Work Is 4 Letter Word

Today, a group of us were scheduled to attend a webinar on using social networking sites to recruit students. A co-worker who is typically in the some people are alive only because it’s illegal to kill them category had registered for it and invited the rest of us. She’d booked meeting space and reserved a laptop and LCD projector from the AV department. Several days ago, she called me to ask if I would run the equipment during the meeting because I have half a brain a technical job title. I’d agreed.

An hour before the meeting the AV technician calls and asks if he can setup the equipment in the room early because he was sick and had to leave for a doctor’s appointment. This meant that he expected me to come to the meeting room then so that the equipment wouldn’t be left unattended. (We have a lot of thefts in our school.)

I asked him if he’d called Smartie, the meeting organizer. He said that he had but that she had said it wasn’t her responsibility. What?!? I was eating lunch busy at the time so he said he could lock the room but I’d have to get security to unlock it when I went up there. Fine, whatever. I was fuming that Smartie was not at least willing to to try to deal with the situation and accomodate the AV guy, who sounded like shit.

I get to the meeting room and realize there’s no network cable to hook up the laptop to the wall jack to get an internet connection. Ummm… hello? This is supposed to be an online presentation. The need for a cable had been discussed when Smartie reserved the equipment. I figured there might be wireless but I wasn’t able to get a connection. I used my cell phone to call for a cable. As I was waiting, I looked around the meeting room – it was a regular classroom – and realized there was no speaker phone. In fact, there was no phone jack in the room.

So, the meeting had to be moved to another location on campus. I personally moved the AV equipment and had to enlist the help of two tech support guys to get a network connection and a speaker phone setup, so that we could both watch and listen to the presentation. Of course, this all had to be done in 5 minutes. In the meantime, our disorganizer ran around and redirected the attendees to the new location.

At one point, she admitted she’d never read any of the “how to join this meeting” emails or other materials the vendor had sent. I realized that Smartie actually had no idea we needed a phone… Even though she claimed she’d assumed the room would have one. I wanted to throttle her.

And we missed the first 10 minutes.