The Anatomy of Delay

On November 13 I wrote that work on C2 is" going very fast now as I've caught up the groove of the book and it should be done by week's end." Well since I wrote that I haven't written a word on the book.

That was a Tuesday, leaving me plenty of room to write the remaining 8000-10000 words on the ms. before the week played out. And on Wednesday I did get up with every intention of hammering on the ms. but decided to to to post office instead. What greeted me there was a notice from our lovely IRS reporting a failure to file some Social Security paper on Todd way back in 2003. A call to the IRS yielded little of anything of value and left the phone on speak for awhile. 2003 was a few weeks ago and it took me some time to unearth boxes of filed taxes and sort through the mess in search of said forms. They were no where to be found. Todd worked for us then as Office Manager and it turned out he had electronic copies of those files as he filed electronically. The information, he suspected, was of course on his computer. But alas that was 4 years ago, before laptops were invented, and he had long since abandoned that machine. We retrieved it from the scrap heap that is the store room, got a monitor, plugs and electricity to power it all up and were greeted with a beautiful blue screen.

Nada. Data only the good Lord knows where. A job for Jason.

Suddenly it was time for dinner.

Thursday found me a little annoyed and even before I was awake I was reading several emails about contract problems. I tracked those down, sifting through the folders and files on the external drive (I"m still porting over mess from one computer to a new one)found them and moved them to my desk top, read through them and promptly forgot about them (my desktop is where they sadly remain). My annoyance had grown into an irritation and I spent some time reorganizing electronic files and deleting duplicate mess.

About that time I received an email from Gary asking some sales numbers questions. This sparked a return to the excel and an attempt to log onto a particular distributor's site to download sales figures as they don't send them via snail mail anymore. Of course my password and login were gone and as I created them some five years ago I had long since lost records to them. Back on the phone with tech support (I think I mentioned this in an earlier blog) but got no where.

Turning my attention to email I noted a few orders, went to the mail room and packed stuff for the better part of the afternoon.

I tried to work Thursday night on the module but was too tired and spent some time staring at stupid crap, stupid people do on youtube before retreating to my book on Sitting Bull and promptly falling asleep in my chair. Staggering off to bed around three . . . .

Friday found my mood foul and possessed of no desire to work. So I cleaned the mail room, print shop and office. During this latter event TLG was struck by a great tragedy. The hardest working member of our staff up and died. Right in my arms the paper shredder breathed its last and expired. I was distraught for without this machine I knew that the office would soon be lost in a mountain of loose leaf papers!

The weekend saw some house painting, installation of guard rails, a small house fire and quite a bit of demolition. The stove had to be removed and replaced. The wife bought a new one and I installed it on Monday along with a bunch of electric mess on the porch.

Before I realized what the heck had happened it was Tuesday again. C2, alone, neglected, untouched on my computer languished in a dreadful pool of its own wants.

But attention it would not get as the print shop demanded my attention and a week's worth of neglected email
glared at me from my inbox. So I spent the better part of the afternoon praddling off answers, requests, job descriptions and excuses.

I worked only a half day on Wensday, and those hours I spent at the post office and creating new templates for Quarterly reports as I've only just now converted all the old files from Quatro Pro to Excel.

I took the weekend off as we had some 20 guests at the great Autumn Feast we call Thanksgiving and many lingered beyond the fattening meal of turkey, dressing, taters and pie to visit and hang out. By Sunday the last of them meandered about and I set to preparting myself for another week's work.

But Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday were destined to be consumed with mountains of data entry. All those files I had updated and templates created were begging for some attention. I spent hours (ask Peter, I yelled at him a bit for disturbing me...though he's pretty used to it I suspect haha) plugging numbers in and compiling the data necessary to better track our sales and see what is doing what, trends, etc etc This will hopefully pay off in the long run. But all this data entry squandered my week's writing desires and left me with an intense dislike of numbers.

The one bright spot in all this number crunching was the arrival of my new swivel chair with wheels. To date I've been sitting in a regular, hard, dining room chair. My desk is about 10 feet long and it has proved very annoying these past several months to hop down the length of my desk on this chair (though I've used this desk for about 2 years, I've only recently cleaned the far end of it off, allowing me the freedom to actually use it), an act I do by grasping the underside of my chair and pushing with my feet and pulling with my hands to 'bounce' or 'hop' down the length of the desk. Well my new chair arrived Tuesday the 26th and I took a little time off to assemble it . . . an annoying act in an of itself as it was assembled with an allen wrench, one of the most annoying tools invented by man (screwdriver anyone?????).

And as if no time at all had passed, Thursday has arrived, the 28th of November. A little over two weeks since I announced victory over C2 would be complete. I've spent the day answering email, balancing check books, paying bills, taxes and the like. And most importantly

There you have it, the Anatomy of Delay. With a little luck I should be able to tackle this ms. tomorrow and with a quiet weekend planned, maybe, just maybe . . . .

Thanks for Playing.
Steve

p.s. For some reason this song captures the spirit of TLG, I'm not sure why...Tom Arnold in the movie The Stupids. Be sure to listen to the lyrics and be careful this file is set on repeat so it will play over and over and over and over!!!