I'm 19 Minutes Late

First off, thanks to everyone who left comments on my last post! It's definitely good to know that I'm not always just typing into thin air and that people do sometimes actually read what I write!

This morning I was working my way through a fairly typical stressy morning with several big-ticket type things high on my list of priorities for the day and a couple of meetings to attend. I sat in both meetings trying to avoid actually physically rolling my eyes at every inane comment that I heard come out of someone's mouth, wishing that I could just escape the meeting and the huge waste of time so I could go work on the really important things I knew were waiting for me. I think I managed to avoid any actual physical eye rolling, although mentally, my eyes were practically spinning.

After the last meeting, I raced  back to my desk so I could start working on the day's big problems and what do I see on my computer screen as soon as I sit down? A "Reminder" notice, generated by our online calendar system, telling me that I was, as of that very moment, precisely 19 minutes overdue in filling out some survey that someone in a "support" department requested that I fill out. The survey was "due" at 10am, and by 10:19am, I still hadn't done it. That should be reason enough to fire me, I realize. But it does seem a little uptight for my tastes.

I know that the intention was good. Some other group that performed a service for me is just trying to gather feedback about how well they did their job. So they created this dumb little survey online that they asked me to fill out. I got the e-mail asking me to complete the survey yesterday, and I should have done it right away. But, as is practically always the case, I was struggling to get everything done that needed doing before the end of the day, and I blew off the survey.

I don't really mind the fact that someone valued my feedback. And I really don't mind that they wanted to remind me to do it. But, it caused my blood pressure to spike to get an automatically generated "notice" with such precision about just how late I was. I suppose whomever was responsible for that would prefer that I complete the survey on time and be 19 minutes late in answering my customer's questions.

It seems sometimes that we've got our priorities all screwed up around here.