7:15am. I am normally successful in my attempts to take a shower, having had a bit of experience in this department, but my 7:45 conference call was moved up 30 minutes and the e-mail message notifying me of the change was waiting patiently in my mail queue. Damn East Coasters - they think everybodys day starts at 8am ET. Thanks to a cordless phone, I take the call on the way to the shower. I mean this literally, as in about 10 steps from the shower. Were this a video conference, the question that you all have been asking for years would have been answered: Boxers or briefs? 8:30am. Work begins on our next brochure. I have open at once DRAW 7, PhotoPAINT, Word 97, and Internet Explorer, where various pieces of the brochure are in mid-assembly. Oh, I also have my mail program open, which dings to tell me about new messages... ...request to be placed on our mailing list...anonymous note to tell us that there is a typo on one of our Web pages...conference call pushed up 30 minutes, thank you very much...tennis on Thursday...question about DRAW 7s scripting tool...patch to Internet Explorer available at Microsoft site...an off-color joke from my mother. I have been dutifully following my New Years resolution to take care of small details as they come up instead of letting them pile up into an unimaginably miserable collection of tasks. Therefore, I take ten minutes out to update our mailing list, fix the typo, download the Explorer patch, and thank my mother for her contribution to the fabric of my daily life. I install the Explorer update, but as it concludes, it asks me to restart Windows. This means, of course, that all of my open files must be closed and their applications shut down. The 10-minute break becomes 20 by the time that I return all applications to their earlier positions. I get in exactly seven minutes of quality time before its time to take Erica to pre-school. |
