The spousal unit here helps with finding and packing books and does the PO run, 2 blocks away, and also has local procurement duties on a regular basis.
Still not enough to keep him from attempting to micro-manage my life.
Wish we had a country house to which I or he could escape.
OTOH, he has book-knowledge far beyond my capabilities that is useful every day in our business, so I guess he is a keeper, at nearly 35 years.
The happy-happy joy-joy stuff comes from people who do nothing tangible, but have some amorphous assignment like âSeller Relationship Managersâ. These are the kind of people who come up with pizza on Friday rather than promised bonuses, and come up with almost every possible inducement to be a public school teacher EXCEPT to pay a living wage.
I ran into these folks when AT&T decided to rename itself âLucentââŚ
Tool: âŚso we want you all to fly up to DC for our big party to celebrate the name change, and stay the weekendâŚ
Me: What about those who cannot come due to the need to continue to collect data from in-progress experiments? Ya know, they call us âBell Labsâ because we have actual laboratories where people do stuff that does not stop happening on Friday at 5pmâŚ
Tool: Oh, EVERYONE must come - its mandatory.
Me: But thereâs 5,000 people here - Iâm not sure, but I bet we can only fly about 1,000 per day, as there are a limited number of airplane seats availableâŚ
Tool: I had no idea your division was so large - we will send you a party kit to celebrate locally.
Me: âParty Kitâ? Does that include some budget money for food and beverages of an alcoholic nature? I know what we spent for last yearâs Christmas bash, so I can email you the numbersâŚ
Tool: Oh NO! I meant Lucent-branded ball caps, beer-can cozies, tee-shirts, that sort of thing. We donât have any budget to feed anyone.
Me: But you had money to fly people to DCâŚ
Tool: No, we donât - that would come out of each divisionâs existing travel budgetâŚ
[Click⌠Dialtone]
It depends on whether Kate is a human or AI. 
Marilyn
Sellers: âFix your processes and quit gouging us!â
Amazon: âHow about we all think happy thoughts?â
âThe floggings will continue until morale improves.â Amazon: making the tritely overused aphorism fresh again.
âTwenty-four years of bookselling on Amazon has been better than busting rocks in the gulag â 93 percent of the time, that is.â