So last night I check my schedule before heading to sleep. I notice a meeting at 16:45 UTC, which is considerably earlier that I have been in the habit of getting to work lately… although really, a 17:00 UTC start time would be a good start time for me, and I should aim at that, but really I am at 18:00 UTC and often am a little later than that… in any case though, this was way early for me. But I made a note of it and even though it was already after 10 UTC by the time I was heading to bed, I set my alarm appropriately.
Of course, in the morning having had only five or so hours of sleep, I hit snooze one or two times too many… and I’d forgotten I had to let the dog out in the morning… but I still got to the car running less than five minutes behind pace to get there on time. If I made up a little time on the road, I’d be late, but only a couple of minutes late…
But then I realized that it had gotten cold over night, and the windscreen and all the windows had a nice layer of ice on it, and although by that point I’d already driven 20 or 30 feet down the road, I really couldn’t see a damn thing, and needed to stop and make sure I could see before driving further. Which cost another five minutes. Once I got started I still wasn’t making up time. I was going to get to our parking lot 7 minutes late, and then adding in the 3 minutes or so to get to the meeting room, I’d be 10 minutes late. And this was for a 15 minute meeting. Oops.
So as the moment passed when the meeting was supposed to start I call my boss’s boss, who was also supposed to be at the meeting, and whose cell number I happened to have on my phone. He was having breakfast. He was not at the meeting. He had basically told them they were crazy, and talk to him later in the day. Or something like that. He wasn’t sure if they had actually moved the meeting, but he had something later on HIS calendar.
Anyway, I get to work, run to the meeting, and sure enough there is an empty conference room with the lights out. A few minutes later I get back to my desk, get synced with the calendar, and sure enough, about two hours after the last time I had my laptop connected to the work network (and thus syncing my calendar) the meeting had been moved from 16:45 UTC to 20:00 UTC.
Oh well, I now have some extra time to catch up on things. Of course, I lost some of it by making this post, and will lose a few more minutes by going and grabbing some breakfast, but hey, this is an hour I wouldn’t usually be here anyway.
Lesson learned: If you check your calendar late at night and notice an early morning meeting, before going to sleep, connect to the network even if you weren’t going to anyway to get an updated calendar and make sure it has not been rescheduled. Worst case, it hasn’t been. Best case, you get to sleep more.
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