"The more I get of you the stranger it feels, yeah"--Seal

Sometimes people are stupid. I mean besides me.

What? You noticed this, too? Why didn't you warn me?

A few months back, my boss volunteered me to help strategize on a struggling project and this has meant my meeting with a core team of three others (Team Leader, Team Member, and someone we'll call Snookums) at least once a week. If I'm lucky the meetings are only once a week.*

Here's the kind of thing that happens at these meetings...

Me: What're we working on today?

Team Lead: Um, there's a fire. I guess that's different. Why don't we go around the table and check in on previous actions--

Me: Wait, did you say there was a fire?! The building is on fire?!

Team Lead: A little... I've never really dealt with a fire before. So, how about we start with last week's presentation?

Team Member: Once, I saw a fire.

Team Lead: Really?

Team Member: Yeah, we called the Fire De--

Snookums: You know what goes good with fire? S'mores. Did you ever have S'mores? Once I went camping and we--

Me: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!

As you can see, my strategic input is always constructive.

Anyhoo, right before a critical deadline we had one of these core team meetings and Snookums flaked. Total no show. This was Friday at 11:00 a.m. The rest of us sucked it up and did what needed to be done. We made the deadline and got the product delivered.**

Come Monday, we got an email from Snookums explaining that she didn't make it back to work after her hair appointment. Her appointment ran a little long and she couldn't be bothered to come all the way back to work after that for only a few hours. It just wasn't worth it.

That's what she wrote.

In e-mail.

Yeah, the kind of email I could oh-so-easily forward to her boss.

So flippin' stupid is our Snookums.

You want to blow off work, Snookums? Next time, for your own good, maybe try a little less honesty. Try, um, sick child. That's popular. Or, hm, emergency flooding at home. That's always viable. Couldn't be bothered to shlep back to work after you got your hair done?! Not feelin' it, Snookums. Not feelin' it at all.



* At least these give me something to put on my weekly status report. This week's status report: Managed to keep from getting stabby. Briefly.

** This is about as impressive as my businessspeak gets.