Crying at work is not professional

To sum up:

It's been cold and rainy the last couple of days, my mom is out of town and I miss her, I had the whole thing with the dog mutilation and the oversleeping and my allergies have been kicking my butt, and then this morning I totally whiffed a telephone interview, so by lunchtime I was not a happy camper.

Then a client called. This client is someone Mom has known since the dawn of time. Okay, since they both taught at The University of Akron (as did his wife, who Mom knew first). He wrote a book, and Mom and I both read through it and made suggestions and copyread and all that in July and August. When he called today, he asked me how to spell my name, and I spelled Pamela for him. Then he asked how I spelled my last name, and I shot off all eleven letters the way I usually do.

"No," he said, "That's how you spell your boss's last name."

"Yes. Same last name."

"That's odd that you have the same last name."

"No, she's my mother."

*total astonishment on his part*

*laughing apology on mine* "I thought you knew--I thought all of the University folks knew!"

Anyway, he asked if I was going to be in for the next hour or so and I said yes, and while I sort of wondered why he wanted to know how to spell my name, I figured it was maybe for a little paragraph of acknowledgement at the end of his book.

Nope. He showed up with a check made out to me for $100, and more importantly, the news that he had used 80% of the changes I had suggested.

At the end of a long few days of irritations and such, validation like that made me blink REALLY hard so I didn't cry right then and there.