Our office had an electric kettle. I used it to make myself a hot cuppa tea every morning. It was perfect for making tea because I could set it so it would shut off when the water reached 190 degrees, which is too hot to drink but if I set the cup aside for five minutes, it was just the right temperature.
Not too long ago the kettle sprung a slow leak that got a little worse with each passing day, and last week somebody finally threw it out. Without the kettle, my choices were either do without my morning cuppa (barbarous!), use the coffee maker to boil water (and end up with a tea-coffee hybrid), or fill a cup with water from the tap and boil it in the microwave (not what I’d like, but better than the other two options).
I boiled the water in the microwave & took it back to my desk, where I added the tea and set it aside to cool. Then things got a little hectic.
First thing I have to do each morning is prepare a list of names and addresses in a spread sheet that one of my coworkers will use to print up a batch of letters our office sends out every day. The list is usually just four or five names; ten would be a lot. On this particular day, there were twenty-two people on the list. Not the most we’ve ever done, but it’s unusual. I looked at the office calendar to find out who was scheduled to print the letters so I could give them a heads-up, and what do you know: I had the duty that day.
Yay, me. To celebrate my great good fortune, I picked up my cuppa, which had been sitting about five minutes, and slurped up some tea. That’s when I was reacquainted with whichever physical law it is that says a cup of water at 212 degrees takes longer to cool down to a temperature that won’t burn my mouth than a cup of water at 190 degrees.
After a bit of huffing and puffing, I cleared the decks and got ready to print up the letters. It’s a little more complicated that just printing them; we have to copy & paste unique images into each letter, we have to track who sent each letter and when on a spread sheet, we have to add notations to several reports so management will know we sent the letters that day, and a second coworker has to check each and every one of those steps to make sure we don’t miss any of them. When there are just five or six names on the list, this can take more than an hour. When there are twenty-two names, it takes all morning.
I was in the middle of copying & pasting the images when my boss asked me for some information that she needed right away. Well of course she did. When does the boss ever say, “I need this information but I don’t need it right now; take your time and get it to me whenever you feel like it.” I’m pretty sure that’s never happened to anybody.
After I gathered the information, I asked my lead worker to review it with me so I could be sure I gathered the right information before reporting it. As I was explaining what the boss wanted, I poked the computer monitor with my finger. It went blank. Then it displayed the message “power saving mode” and shut itself off. I turned it back on, but it shut itself off again. I shut off the computer, disconnected the video cable, reconnected it and powered up the computer again. Still no joy.
At this point, I had less than an hour to get my computer monitor fixed, report the information the boss asked for, then finish the letters, before I had to be at an appointment across town. To top it all off, somebody pointed out that I was scheduled to do the letters again this coming Wednesday, when I would not be in the office to print them, so I would have to ask one of my coworkers if they would cover for me. I think they call this a perfect storm?
I’m happy to say this story has a happy ending. My computer is a laptop, so I disconnected the monitor and worked on the laptop screen. My lead worker found the information my boss needed, and I got the letters done just as the clock was ticking down to the last few minutes before I had to leave to make my appointment. Crisis overcome, victory is mine, I need a drink.
This Is Drivel 