Tomorrow is another day

Today was the toughest day so far. It started off with the Editorial Director asking me about my progress on making the amendments to the modern art text, to which I replied that I'd completed chapters 1 and 2 but that I had been asked to prioritise other tasks over it by the Director. I was then told that as unfortunately the deadline is Tuesday (tomorrow) evening, which I didn't know about, that she'd be passing this project on to a new intern. I am really kicking myself for not answering that I could manage to finish it in time. I hadn't even had a chance to look through the remaining chapters to estimate how long the amendments would take. I'd been working late 3/5 days a week and working through a couple of lunch breaks too. However the fact remains that the only editorial task I'd been given was now being taken away from me. I felt like such a failure. I want to work as an Editorial Assistant; the current role is entitled Editorial & Rights Intern but in fact 90% of my workload comes from the Director and is either sales work or sorting out the impending office move. It feels more like my old PA job, a "career" which I am desperately trying to leave behind. We had a handover meeting where I explained what I'd done and what needed to be done and then the intern set to work. She kept asking me lots of questions which is understandable but as it turns out, there wasn't actually that much left to do. With the time it took for the handover meeting and with her questions, I could've done it myself. Annoying.

So I am feeling sad because a) I lost out on doing the interesting work, b) the Editorial Director has lost faith in me/my ability, c) I made a mistake not saying that I could do it before the deadline and give it a shot. I should have just tried, rather than be honest and replying that I didn't know whether I could finish it in time. I did offer to talk to the Director and ask which of my tasks were top priority but the Editorial Director didn't give me a chance.

The rest of the day was fairly miserable and stressed because the Director kept finding new things for us all to do. My colleague even commented in exasperation that she didn't know where to start with her workload.

I arranged some more London Book Fair appointments, checked the furniture inventory list for what we were keeping or getting rid of, and I went into the production room where there are copies of each print of each book, and I had to take one of each and put the rest into storage as well as label them and do a stock check. I haven't finished this task yet, I can tell it's going to take a while.

Tomorrow is another day, as they say.