It happens before every long weekend ... work will be progressing (or not progressing) as normal ... every cog and wheel churning along at its usual, pedantic pace ... then Thursday hits. Suddenly, many of your previously polite co-workers and customers have seemingly sprouted horns and a pitchfork overnight. They're calling you twelve times a day. You've got 2,465 e-mails, all flashing "urgent." People are actually snapping at you! What the ... ?!

Well, I'll tell you what's going on: Everyone wants to enter their "mini vacation" with that wonderfully weightless and accomplished feeling that will allow them to sip their chilled glasses of chardonnay with a smug sense of deservedness. Of course, this means scraping all those nasty little tasks and responsibilties off of their own plate and onto someone else'sas quickly as possible. But everyone's doing the same thing ... this one is scraping in your direction ... you're scraping in his direction ... and the emotional temperature is rising. Snap!

Of course, things are particularly hot and heavy for us self-storage folks, because many are going straight from the long weekend into the SSA tradeshow in Las Vegas, which means double duty on the plate-scraping.

Me personally? No, I won't be there. I've got a deadline looming for our November issue, the annual finance edition; so I'll be sitting here Googling things like "EBITDA" and deciding whether "subprime" should or should not have a hyphen. Yes, these are the earth-shattering decisions that rock the world of an editor. I bet you're trembling with jealousy.

The good news is I will be smugly sipping this weekend. I've had a productive and gratifying week. We've just posted our September e-book on self-storage construction to the website. I've collected and organized all the feature stories for our pending issue. I actually managed to blog twice in one week and create the weekly e-newsletter. And we hosted an extremely successful webinar on boat and RV storage, presented by Mako Steel. (Yes, they were also the sponsor, and yes, that was an obligatory plug. What are you going to do about it?) I also managed to do a bit of plate-scraping and deflect some portion of my co-workers' scraping, so let me just pat myself on the proverbial back!

Whatever segment of the storage business you work in, I hope your day goes smoothly and you can get to a happy place for the weekend ahead (mentally and physically). You know there's going to be that one person who comes to you at 4:15 today with some "small" request, favor or need (I hate those people). But take heart. If you find yourself staring at the greasy end of a fork, being slimed by the scraps of someone else's procrastination, try using one of my favorite quips: "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine."

Happy Un-Labor Days.