Sorry, but Your Boss Outranks Your Honey

Last weekend was supposed to be perfect. My lovely girlfriend, who is now my lovely long-distance girlfriend, was going to take the train down and spend the entire weekend with me. We spent all summer living together, and it's difficult getting into a new rhythm when we're only together three days a week.

Last weekend was going to be sublime, until late Friday morning Uncle Jumbo (you know and love him as Jim Cramer) dumped a high-priority project in my lap to be finished by Monday. And this wasn't some easy assignment. No, we're talking about a five-day workload that had to be done in two-and-a-half days. My weekend was going to be miserable. I tried to call my girlfriend, but she was already on the train to New York. Not only did I have all of this work, I would also have to spend the entire weekend neglecting her, which historically hasn't worked out well for me.

What are you supposed to do when your boss drops a huge, weekend-spanning project in your lap on a Friday afternoon, and you've already made plans to do something romantic or even just social that weekend?

For anyone who's spent some time in the workforce, this seems like a fairly common, if completely miserable, occurrence. But if you're not yet working, or just getting started in the real world, this sort of thing might come as a surprise, like the kind of episode you'd expect at the beginning of a movie (Harold and Kumar comes to mind) but never in real life.

Young readers, I'm sorry to report that the opening scene of that cinematic masterpiece, where Harold's two WASPy bosses dump their work in his lap so he can complete it for them over the weekend, is remarkably true to life.

(To see Cliff's videos with Jim Cramer on this issue, please click here and here.)