catch a break. So, I was feeling pretty good about how my physical therapy was going. My neck was beginning to loosen up. Life was good.

Then I went to work this morning. I sat down at my desk and grabbed the phone, as I always do, to check for any voice mail messages. There were none, but there was something sitting by the phone. Now, it's not unusual for my boss or another Tech Writer to leave something on my desk for me to proof. This was not something to be proofed.

My student employee left me a letter of resignation.

Effective yesterday.

That's right folks, he up and quit. No notice.

And, this puts all the rest of us writers right in the middle of a s**t storm. You see, right now my group has a position open for a full-time writer. The plan was to transition my student into this position. A few of us thought the student was on board with this plan. The other students knew that he wasn't and didn't bother to inform us. Not that I would have were I in their position.

So now we're down a writer, have had to tell a group that we previously supported that they can take their backlog and put it where the sun doesn't shine because we have no one to do the work, have had to redistribute a massive amount of work to myself and the other full-time writer, and my boss, who no longer does tech writing, has had to pick up two manuals herself.

Had we known about this yesterday we would have had a fighting shot at hiring one of the two student applicants that came through. Now we'll have to wait. I'm not a patient person.