Lost Minutes and Found Time

We had a “prep” meeting for my quarterly Advisory Board meeting. I have never had a “prep” meeting before and was mildly astonished that all of the regular staff attended—this could have been a little “Over Kill” but still I appreciated the input. The meeting is still almost three weeks away and at times the meeting was annoying from input from staff who did not know what they were talking about. The meeting took nearly 90 minutes but I was finally able to come away with an Agenda for the meeting. So I will be able to get the Meeting Announcement and The Agenda finished and posted next week.

I returned to my desk following the meeting and immediately started searching for the minutes for the last meeting, of in this case the October meeting. I was feeling a little fuzzy over where I may have stored this item and began running searches with my Word program: nothing. I ran it again and changed the spelling of the document, I did a search my date and even a search by “words inside document” again, nothing. I started getting nervous and began to feel like the bad guy (Tony Goldwyn) in Ghost where he cannot find the money he hid in Sam’s account and Goldwyn is madly searching through all the companies data banks. That’s how I felt. I was not too worried. I still have tons of time and worst-case scenario I could reconstruct the minutes if I had to. I was sure I had mailed the minutes out and if I could get my hands on one of those copies I could just scan the minutes into the system. There are other documents which I Can get my hands on and as I assembled them I came across a document we used Survey Monkey to produce and then it dawned on me. I did not do minutes of the last Board meeting because we did not have a formal board meeting. We were in the middle of hosting a number of focus groups aimed at better serving our customers and I had planned to use the information from the focus group as the minutes for last quarters meeting. This revelation greatly reduced my stress levels.

So this is the end of the first week with the new secretary, as I wrote early the office dynamics are quickly changing nothing glaring yet but I sense the “the pot is beginning to boil”. I am not sure what it is but the staff is slightly irritating. I am sure it’s the old setting boundaries thing. She definitely has a different way of doing things—which are not bad or wrong it’s just change and you know how I hate change. Part of it I have not been “told what” to do for as long as I have been in this office and not this new person is almost ordering me to do things. As I write, this truly looks silly but it is how I feel. There are some other things as well but I shall not go into those right now.

The gunge is still in the air maybe for another week but that is not stopping us. Tomorrow Dianne and I are planning on taking Mom out to Mexican. Mom has been talking about Mexican food since Christmas. It should be fun.