weird week

I almost don't want to even go over what has been going on this week because I will have to think about it again. Most of the chaos was work related but some was family fueled. I get the normal stress this time of year but for some reason this year it is not a happy stress. I have a couple of accounts that I typically have to bail out of confusion on a regular basis. One is an office manager that micromanages every freakin detail of the office. Every time my caller ID says it is her calling I truly don't want to answer. The girls that work in her office like her has a human, she is not evil, she is just hovering constantly and refuses to let people do the work they were hired to do. She called me completely freaked out this week about a minor problem with their equipment....which I have nothing to do with.....and she was talking so fast and asking 10 questions in a row without even taking a breath. I half hoped she would suddenly gasp and quit breathing altogether. As I tried to address her panicked questions one by one, she would interrupt and ask a totally different question before I could address the first one. I finally told her to STOP. I think my mom voice booming through her earpiece caught her attention because she did stop-for a second-long enough for me to tell her to relax, that all was well. I told her I could help her (at least 8 of the 10 rambling questions she asked were similar enough to answer fairly easily) and that she was going to have a stroke if she didn't calm down. Yep..I really did tell her that...I couldn't help it. Anyway, within a reasonable amount of time I had taken care of HER problem. Later that day she called again..once again that valuable caller ID tempted me to take a quick trip to the bathroom or outside to scream but I answered and the most unbelievable thing happened....SHE THANKED ME. Wow, I didn't see that one coming. She told me that even though she rarely tells me (yeah, like never) that she appreciates all the things I do for them and that they don't go unnoticed. Wow. She then told me that if she ever hears of another office that needs my service she would gladly sing my praises. So, I guess the migraine that she induced was worth it after all. I have another client that is one of a large chain of extended care facilities. (they used to be called nursing homes but that is such a downer they changed the name to sound less like a smelly, dank, depressing place to somewhere you might want to vacation). Anyway this facility has about 200 clients (actually patients but again we are trying to sound vacationy) and a huge staff. Out of that huge staff, they have ONE person that is trained to send the work to me. One, uno and guess what????-she got very sick and had emergency surgery and is now out for 3 months. The administrator called me in a panic and this situation is a lot more difficult than the micro manager situation above. This facility has to conform to the standards of their national headquarters and they are a tad behind the times. In their efforts to control their facilities, they have set up their computers so that it is impossible for anything to be sent beyond their own network and since I am not technically an employee there (I am an ancillary service) I don't have employee access. Trust me when I tell you it is a huge clusterfuck of details but I have to figure this out because they account for about 1/4 of my income and I can't lose that account so I have spent countless hours on this problem, on the phone with the headquarters in another state, talking with their tech support etc etc......my headache is coming back just thinking about it. Then last but not least I found out that S2 got into some trouble last week. Big D and I talked it over and amazingly Big D didn't over react in a cop kinda way (which is shocking as any other time he would have screamed, yelled, etc--this time he sat with S2 and talked for 2 hours...wow) So this has been a huge stressor for me. I won't go into details here because I have already rambled enough this morning but I will probably tell you about it down the road. Lets just sum this up by saying that these events on top of a few more things that I have suppressed from my consciousness have caused me to have a horrid week. I am now inundated with work (one of my best girls is off too) and will be stuck at my computer all day and night. Tomorrow I have to take S2 on a college visit ( it is either tomorrow or next Monday-the call came during one of my chaos days this week and honest to God I can't remember which Monday it is)..shit, does anyone have any valium???