My boss is back in the office after a week out. Things are a little... interesting this morning. Her assistant just came and bummed a cigarette off me. I've never known her to smoke. Eek.

It's getting good presales from the chains and we're thinking that this book might be the "sleeper" of our fall list!

Suh-weet!

Hey, JenP, how're you feeling these days? What's up with your treatment?

when we are talking about hours within a business day, we say "two business days" versus "two full business days,"

Hmm. I'm not familiar with that usage.

Basically I agree that the business usage of 48 hours is crap. Say two business days. Let add the weekend and Thanksgiving or whatever into the formula.

48 hours is dumb.

Close of business as 5pm? I've never worked at a business that closed at 5. 6 is the earliest, but I know of non-retail places that duly went longer, and these days retail does too. So close of business means no specific general time to me--it's pretty much when the phones stop being answered by humans or when I can't walk through the business doors to get some of whatever they do.

Allyson! Cool!

Close of business as 5pm? I've never worked at a business that closed at 5.

Dude, you need to get better jobs. Unless your work day started later? My standard office work day has almost always been 8 to 5, with an hour for lunch. Right now I work 8:30 to 4:30, which is slacktastic.

Isn't COB standard banker's hours? But then I realize I don't know what banker's hours ARE (besides completely inconvenient,) except I interpret them as ending at 5.

Just to make things even more evil, our IT's definition of COB? 4 freaking 30. Convenient, no?

5pm is when it gets dicey for me to be able to expect a response when I call another office in the same time zone. Maybe somebody will be there, but the likelihood is decreasing rapidly.

(There is the secondary question of "when is the last pickup of UPS/Fedex/Other, and don't think I didn't use Fedex just because their last pickup was at 8pm. Now I'm required to use UPS, and the last pickup is at 4:45. Feh!)

My current office becomes a ghost town at 5pm. There are some who come in at 7, and are gone by 4. The air system shuts down suddenly at 6, and it is terrifyingly silent.

COB here is entirely about when we want to stop talking to clients. We all work at least an hour past the official COB. (Because if we let them call us until the last minute, we'd all end up working an hour later than that, and there must be limits.)

Dude, you need to get better jobs. Unless your work day started later? My standard office work day has almost always been 8 to 5

I usually didn't have to be in at 8. The cliché standard is 9 to 5, right? Never worked that either. Usually till 5:30 or 6:00 unless I was exercising some job flexibility to get to krav on time.

My local branch of Bank of America is open 9 to 6 on weekdays and 9 to 2 on Saturdays, for what that's worth.

Wachovia around here is pretty much 9-5, with a few branches having extended hours ('til 6 on Friday) and weekends (9-noon saturday.)

I usually didn't have to be in at 8.

Well, that makes up for staying later. Or it does if you're as anti-morning as I am.