Spaced Out

I went to work with some kind of cold/allergy thing today. You know, the kind of thing where you get a little plugged up and cough a little bit but you're mainly uncomfortable, run down and spacey? I thought I could get through the day pretty easily since I didn't have any meetings, just some notes to write and agendas to figure out. Besides, it's the beginning of my third week, I can't call in sick.

I wasn't there more than an hour before two meetings popped onto my calendar. I still get emails that say "Hey, I don't think we ever sent you the notice for the regular meeting of the *** group that you need to go to." I wound up with three meetings beginning at 11.

NOTE: I'm happy to say I'm double booked twice every week now--I'm really part of the team. On the other hand, I have at least two lunch time meetings, one biweekly.

I figured at this point I should take a cold pill so I wouldn't start sneezing at the meetings. I know the pill will make me more Spacey which might be worse than being Sneezy but I figured I'd take the chance.

The first meeting was supposed to be a "showdown" meeting with a manager who doesn't cooperate with "our process." Of course the manager didn't show up (which showed again how much he respects our process) and we just talked with the people in his group who said THEY wanted to cooperate.

The next meeting was one of the dozen or so regular meetings I go to with other "lead" people--lead people who are working on the same kind of testing, on the same kind of projects, that have the same job title, etc. I can still play the "new person" in these meetings because while I usually understand what people are talking about, I don't usually have enough context to understand why the topic is important or how to look at the problem/issue/action item in a different way. An hour long spaceout. Mmmmmmm.

Then I met with a very nice developer to ask questions about some project information I missed in a group meeting. This guy is very good at explaining things so I thought even in my attention-deprived state I would understand him. It's vital to my work on the project that I understand what's going on.

In fact we got through all my questions pretty easily and after thirty minutes I thought I had the information I needed. I was ready to go space out in my cublicle for the rest of the day when I HAD to say one more thing. Some automatic speech generator in my head output the following. "This should be pretty easy."

His face fell. "No, this is going to be very hard. Just because we can figure out the...."and so on and so on. I blurbed out short explanations of what I really meant, which was that it was going to be easy to frame the questions (or something like that) but I was sure he thought I had misunderstood what he had told me.

I slunk over to Stairway K and went down to my cube. I tried to fix the meeting notes using the information the developer had given me but it's tricky stuff to summarize so I decided to take some time to think about it. I'm sure it will all make more sense tomorrow.