I'm a mad, mad, mad, mad girl.

Since I started working as a job coach six months ago, the job has changed an infinite number of times. I got the call about my application two weeks after I put it in -- when, as I left, they said "You'll hear from us tomorrow" -- but was slow to pick up hours. I had been hired to work with a girl in her home, four or five days a week. Three weeks into the job, I had shadowed with just about every possible client, but the girl I was meant to work with was still sick, and no one knew when she was likely to get better.

I was assigned, in the meantime, to a male client two days a week, whose three-days-a-week job coach did an excellent job preparing me.

"He will suck out your soul," Josh, the job coach, said to me. "He will take whatever you give and take more. If you tell him anything about yourself or your family or anything, he will use it to manipulate you. Don't give him anything."

I believed Josh. He spoke so seriously and emphatically that I couldn't do otherwise.

I worked well with this client for three months, until the day we went with my supervisor and the girl I work with now, to Pizza Hut.

We should have known things were going to go wrong. This client has social anxiety, so it was difficult for him to spend time with others; having an outing with my supervisor and another client was probably enough stress for one day. But both clients said they wanted Pizza Hut for lunch, and my supervisor said she would drive, so we piled into the car and went.

It might still have turned out alright if Pizza Hut hadn't been hosting a four-year-old's birthday party that day.

As I talked with my supervisor about work-related issues, I watched as my client grew increasingly strange -- muttering to himself, gesturing, seeming to speak in tongues -- and when it was time to leave, I tried to get us out the door quickly while he pretended to confront Pizza Hut staff, thrusting his chest forward and putting his hands out as though to say "you want a piece of me?" I was the only one watching.

On the ride back, he refused to put on his seatbelt. He had admitted to me two days before that he sometimes didn't wear it when he wanted to get attention; I told him this was completely unacceptable, that it was unsafe, and that he knew he could get attention by asking for it instead of engaging in these behaviors. He had agreed and indicated that he wouldn't pull that again.

I spoke to him on that ride back, in my supervisor's car, as sternly as I ever had -- as sternly as I ever will, in fact.

When I got him home, he was silent and restrained. I left.

After I left, he had a meltdown and was restrained -- physically, by staff at his group home.

Later, another one of the guys from the home saw me in the library and began talking about my former client.

"He was sayin all this stuff about you," the boy said. "He said he would rape you."

I got myself out of the conversation, I think able to conceal the instant, all-consuming rage I felt at hearing this.

This client had no history of violence or physical confrontation, and I had spent hundreds of hours with him over the three months I was working with him. I don't believe that his statement was anything more than an empty threat. That didn't make me less angry; it made me more angry.

I went to work with the girl I had been hired for, having been told that after having her gall bladder removed, she should no longer be getting sick every hour.

In the hour and a half that I was there, she threw up five times, announcing with an evil-looking grin each time that she was "going to puke" -- teasing, or threatening, I couldn't tell which, but following through every time. I left for the day feeling nauseous and never went back.

My supervisor assigned me to the girl I work with now right after Christmas. It's been a tough couple of months, at times, as my girl is challenging and doesn't always cooperate. But I've come to appreciate her sense of humor and ability to stand up for herself and her sporadic affability. I like her and we generally work well together.

So when my supervisor told me that due to staff losses, she'd like me to double-up this Wednesday -- that is, take two clients at once, though I'll only be paid for one -- I accepted it without complaint. My girl and the male client who will be with us get along well, and she and I were already excited about our plans for the day: a community movie at the library.

If my girl does well at work each week and spends part of Mondays looking for jobs, she is rewarded by movie Wednesdays. When there aren't community movies, we watch a movie on my laptop, which is less impressive and does not have the advantage of getting her out into the community. (It also has the disadvantage of requiring movie selection; while she would love to sit and watch Chucky movies all day, she's not allowed to -- for good reason. As an alternative, she often picks such family-friendly drivel as Zeus and Roxanne -- a movie about an unlikely friendship between a mongrel dog and a dolphin, starring Steve Gutenberg.)

We prefer community movie days and look forward to them all month.

Today, though, my supervisor calls and tells me that the second client I'll be taking tomorrow -- who I don't normally work with at all -- has a job interview in a place twenty minutes' drive from the community movie library, in the middle of the day. Which wrecks the movie plan.

It's probably stupid that I'm as angry about this wrecking of my girl's Wednesday plans as I was about being threatened with rape, but I am.

It's not my fault that the organization hasn't hired anyone to handle the amount of work they've taken on. It's not my fault that the guy's other job coach didn't tell anyone until today that this job interview existed. It's not my fault there's no one else to take him. More importantly, it's not my girl's fault, and she's the one who would be most put out by the alteration. I had carefully prepared her on Monday for the likelihood that we would be taking along the male client, knowing that the unpredictable can derail even the most wonderful plans. These clients thrive on routine and are wrecked by the unexpected.

"She's been doing well lately," I told my supervisor. "It bothers me that her plans should be changed like this. What is she supposed to do during the interview?"

My supervisor, who often refers to me as one of her best job coaches -- "like an assistant to me," she says -- seemed to sense my barely concealed hostility, and she didn't have many answers to mitigate it. She didn't know the name of the contact person, or even of the company at which the client was to interview. She didn't know what I was supposed to do with two line-of-sight clients (job coaches should always be able to see them) if one was interviewing while the other waited outside. She didn't know of any other job coaches who could take him.

By the end of the conversation, she said I should just go ahead with my original plans. She said she would have dealt with this issue earlier in the day if another client -- the one I worked with as a sub last week -- had not needed to be removed from Walmart for getting into a confrontation. She would see what she could do, she said.

I guess now I know what I can do: slightly less than this.