Today at work, our e-mail servers and everything associated with Microsoft Outlook is down. It ran off to warmer climates sometime around 8 a.m. and it’s not expected to return until at least Monday morning.
You’d think that a day without being able to get a single e-mail would be a day in heaven. No one to harass me, you’d think. Hours on end saved by not having to follow-up on this subject or that.
But the sad reality is you don’t realize how much of your work life revolves around that one little program – that without it, you’re not actually in a blissful place where you can do work without interruption. You’re actually in a weird limbo place where you think “ok, I’ll finish this up then” only to realize that the file you need is attached to the e-mail so-and-so sent last week. I think I’ve started and stopped three different projects today because they’ve all ended in the same results – “damn that file is in my inbox.”
And, I now have a post-it note stuck to my monitor reminding me of the important e-mails I’ll have to send first thing Monday morning.
But what’s almost worse than not having e-mail, is not having access to my calendar. For eight hours every day, that stupid little tool tells me where I have to go, who I have to meet and how long I have to meet them for. Without it, I have nowhere to go because nothing is reminding me to go anywhere. Again, this sounds great in theory, but when you suffer from some pretty serious baby brain these days, (as I do) you’re stuck in a void with no idea of what future days hold.
Case and point, my phone rang an hour ago with the question “how’s Friday for meeting up at my office?” My answer, “well probably as good as any…I hope.” Thankfully, the person asking also works here (just not in this office) and is suffering from the same ails I am.
Two more hours and the day is done – I’m sure I have some phone calls to make or files to work on somewhere. I just hope no one is expecting me to show up somewhere.
You’d think that a day without being able to get a single e-mail would be a day in heaven. No one to harass me, you’d think. Hours on end saved by not having to follow-up on this subject or that.
But the sad reality is you don’t realize how much of your work life revolves around that one little program – that without it, you’re not actually in a blissful place where you can do work without interruption. You’re actually in a weird limbo place where you think “ok, I’ll finish this up then” only to realize that the file you need is attached to the e-mail so-and-so sent last week. I think I’ve started and stopped three different projects today because they’ve all ended in the same results – “damn that file is in my inbox.”
And, I now have a post-it note stuck to my monitor reminding me of the important e-mails I’ll have to send first thing Monday morning.
But what’s almost worse than not having e-mail, is not having access to my calendar. For eight hours every day, that stupid little tool tells me where I have to go, who I have to meet and how long I have to meet them for. Without it, I have nowhere to go because nothing is reminding me to go anywhere. Again, this sounds great in theory, but when you suffer from some pretty serious baby brain these days, (as I do) you’re stuck in a void with no idea of what future days hold.
Case and point, my phone rang an hour ago with the question “how’s Friday for meeting up at my office?” My answer, “well probably as good as any…I hope.” Thankfully, the person asking also works here (just not in this office) and is suffering from the same ails I am.
Two more hours and the day is done – I’m sure I have some phone calls to make or files to work on somewhere. I just hope no one is expecting me to show up somewhere.
3 comments:
Too bad you didn't just get to go home! An early Friday would be nice!
Luckily, we're almost always connected with our BB's which give us our calendars, email and almost anything else! Secretly I love it!
Post-it note on your moniter? Clearly you need these - I couldn't live without them:
http://www.download.com/Post-it-Software-Notes-Lite/3000-2351_4-10060027.html?tag=lst-1
Just a thought, because this probably does not occur often, but should you consider once a week copying and pasting your agenda data to a word document that you save on your computer, thus you could always look at it if needed. However, you might show up at the meeting, but nobody else would :) :) :)
Bill
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