That was unpleasant. Well, relatively speaking, of course. I actually did get finished with my persnickety minute-typing yesterday right at 5:00 p.m., in spite of the best efforts of my supervisor, who seemed yesterday to be quite in need of someone to have to validate his managerial position. He's a wonderful guy, and a real mensch, but sometimes his brain runs away with him, like one of those old movies when you see a steam engine go out of control. So, yesterday he was in and out of my office all day--looking for things that I don't have, asking about people's whereabouts, chit-chatting--worse was when my pseudo-literate coworker and he BOTH came in my office and started a long blabfest about nothing, loudly. I did my best "I'm IGNORING you so you'll LEAVE" routine, but they kept it up for several minutes. To top it off, Boss came in around 4:56 as I was furiously spell-checking and correcting and trying to get the things copying, and had someone he wanted to put on our next meeting agenda. "Well, it's full, and then some. But I'll put it on there if you want me to." I showed him a copy of the agenda to illustrate my point.
"Well, put him on there, and when we do our review, we'll take him back off and tell him to come to the next meeting."
Huh?!
Which is pretty much what I said. He got a bit impatient with me, I think, although he hides stuff like that pretty well. "We will put him on the agenda, and when we do our staff review, we can go through the list and see who can wait, and call them, and reschedule them, and we can tell him he'll have to wait."
We can't do that. Well, we could, but it wouldn't be fair, because we take people in the order they come in. That's why we don't, and why, in the ten years I've been here, we've never done such a thing.
"But, Boss [not his real name], why not just go ahead and tell him he'll be on the next agenda after this if you already KNOW you're going to bump him to it? And we can't really go bumping people to the next agenda if they've already been assigned a slot--some of these folks have been waiting almost three weeks, and it wouldn't be fair to them."
The runaway freight train synapses seemed to slow a bit as he digested the idea that the thing he'd just told me was illogical and a pointless busywork task. "Okay, well, put him on for the 24th, then."
Done and done.
After 5:00 now, and time to go get the papers off the printer, copy them so they are on the front and back of the sheet (saves paper and postage costs) and then ran the required 67 copies, halfway through the running of which I had to take a stack to stuff into everyone's inbox (wastes paper and printing costs), then grabbed the rest and headed home.
Home, hurriedly eaten barbecue sandwich, then off to church for all of us. Make sure everone's in class, then study the intricacies of Philippians 1:27, then spend a few minutes explaining to one of our building committee members why it would be foolhardy to start meeting with our architectural firm without the benefit of a signed contract in hand, then on to home.
Where I started in on folding and stuffing the envelopes full of my meeting minutes, THEN set in to type some more on Reba's directed studies paper, AND try to come up with a better quality graphic for Revolvoblog that doesn't look so raggedy and pixellated. Wound up having to use a poster program we have, print out the result, scan it in, and save it as a .png file, whatever that is. Maybe it'll look better. We'll see later on today sometime.
AND, as for today, I still have that stupid PowerPoint presentation hanging out there in the breeze not getting finished, and I have to ONCE MORE fill out a personnel questionnaire so they can determine if they're wasting enough money on me.
But, even with all that, there should be more time today than in previous days for some fine pointless electronic bloviation!
Posted by Terry Oglesby at August 4, 2005 08:01 AM