About a month ago, my bosses approached me about taking a new job. They had a task that needed doing– a kind of project coordination, air traffic controller thing– and they thought I would be just the perfect fellow to watch the 500 green blips on the screen and make sure they didn’t hit each other.

Also, the first guy they offered it to quit after they offered it to him. I decided I’m not reading anything into that.

This new job would not replace my old job, but rather be sort of stacked on top of it for a while. For the time being, I would do my old job 50% of the time and my new job the other 50%. Previously, getting my old job done took 100% of my time, so I looked forward to what kind of magic spell would make this feat possible. From what I can tell, the spell is something along the lines of “Abracadabra, your lunch hour has disappeared!”

Nonetheless, I accepted the challenge. It seemed like the smart thing to do, given my long-term goal of taking over the world by doing things for strangers that don’t seem important at all. They put me in touch with a guy who’s done it all a million times who’s in all the same meetings as I am anyway, and he has been showing me the ropes.

At this moment, I’m on a conference call with England and Ireland about a new Irish site for our company. I’ve never worked on an international site here, so I have no idea what the process is, and the guy who’s done it a million times agreed that this would be the perfect time for such a call knowing full well that he was triple-booked and had no intention of showing up. He saw that the boat’s fuel tanks were low and said, ”Now’s the time to head into open water! I’m just going to go check on the lifeboat.” So I am leading the call with literally no idea what I’m talking about.

The good news is I accepted these responsibilities without a raise, so as I try to fake competence I’m not distracted with conflicting thoughts of how I’m going to spend all that money.