Joe Offer --

My rule of thumb is never give excuses, whether your poor performance is due to the flu or PMS, or a migrane, or a hangover, or whatever. If you're feeling too "off" to do a job up to your usual standards, you should just get through it as best and as well as you can, and keep quiet about it.

Giving an excuse only calls attention to your mistakes anyway, and primes an audience to nitpick you rather than root for you... And it makes it harder for other women to be taken seriously -- the "Oh, don't mind her, she just has PMS" syndrome.

Personally, over the years, I've noticed the following about my own symptoms of PMS:

On the physical side, I get migraines, and my asthma acts up so that I sometimes have to use my inhaler several times a day, when the rest of the month I hardly have to use it at all.

On the emotional side, I find that I'm set on a hair trigger over issues of fairness -- either for others (such as hearing about civil rights cases in the news), or for myself, (especially if I feel that I'm not being heard and respected somehow). Generally, the issues that "set me off" for those three days a month are the same ones I care about all the time... It's just that my sensitivity goes way up, and my dampers go down -- it would probably be a good time for me to try writing political protest songs (at least the rough drafts).

How's that for drifting this thread toward an on-topic discussion?

Also, emotionally, I find I get very, very sentimental: puppy food commercials and phone commercials get me laughing and crying at the same time -- most odd.