At the risk of sounding redundant, work’s been a rather consuming force as of late. Today I put in a full workday, and left only because I knew I’d be doing another few hours of work at home. And yet still I won’t get done everything I want to do. While I’m able to have a sense of accomplishment, I tend to dwell on that which remains unfinished, or lacking. It’s one of those things I pull out in job interviews when they ask you to “three negative traits about yourself” because I’m able to turn it around and demonstrate what a hard worker I am, although thinking about it now, I could see how it might come off as obsessive-compulsive.

It is in moments like these that I try to remind myself why I love my job, and that other people (and those “people” include “me-a-year-ago”) would kill to have this gig.

So here are five things I did today, all of which were absolutely essential to me doing my job well.

1. Had two conversations with two different colleagues (it seems important to note here that they were both female), about the phrase “Standing, face-down, ass-up” and whether it was A) physically possible to arrange oneself in this manner; B) confusing for the reader to read this phrase and therefore C) necessary to change the copy to the less-confusing “standing” and, if so, D) too far away from the intended meaning. All of this was done while trying to pretend as if I was having a conversation about staples, lint, or something similarly innocuous so as to not do anything that we were told not to do during the sexual harassment seminar a few months ago.

2. Borrowed a third colleague’s action figures in order to resolve Part A of the above quandary. (Answer: Yes, thereby requiring the resolution of Parts B, C, and D, the answers to which were yes, yes, and no, respectively.)

3. Asked a superior whether “Tell us how you do it, you know you want to” was appropriate language for an e-mail that will eventually go out to over 20,000 people, only to have her reply “Sure, that’s cute.”

4. Resized a photo, which required me to spend an inordinate amount of time staring at a 25-year-old woman dressed in nothing more than a sequined bra, sequined hot pants and fishnets. Granted, that woman was Britney Spears, but still.

5. Purchased $17 worth of non-alcoholic beer, of which six dollars worth will be consumed by my colleagues for a work-related purpose. The remaining 12 dollars worth will probably end up getting thrown out, but I’m going to try to give it away on Craigslist first just to see if that’s possible. That last part isn’t job-related, I’m just curious.

I got paid to do all five of those things.

Seriously, my job is pretty cool sometimes.