Earlier in the day:

Sweet mother of god, how does someone get their doctorate, become employed as a professor, begin submitting to journals and university presses and still not realize that you have to request permission to reprint copyrighted images??? And then get all dickish about it when I ask them to obtain permission? WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? I love our office manager to death but if she doesn't shut up with her horrible, loud singing, I'm going to lose it (she's in the office next to mine). Is it strange that I work at a university for deaf and hard of hearing kids and yet I'm being aurally tortured? She's at least switched from her unrelenting gospel music (it sounds like each song is just one or two phrases repeated over and over and over again to the exact same rhythm) to Christmas music. But I don't know how long I can stand listening to her sing along to "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Authors, please stop coming up with elaborate systems to indicate your changes on the proofs. I really shouldn't have to have a pdf and a Word document open at the same time to figure out what you want to change. In the other direction, don't send me a list of changes that looks like this:

p. 142, change "to" to "to be"

Really, author? I'm supposed to just magically divine which "to" gets changed to "to be" on the entire page? You can't give me a line number? Or some additional text in the sentence that you want changed? I'm getting a headache.

(And for the record, I usually send extensive instructions on how to mark up proofs, which for the most part are universally ignored.)

After attending the university president's holiday open house:

Everything's all right now. Sing away, office manager! Go ahead and be annoying, authors! It's amazing what free food, and a goodie bag that includes a turkey can do for my mood. I am easily pleased, it seems.