| Monday, February 07, 2005 |
| Not an auspicious start to the week |
How could such a beautiful day go so terribly wrong? For the out of town and overseas readers - we had an unbearable tease of spring all weekend. Today, it's so nice out that I think the groundhog was smoking something. Sunny, mild, almost warm enough to open the windows and wash the car kind of weather. You can now see more pavement and grass than snow for the first time in a month.
Today was supposed to be a nice, productive day. I had a business luncheon at a favorite restaurant scheduled with people from a company we are negotiating a new venture with - and they were paying. The negotiations have recently been strained at levels above me (i.e. lawyers), but the woman I work with most directly is engaging, bright, pleasant, my age, and we've become friends in spite of these negotiations, so despite the partisan bickering, I was looking forward to a pleasant lunch conversation.
Since the luncheon was scheduled in the same suburban area as one of our satellite clinics, I asked my assistant to try and schedule some other meetings at the clinic so I could accomplish a couple of other pressing things, and scheduled myself out of the office today to work off-site.
I also took the opportunity to call the guy who needed to measure my replacement windows to see if he could stop by first thing this morning since they don't seem to make evening or weekend house calls.
So....All ready to go, and because the window man wasn't scheduled to come until 9:00 a.m., this meant I got to sleep in an extra 2 hours past the usual 5:30 a.m. (on a Monday!!!) and have coffee at home. Of course, at 9:15 he calls and cancels. Sigh. Oh well, we reschedule and I head out.
I realize that I forgot to leave an "out of office" message on my office voice mail, and start dialing in to leave one on my cell. If your system is like ours, it has lengthy numerical menus which I've memorized over time, so that changing my message is simply 1,1,3,4,"Hi - I'm out today, call me on my cell",2,4#. So I'm doing this on the cell while I'm driving, and the system hangs up on me. What the $^%$#@? Call again, 1,1,3,4,blah, blah,2,4#. Hangs up again.
So now I call my assistant. "Don't you remember?" she says, "We changed over to a completely new voice mail system a week or so ago and they've changed all the menus". So now I actually have to LISTEN to them all to make the right choices without getting a hang up. This took slightly less time than building the Great Wall of China...
My next meeting is at 10:00 with one of our architects and one of my managers to discuss expenses and changes in a recent construction project. This was a very complicated project that involved a lot of structural support and shielding for some delicate imaging equipment and had cost me about $100K more than projected, and I intended to find out why. Well, 10:15 comes and no architect. We call, and discover that the poor girl fell and broke her leg hiking over the weekend. Decent excuse - but couldn't her office have called?
Now I'm stranded for the next hour and a half. To drive downtown and back is an hour roundtrip, so I stop in one of my cardiologist's offices and find and empty office and attempt to catch up on e-mails and phone calls with not too much success, mostly because the oddity of having me in their office causes everyone to stop by and chat (i.e. suck up).
I go to the lobby to meet my luncheon appt., and she calls to tell me there is an accident on the Beltway - so sorry, she's running late.
I get to the restaurant and long story short, it takes until 1:00 before everyone arrives, gets seated, and places an order. We talk business, have a nice lunch and everyone leaves by 2:30 p.m.
At this point, I go back to the clinic in the hopes of catching some people as planned, but it is now the busiest part of the day for patient care, and is 3:00. "We were hoping you'd be here earlier" - I tried!
At 3:30, I headed home, answered all my voice mail, e-mail, and text messages, and now it's 5:00 p.m.
I had lunch today - that's about it folks.
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posted by Broadsheet @ 5:24 PM   |
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| 3 Editorial Opinions: |
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A few of my days in New York have been like that, chasing uptown and down, knowing that even though you have an hour, you can't get there and back in time. So you're stuck.
On the other hand, there are days when I think, Man, it's five o'clock. How did I end up on the couch the whole day?
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I hafta say, a day when the only productive thing I do is eat lunch is fiiiiiine with me.
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Buy a motorcycle - speed through traffic!
$100k over budget? Jeez! Hey, uh, think you could kick some of that back to me? I give killer back rubs ...
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A few of my days in New York have been like that, chasing uptown and down, knowing that even though you have an hour, you can't get there and back in time. So you're stuck.
On the other hand, there are days when I think, Man, it's five o'clock. How did I end up on the couch the whole day?