Stupid work

Work made me cry today.

It was 5:20, Friday evening, and i was still sitting at my desk. I had just called my boss and everything just overflowed. I had been paged from useful work on the floor at 4 by my boss in order to hand hold him, via telephone, from my office, over power point edits. I prepared the deck with meticulous care and sent a draft to him monday. He nitpicked minute details all week. I retook micrographs 5 times varying the lighting conditions, background and focal points. At 7AM the presentation was still as I had left it, 50 slides, uniform style, lots of images, very little text. By 10 this morning there were 23 more slides and a whole flurry of edits.
"Go take more thermal images."
"Make this timeline prettier."
"No, I meant prettier like this."
"Oh, that looks worse. Just fix it."
I didn't get to go to lunch. I sat trapped at my computer. Every time I'm paged, I make the necessary changes with a smile. Every time I start to do work on the floor, I'm called back to my office. At 3, the co-op leaves. At 3:30, my office mates leave; it is friday. At 4, my boss wants more handholding through the presentation, which he has butchered with last minute edits. It feels like he's killed my child.
"How late are you planning on staying?"
"As long as you need me to."
That was the wrong answer. I'm told to sit by my phone and wait. Read technical documentation, no doing useful work. At 5:15 I haven't heard from my boss again. I clean my desk, prepare everything for leaving and call again.
"I really need you to stick around a couple more minutes. I'll call when I need something."
And I lose it. I'm not getting paid enough to put in 60 hour weeks. I'm using my engineering education to walk my boss through making a power point presentation. I spend many hours counting light bulbs on a regular basis. I'm not getting paid enough for this. Actually, I'm not getting paid at all, someone in HR has lost both paychecks I should have received since arriving. I'm tired of working through lunch and stumbling home too exhausted to even go for a walk. I'm ready to eat things that aren't peanut butter and jelly. I just lose it. I sit at my desk, with tears rolling down my checks, grateful that my office mate left 2 hours earlier.

Some days work sucks.