Thursday, November 1, 2012

Wait For It...

A lot of people don’t know that I have limited (and I mean very limited!) patience. I don’t try to hide the fact, although people in my professional life always seem to comment that I am a very patient person. What I think they confuse it with is that I’m not easily excited and I remain pretty calm in most situations. Well yesterday was a day to try my patience…

As you probably know Susperstorm Sandy made landfall a couple of days ago. And since I work for an insurance company with their catastrophe response division this means that a work assignment is pretty imminent for me. Well, I also have vacation scheduled beginning today through next Tuesday for the Dallas 3-Day Walk. (And I’ll also mention that my time off has been scheduled since last fall) Just like clockwork my manager contacts me to inquire about my upcoming time off. And to make a long story short, he was going to contact me before the end of day to let me know if I would need to cancel my vacation request and if I would be sent on an assignment within the next couple of days.
Guess what?

Yep, he never called me back before the end of my typical business day. So, I did send him a message that I will make one last ditch effort to contact him this morning to see what my status is. So now do you see why my patience has been tried? Hopefully all will work out well so that I can be here for the 3-Day (or at least one day of it!) and leave at the beginning of the week. I’ll keep you posted…
On another note…

When I started writing about patience it made me think of another work related story. Several years ago I worked in a department where the department secretary would send out status updates when there was a hardware or software problem. She would end each email with ‘Thanks for your patients!’ After seeing this same sign off about a thousand times, one day I decided to tell her about improper word choice. I explained to her that ‘patients’ are people in the hospital and ‘patience’ is what she would like for all of us to have regarding the hardware or software problem (and what I had been demonstrating every time she sent an email). All I can say is that unfortunately (and sadly) she never understood the difference.
I know, real random right?

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