What a morning! (by alaric)
Ok. My days are usually pretty stressful. I'm supposed to work from 9am to 5:30pm with an hour's lunch break, but most days, I can't; with the school run I rarely get into work before 9am, and with picking Mary up from nursery (Mon+Fri), or getting Jean to Cubs (Wed), or getting Jean to Ju Jutsu (Tue), I tend to have to leave at 5pm at the latest. So I eat at my desk and work through the "lunch hour" to fit my working day into 9:30am to 5:00pm. Except on Tuesdays, I need to leave at 4pm to get Jean to Ju Jutsu for 4:30pm, so I make up for that by also skipping lunch on Thursday, despite staying until 5:30pm then (I manage to get in for 9am on Thursdays, as I can drop off at school slightly earlier on that day, and Tuesdays too). So it all balances out and I fit my contracted hours in each week, but with zero leeway and no lunch breaks.
But that is merely the backdrop to today's story.
So, today is complicated by the fact that Jean's school play is on, and so is the end-of-year barbeque for my Cub pack. Last week, I asked a teacher when it would be, and was told it would start at 5:00pm and finish about 5:30pm, which should let us get down to the barbeque venue for 6:00pm. Phew. I'd just need to find a way to get her to the play for 5:00pm.
The school sends out a newsletter by email every Friday, so this morning I dug out the newsletter to find out how early I needed to get her there (I figured they'd need some time to get ready), only to find that it said I needed to get her there for 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start. I'd not noticed that when the newsletter came on Friday, presumably as I skimmed over that section because I already knew about it from talking to a teacher.
So after discussion with Sarah, I decided that we'd do the play then rush over to the barbeque 45 minutes or so late, which should be OK as it runs for two hours, although I still need to organise with the other leaders to see if they can manage without me.
Sarah then asked me to give her a lift into Gloucester, to take Mary to the climbing wall, so after I'd done the school run, I came back home rather than to work to pick her and Mary up (something I often do, making me even later than usual for a Wednesday, but still just about scraping it for 9:30am). On the way, she asks when I'm picking them up, so I figure I'll need to pick up at 5:00pm (leaving work slightly early) to get there for 5:30pm. "No," she says, "when are you picking us up from the climbing wall to take us home?", and it transpires that she (still suffering from concussion) had assumed that I'd deduce from the fact that she wanted a lift in to the fact that her friend who is often also there can't give her a lift home, and I need to find some time during the day to come out of work to drive her and Mary home again.
With a groan, I resign myself to trying to find a way to work several hours in the same hour sometime at work that day, and say I'll pick her up at 1:15pm. I can leave the office at 1pm, be there for 1:15pm, get her back home around 1:40pm, and probably be back in the office before 2pm.
Ok, fair enough.
As I'm pulling into the road that leads to the office at around 9:30am, Sarah then reveals that she's not confident she can manage the walk from my office to the climbing wall with her concussion, and asks me to drop her off at the climbing wall instead. So I then have to drive to the climbing wall to drop her off. As she's starting to get out of the car, one of the staff pops out and says that the toddler climbing session today has been cancelled, and they thought that somebody who works there who knows Sarah had told her on Facebook, so hadn't rung her up to tell her...
...so I then have to drive her and Mary back home again, drop them off, and return to the office, getting in sometime past 10am.
Hnnnng.
Wed 15th Jul 2015 9:49 am 
Subscribe
By John Cowan, Wed 15th Jul 2015 @ 2:14 pm
I've never seen organise used that way. Is it a Briticism, a personal usage, or a brain fart?