Hurry up and wait

I feel this is an ever present phenomenon in several aspects of my life at the moment.

The wedding plans have come to a screeching halt. After about six weeks of drowning in a sea of to-do's, I finally relinquished control to my mom. Unhindered by a 9-5 job in cube-land, within ear shot of dozens of colleagues, she managed to book all remaining vendors and thus has become my hero for the bazillionth time. The thing with planning a wedding is that you scramble to book venues and vendors nine months to a year before the event. However, once you've done that, you sit back until a couple of months prior at which point you scramble to choose whether you want white or yellow daisies, what font you should use on the invitations, and if your first dance should be a cliche, cheesy ballad or something you both actually enjoy. Hurry up, then wait. Repeat.

Things at work seem to be going the same way. Clients come to us frantic to get a brochure printed or web site built by next week or some other insane timeline. So we race around getting cost estimates from photographers, designers, printers, mail houses, etc only to wait a week and a half before getting approval to move forward. We then get the first draft of XYZ project done in record time! Hooray!! But then we can't get the clients to respond for WEEKS!! Hurry up, then wait.

Roommates

A co-worker/friend of mine owns her own home and has had a roommate renting a room for the past three and a half years. As most roommate experiences go, however, things are no longer working out. We’ve been hearing the amusing details for quite some time now and at lunch today, my friend announced that she is kicking the roommate out. Finally! So the super fun group with whom I had half-priced burgers for lunch spent the hour sharing funny roommate stories. I am sharing some of the best with you, my faithful readers:

• One guy moved in without notifying his roommates that he had two huge iguanas. Not a big deal? Yeah, except the roommate discovered this when she opened her door in the morning to find one of them in the hallway. Yup, Huge Iguana One and Huge Iguana Two were litter box trained and roamed the house. Creepy!

• One home-owner’s roommate refused to admit that there was a problem with his toilet and, apparently unable to fix it any other way, scratched up the porcelain in the bowl with a coat hanger.

• Another home-owner found that he was always low on spoons. He dismissed these thoughts, figuring his roommate was a slob and not bringing things back to the kitchen from her room. She then moved out, at which point he counted his spoons. His set of 24 was down to 6. He still doesn’t know what she did with all the spoons.

• One person had a vegetarian roommate who just assumed that various vegetarian foods including peanut butter, hummus, and tofu must belong to him and ate them, even if he hadn’t been grocery shopping in weeks and so clearly had not purchased these items. And it’s not like carnivores eat the occasional PB&J or anything.

• A crazy roommate who liked to passive aggressively test her roommates considerate-ness left leftover sushi on the kitchen counter for three days waiting to see if they would throw it away. Gross.

• A drama queen roommate had crazy screaming fights with her boyfriend ("All my friends are married and having babies. I don’t see any babies, Max! Do you see any babies?!?!”) in common living space, leaving her roomie no escape route. Helpful hint: when yelling at your boyfriend, be courteous and time it so your roommate/landlord is not at home.

Some of these stories are my own. I have countless more horror stories and just as many positive tales of late night gossip and eating cool whip straight from the tub. I am, however, happy to have been living alone for over a year and just as happy that the next roommate I have will be H2B

Chaos at work!

So yes, I've been AWOL for a couple of weeks now. Life's just been too busy. Instead of trying to catch you up on everything that's gone on for the past two weeks, here's what happened yesterday.

My office has been using Groupwise for e-mail since I started working here over a year ago, and for probably a long time before that. Until yesterday, when we migrated to Outlook. Chaos ensued.

For some of us young professionals, the migration was no big deal and to some of us it was even welcomed with open arms. Being a part of the generation that job hops, most of us have used Outlook before and are aware that it is a better program. Others in our office have been here for years and years, long enough to have either never used Outlook or to have wipe all memory of it from their minds. The day was almost a total waste. Even for people who knew what they were doing, it was still an adjustment, plus adding in time to answer questions from everyone else like "How do I get rid of the reading pane?"

Not only did we switch e-mail programs, but we updated to Office 2007. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to "Save As"

I like to think I'm pretty flexible and learn knew programs and processes pretty quickly, but even I was frustrated yesterday. I can't wait until our requisite office fuddy duddy who can't handle change will take all of this when she returns from vacay on Monday...