Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "Generally speaking, anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything." - Gertude Stein

Reading: Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska, Simple Living

Listening to: nothing

Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a few papers, but things are still chaotic

4 December 2002 - The Waiting Game

We've been waiting for a major document affecting our program to be released. This is essentially the top level decision on some schedules and has several million dollars of cost impact. This morning we had an email that said it was going to be out by close of business today.

A couple of hours later, another email came, suggesting it would arrive as early as 1 p.m.. So we were supposed to respond to it tonight, particularly as the weather forecast was fairly ominous. (It was, however, back to "snow" rather than the "heavy snow" it had been upgraded to yesterday.)

One o'clock came and went. There may not have been any flurries of snowflakes, but there were definitely flurries of phone calls. "A few more minutes," we heard. We drafted our response, based on our best guess as to what the decision will say. The response got coordinated with lots of people, many of whom always feel obliged to change at least one word.

By four o'clock, the rumor was that it would come at six. Fifteen minutes later, we got an email that claimed to confirm the rumor. We braced to stay late. In the meantime, we worked on other things (briefings to draft, point papers to write, a bureaucrat's lot is not a happy one).

At 6:08, one of my colleagues went to stroll the floor in search of rumors. At 6:24, the general told us to go home. It seems that decisions about millions of dollars are just like Godot.

I'm home now and just waiting for the snow, which looks less and less likely to be a major storm here. Actually, snow doesn't bother me much, but I hate sleet and ice. Fortunately, I rarely have to drive anywhere. I commute via Metro and I walk to the station. And I'm well-stocked up on basic groceries. While I did forget to buy eggs and cans of tunafish the other day, I have plenty of things to make a meal out of. Beans, barley, lentils, onions, potatoes, carrots. Damn - I'm out of garlic, too, but I could still manage. There's also lots of frozen veggies on hand, rice, pasta, cheese, flour, yeast. I could get bored, but I'd probably end up eating far healthier meals than I normally do. To counter the wholesomeness, I have plenty of cocoa on hand, too. And, actually, even if I did need to go shopping, there's a convenience store in the lobby of the building I work in, another (better-stocked) one next to the Metro station at work, and a large shopping center that's less than a ten minute walk from home. The latter has a supermarket, drugstore, banks, restaurants (some fast food and some real food, though the only one I ever really go to is the Baja Fresh because I love their veggie tacos), computer store, crafts store, book store, diving gear store - everything I could possibly need and much I couldn't ever need.

I still wish Ma Nature would take a look at the bloody calendar which points out that it isn't winter for two and a half more weeks.