Best Husband Ever: a tale of woe with a happy ending.
I am living in a bubble. I hear about Katrina, but I haven't even turned on the television. I have been totally absorbed in me me me and this big Thing that I just wrapped yesterday at work. Today I can barely wake up, though I slept twelve hours last night. I need to give to the Red Cross. I need to store drinking water in the garage. I need to drive to Santa Cruz. I need to return my library books. But I'm having a post-panic schlump, and I can barely think.
See, there was this meeting. A big meeting (for our project, 40-50 people is a big meeting) with people from all over the state, and while I had dribs and drabs of information, I felt like I didn't really know what we were doing at this meeting, which was a Bad Thing, since I was running it. And I didn't feel like I really had a handle on the content or the timeline until maybe last Thursday, when some decisions finally got made, and we almost lost the hotel contract because our business office contact was on vacation, and I was up until the ack emma of the night before frantically doing Powerpoints and notes and handouts, and and and. I was afraid it would look rushed and scrambled and that I would lose all professional cred and really, it wasn't all me; this was the most last-minute thing I've ever been asked to organize.
But there I am, at 9 pm the night before, and Powerpoint crashes (curse you, Microsoft), and I lose an hour or two of work and I have hours of it yet to go, and the printer is out of paper and I have not yet photocopied anything or burned the CDs I need to burn and I just started crying, staring helplessly at my screen. And of course, because when I get stressed out I flail and start getting snippy with people, I'd been fairly awful to my husband all day.
This is a problem with me. I take something I'm not familiar with and I fuss with it for a bit and if it doesn't immediately make sense, I complain that it doesn't work. Or if I get stressed out I decide that it will never get done. Or if I don't know how to do it, I avoid it, even if it might not be too hard to find out how. And I get pissy with people who try to talk me down, or help me out, even though I need to be helped or talked down. Drives my husband nuts, understandably. So Tuesday night I'm crying at my Powerbook and my husband got me to tell him what was wrong (which explanation probably involved a lot of handwaving and liberal use of the word "doom") and then he ignored the fact that I'd been a walking whine factory all day and solved my problems.
He told me how to email all my documents to Kinkos, which saved me three hours of midnight copying. He gave me useful tips on how to make sure they did it right. He set up the printer, he burned my CDs, and it only took me another two hours to finish the documents I needed and get them sent off. Inspired by his problem solving, I asked my director for a bit of help on one more piece that I'd been stuck on, and when she agreed...Oh my God. It was all done. Like a miracle. And I picked up the printed documents in the morning while my director picked up the candy I'd forgotten to buy (we never run meetings without chocolate) and the hotel room/process was not a disaster (Holiday Inn Capitol Plaza in Sacramento, top marks) and the meeting went really, remarkably well.
Some days I am just a walking disaster with a really good support network. It's amazing how much that can make me look like a competent, functioning, human being. I feel very blessed for my husband's patience, knowledge, and creative problem-solving, my director's willingness to crisis-manage me during freakouts (okay, it helps that we are related, probably), and for competent, efficient people at places like the Holiday Inn and Kinkos, who know and do their jobs so that I don't have to.
See, there was this meeting. A big meeting (for our project, 40-50 people is a big meeting) with people from all over the state, and while I had dribs and drabs of information, I felt like I didn't really know what we were doing at this meeting, which was a Bad Thing, since I was running it. And I didn't feel like I really had a handle on the content or the timeline until maybe last Thursday, when some decisions finally got made, and we almost lost the hotel contract because our business office contact was on vacation, and I was up until the ack emma of the night before frantically doing Powerpoints and notes and handouts, and and and. I was afraid it would look rushed and scrambled and that I would lose all professional cred and really, it wasn't all me; this was the most last-minute thing I've ever been asked to organize.
But there I am, at 9 pm the night before, and Powerpoint crashes (curse you, Microsoft), and I lose an hour or two of work and I have hours of it yet to go, and the printer is out of paper and I have not yet photocopied anything or burned the CDs I need to burn and I just started crying, staring helplessly at my screen. And of course, because when I get stressed out I flail and start getting snippy with people, I'd been fairly awful to my husband all day.
This is a problem with me. I take something I'm not familiar with and I fuss with it for a bit and if it doesn't immediately make sense, I complain that it doesn't work. Or if I get stressed out I decide that it will never get done. Or if I don't know how to do it, I avoid it, even if it might not be too hard to find out how. And I get pissy with people who try to talk me down, or help me out, even though I need to be helped or talked down. Drives my husband nuts, understandably. So Tuesday night I'm crying at my Powerbook and my husband got me to tell him what was wrong (which explanation probably involved a lot of handwaving and liberal use of the word "doom") and then he ignored the fact that I'd been a walking whine factory all day and solved my problems.
He told me how to email all my documents to Kinkos, which saved me three hours of midnight copying. He gave me useful tips on how to make sure they did it right. He set up the printer, he burned my CDs, and it only took me another two hours to finish the documents I needed and get them sent off. Inspired by his problem solving, I asked my director for a bit of help on one more piece that I'd been stuck on, and when she agreed...Oh my God. It was all done. Like a miracle. And I picked up the printed documents in the morning while my director picked up the candy I'd forgotten to buy (we never run meetings without chocolate) and the hotel room/process was not a disaster (Holiday Inn Capitol Plaza in Sacramento, top marks) and the meeting went really, remarkably well.
Some days I am just a walking disaster with a really good support network. It's amazing how much that can make me look like a competent, functioning, human being. I feel very blessed for my husband's patience, knowledge, and creative problem-solving, my director's willingness to crisis-manage me during freakouts (okay, it helps that we are related, probably), and for competent, efficient people at places like the Holiday Inn and Kinkos, who know and do their jobs so that I don't have to.
posted by The Stute Fish at 11:43
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