Selective Memory

We're all guilty of it. Selective remembering and, more importantly, selective forgetting.

"Oh, I forgot it was your" [turn, birthday, anniversary, jahrzeit].

My boss just had a major bout of it. A client wants to use our biggest meeting room, "The Board Room" from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. for three days running starting on Monday, January 15th.

I had to remind him that we're closed on Monday the 15th (MLK, Jr. B'day). I also had to remind him that we hosted them for 3 days last year and it was a monumental fiasco. They ate all our food, drank all our coffee and more importantly THEY HOGGED ALL OUR BANDWIDTH, for three whole days. When you invite 50 computer geeks to roost for 3 days, the arrive with 50 laptops and want to be immediately wired into the internet.

Well, that crippled our usually zippy system performance right down to something that resembled my first 2400 baud modem (yup, it was a Hayes).

And they really expected us to wait on them hand and foot for those three days. I spent most of my time making sure they got fed in a timely manner by our outside caterers and that the coffee kept flowing into the room.

When they finally departed, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief and my boss said, "We'll never do THAT again!" Which lasted all of a year. I got an inoccuous little e-mail from their operations person last week, inquiring if they could "do it again" in January. I immediately forward the e-mail to my boss and added, "YOU TAKE CARE OF THIS." Well, he didn't. So I got another e-mail today from her, wondering what was happening. I forwarded it to my boss, as well, and added, "I thought you were taking care of this."

Then I found out that he'd been sneaking around behind my back and checking with our in-house scheduler regarding the availability of the Board Room for those dates in January.

I immediately fired off another e-mail, reminding him of all the trouble they were last year. His response? "Well, we can do Tuesday and Wednesday?"

He's such a weasel.

But I should know. Six years ago, when we came to work together in New York City, it was with the specific promise that it "would only be for three years. Then we'll go back and open up a little office in New Jersey, close to home."

I'm still waiting.