I spend an undue amount of time juggling other people's schedules. Part of this is by trade; one of my primary responsibilities is to schedule meetings of various sorts for a collection of deans.
[Side note: I would love to hear some suggestions for what to call a group of deans if you have any. A "distinction" of deans? A "dithering" of deans? You get the idea...]
As a stage manager, I set up the rehearsal schedule and the tech schedule, negotiating between actor desires and building hours and so forth. I'm also the person who holds the family calendar in my head, making sure we remember birthdays (um, try to remember...) and holidays, plan vacations far enough ahead to get good airfare, and the like. I appear to have a peculiar talent for stacking people's time blocks side-by-side and finding common spaces. It's basically a spatial-relations talent but in the fourth dimension.
Someone asked me what a truly relaxing day would look like recently and I've been giving the question quite a bit of thought. It definitely involves a day where I am not responsible for where anyone else is or for what they are supposed to be doing. But that same imaginary perfect day isn't relaxing if I know the next day I will return to reality to find things have gone to hell in a handbasket in the meantime.
There are a lot of duties in my life that I can let slide for awhile in times of stress (cleaning, ironing, writing letters, getting pictures developed, just to give a few examples). The scheduling aspect, though, does not appear to be one of them.
It would be a really cool skill, when I go on vacation, to be able to forget when the last day of vacation is. The thought of returning to work doesn't stress me specifically, but I do have problems staying in the vacation moment, so to speak.
Not that I'm anywhere near a vacation now. The lack of unscheduled time in my life for the next few months is pretty apparent. Just daydreaming about time and how it works.
4 comments:
How about a Denomination of Deans, or a Detent of Deans... Detent being "a catch, by the removal of which machinery is allowed to move" Oxford. ..I am by the way Denise's sister's mother in law, and not always as bitter about the machinations of Deans as this may sound..
Scheduling for other people makes it VERY difficult to get those time blocks out of my mind, as well. And our scheduling system runs on Sat-Fri weeks, which took a while to get used to, but now I tend to think of everything that way. It doesn't sound as strange here as it feels in practice.
Perhaps a downpour of deans, a dimension of deans, or if long-winded enough, a draft of deans.
jen B.
After the last few meetings I've attended I think a "droning of deans" might also be appropriate. I love the suggestions above. :)
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