Why I Will Soon Have To Get A New Job
I work every day with people all over the world. Consequently, it is often hard to set a meeting time that is useful to everyone who needs to be in a meeting.
I am quite prepared to work in the evenings, and often do, but I really, really, want to keep that narrow window of time between “Sarah gets home from day care” and “Sarah goes to bed” free of work. This is play with my kid, eat dinner with my family, read my kid a story and tuck her in time.
Since I can’t expect everyone to know that, I use our calendaring system at work to block off this time–creating a repeating appointment that shows me as busy every night from 5-8.
In theory this will tell everyone that I am not available for meetings in this time slot–a message I reinforce at every opportunity.
This is how my calendar looks tonight:
And that’s me, one notch closer to polishing up the old resume.
Ross Patterson
Phil
Ch4v3z!
Julian
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September 2nd, 2008 at 4:03 pm
What about as McCain’s next VP? You have, like, tons of international experience.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Well, there’s a couple of problems:
1) The serious, heavy-weight vetting process that the GOP would surely use in VP selection might rule me out. Snort.
2) I doubt that the job would result in more free time for the family.
3) I don’t like to be on the losing side in any contest.
4) What was that other thing again… oh… yeah… I remember: Republicans are fucking nuts.
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Ah, bah. Sorry to hear it.
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:13 pm
The worst part about it is that there is no good alternative: any meeting that needs to include several people from Boston and several people from Melbourne really only makes sense in that time slot–it’s the only thing at all close to work hours in both places. A 5PM meeting in Boston (6PM for me–in the slot) is, at least at this time of year, 7AM in Melbourne.
So how can I ask for it to be moved? Tell all the people in Boston to work later at night because it’s more convenient for me? Tell the Australians that they have to get up for a call even earlier than 6AM?
There’s no winning, and there’s no indication that the problem will go away.
So it pretty quickly comes to either “suck it up” or “find a new job”.