September 18, 2015
Dear Everyone:
I thought we had the whole thing sewn up for our monthly
ARMA Chapter
Meetings for this year. We
had the Speakers identified, Programs all lined up, restaurant ready…
Then yesterday morning I got an email from our Hospitality
Director, who also happens to be our Treasurer.
The job of the Hospitality Director is to find a venue for the meetings.
Over the past few years, this has been easy.
There is a “coffee shop” style place that actually has a separate
“banquet room” that they let us use for no extra charge.
It’s in
Walnut Creek, close to the freeway and within walking
distance of BART. And,
because we have the calendar all set up in advance, the meetings are
always on the fourth Thursday of each month, with the notable exception
of Thanksgiving in November.
So imagine my surprise when our Hospitality Director / Treasurer
informed us that “the room” was booked for next Thursday.
She implied that the restaurant had made a mistake, “overlooking”
our standing reservation. Or
it could be that she was just the tiniest bit late in getting that
standing reservation to them.
In any case, the choice was 1) move the meeting to another date; either
Tuesday or Friday. 2) move
the meeting to another restaurant.
The problem with Option 1: I
have a Homeowners Association Board Meeting next Tuesday and cannot be
in two places at one time.
As for Friday, the Speaker will be travelling that day.
So, if we went with Friday, we would have to find a new Speaker
in less than a week.
Now, I always knew something like this would happen.
Or, getting that phone call from the Speaker on Thursday morning:
“Sorry, my child/pet/car has a problem and I can’t make it.”
Or, “I’m on the freeway, but there’s a traffic jam and I won’t
get there until the meeting is over.”
In any case, we need a Plan B.
So I have been cobbling together a couple of prospective
last-minute-substitute-presentations.
One about the Four Social Styles, also known as the
Four
Behavioral Styles, titled:
“Producing (Better) Results with Others”.
This is actually a repeat of something I did quite a few years
ago. I’ve even bought some
books on the subject, which caused the computer at
Amazon to conclude
that I was suddenly in Sales.
The second potential presentation is on
Project Management.
Think about it: I’ve
done dozens, if not hundreds, of projects over the years.
There were times when I had as many as a dozen projects sitting
on my plate all at once.
Everything from helping a single department develop their own
Retention
Schedule to managing the integration of hundreds of thousands of
hardcopy files resulting from the largest
merger in corporate history*.
Or what about that time that upper management thought it would be a
really nifty idea to replicate over 20,000 hardcopy files?
I had temporary workers in every nook and cranny that I could
find, pulling files apart, prepping for copy work, then reassembling the
original and copies, all while keeping the files available should anyone
need to check one out. And,
since the regular copy center couldn’t handle that much work, 24/7,
every independent copy office in
Northern California was working on the
overflow.
Between those two projects alone, I made enough money on overtime to buy
a fur coat and make a down payment on my first
condominium.
But the person who made the most money on that “little” project
was the copy machine repairman, who was running up and down the
West
Coast repairing all those overworked machines.
So yeah, I’m qualified to talk about Project Management.
And, yes, I got another book on Projects, further confusing the
computer at Amazon. The only
problem is, it’s all in my head at this point in time.
Lots of ideas about individual slides and all that, but nothing
put down in writing just yet.
I was thinking I’d have to drop everything to throw a real Presentation
together. But then the Board
decided to keep the original Speaker and move the meeting to
Orinda.
Big sigh of relief. And a
firm resolve to get that Presentation together (both of them actually)
before the next emergency.
Any day now.
Love, as always,
Pete
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