And You Think YOU'RE the Loser...

I once had a pain-in-the-ass female boss who made me draw up a breast milk delivery schedule. It was a complex business, full of color coding, a complicated rota system of players to track, receive and deliver the milk to her home in Connecticut and a relationship so close, with a poor FedEx rep in Memphis, that we were almost obligated to celebrate her birthdays.

Boss lady, you see, had a baby via a surrogate, in the lovely state of California and after the baby's birth, she had the surrogate pack her breast milk in bags daily, freeze it, cram it into a FedEx container with a wad of dry ice and ship the stuff to our office in New York.

Every. Freaking. Day.

The schedule documented how much milk was being sent (bags and ounces and probably viscosity and maybe hue and definitely what vitamins it consisted of and its boiling and freezing temperatures and probably its chemical make-up), in what sort of container and how much the surrogate projected would be sent the day after. There was, very briefly, a column at the end of the spreadsheet (complete with relevant formulae) which projected how many days of this batshit insane nonsense it would take before I emptied my 401K, bought a Glock and shot myself in the head.

Naturally, this whole shipping milk thing was a recipe for disaster since packages on occasion have the habit of not showing up where and when they are supposed to, or in the condition you expect them to. On these occasions, normally weekends, they show up two days late, at your apartment, after two whole days of having no life because you've been on the phone tracking them down (you try telling FedEx you're searching for some AWOL breast milk and see how far you get), totally thawed-out and leaking all over your kitchen floor where your cats try to eat them.

I don't care what you do for a living, documenting and tracking breast milk should never be part of your job description.