Feelin' Hot, Hot, HOT!

Hot! Hot! HOT!

Today there was a serious problem with temperature control in my office at work. The thermometer that I borrowed from a coworker in the next office climbed to 84 degrees Fahrenheit, before I bailed. (Around 11:00 a.m.) Her office was only a balmy 78 degrees.

Before leaving the workspace, I forwarded my office line to another worksite outside of my office, submitted a work order for maintenance to address the issue and made a sign directing patrons where to find me. (I decided to try to overlook the fact that on March 20th, I had submitted a work order for the same reason….. yeah.)

Anyway…….

Once comfortably settled in a significantly cooler and much more comfortable workspace, I set about accessing my work Outlook email remotely. First order of business was to contact the one appointment that I had scheduled for assessments and consultation. As I pulled up the calendar feature to access the details of the appointment, I realized that I never have just ONE scheduled appointment in an afternoon. Very fortuitous indeed! I would only have to inconvenience one patron. Turns out I could not reach him. But when he showed up at two o’clock and was informed of the situation he said, “Oh, good… I really need to take care of some business but didn’t want to cancel on short notice.” Wow. Cool!

As I settled in, I realized that being outside of my office; I would be limited in productive activities to stay busy. I was at work, after all…

So, I decided to tackle my overgrown inbox in Outlook. The last month has been very hectic with scheduled meetings, college wide events, committees and a huge load of support assessments for various instructors and professors on the campus. So, each day I “put out fires” in the inbox and left the remainder for when I had the time. Well guess what? Today was the day! I was so pleased to get my mailbox back under the size limit restriction from the IT administrator! My inbox alone had over 114 messages, and then the sent file and deleted items needed to be cleaned up. I read, responded and deleted as if on a mission.

That huge task done, I turned my attention to the 86 online documents that I needed to read, evaluate and rank. I am happy to say that I made a huge dent in those, too.

So, in reality what happened today was not really an inconvenience. I had the opportunity to focus my attention on two tasks needing my attention since I had no distractions of administering assessments, consulting with patrons and guiding exploration.

It was a greatly productive day.

But I still hope that they fix the air conditioning before tomorrow.