A van for a heating and cooling company was parked across the street from the front door of the work building where I spend quality awake time. One of our Facilities team members was over near the vehicle, tipping me off that the van was there working on the case of the sweltering office suite. This was a promising sight after the recent days of no office A/C on our floor. I was at the office early to print a schedule needed for the morning and once off the elevator on the top floor, felt the refreshing coolness and comfort of the functioning air conditioning. It swept over me like the breezy effect used in a York Peppermint Patty commercial and it was good.
Over the past several weeks, I had been chasing down a list
of bankers for a photo session which was originally set up for our suite where
we have the necessary ceiling height and running floor space for the
photographer to set up lighting and a backdrop. After realizing that a lot of
the photo subjects either live or work in a neighboring state, a second photo date and location were set up (twice the fun!).
Because I had gotten a little too comfortable and crossed it
off the work list, fate intervened to kick me in the ovaries.
With the sultry 90-degree tropical office climate on Monday (and
to a slightly lesser degree Thursday and Friday before that), and no known timeline
for repairs, the Tuesday photos had to be moved to a different location. That took most
of Monday morning to accomplish.
After several hours, countless emails, Outlook calendar
quirks, one phone call, several Teams messages, and one massive headache, the location
was resolved and updated meeting invitations sent. Much of the delay was because
the minimum Outlook calendar meeting time is 30 minutes, but the individual
photo shoot times are 15 minutes. Setting meetings at 15-minute intervals
causes a time overlap which caused the conference room location feature to decline most of them due to meeting conflicts. This wasn’t an issue with the original
invites which didn’t require a conference room reservation.
In the end, a single meeting reservation held the room for
four hours under my name and the many individual invitations were updated
for a second time with a description of where to go in the location field and bypassing the room reservation. I may
have loudly told the Outlook Room Locator where to go a couple times. It was ok,
I was working remote due to the office heat situation.
 |
| Professional photographer making magic in the substitute location. |
Today’s photo sessions ran like a dream, which has
as much to do with the professionalism and demeanor of the photographer as
anything else.
I offer this riveting recap of the process as an explanation
(lame-ass excuse?) to anyone in my sphere (path of destruction) who may have
wondered why I’ve been extra, extra, extraordinarily grumpy and stormy for the past few weeks. It’s
not the recent hell-heat as much as the exhaustion from the chasing and herding
and juggling and scheduling. Layer in the near constant brush fires and “challenges”
(fancy word for problems) with a major vendor’s annoying and quirky system, paper shortages at the print vendors (supply chain), delays in receiving info and botched
internal timelines, and efforts to control the chaos, and we have the makings of quite possibly the most “exciting”
summer ever. No, really. It’s a ball. A real hootenanny. Yee-ha!
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