So, there's this guy at work, another assistant, who is annoying and lazy and stupid. When I talk about him to The Husband, I replace the first syllable of his name with "Douche". Because he's a douche.
Today the Douche had to schedule two recurring monthly meetings, for the rest of the year, for one of the managers he assists. Two of the managers I assist are attendees at these meetings, so in their inboxes I found a total of 22 invitations for each of these managers — one invitation for each meeting (11 of one, and 11 of the other). So that's a total of 44 invitations that I would have to wade through and accept, one by one.
This was rather time-consuming, but not as time-consuming as it must have been to schedule all 22 of those meetings, one by one.
I pinged him (on our internal instant messenger), "What's wrong with just one repeating meeting? You hate me that much?" He responds, "no... sadly I could not figure out how to make that happen since they happen on odd dates... there is no rhyme or reason".
Bummer, that sucks for him (and now for me).
Except then I begin to go through and accept them, and it takes me mere seconds to see that there is, in fact, both rhyme and reason — one meeting is on the first Friday of every month, and the other meeting is on the second Friday of every month. Simple. And Lotus Notes, though I despise it for its slowness, does indeed have the convenient ability to schedule recurring meetings at all sorts of intervals — this one would have been no problem. (They are all at the same time, in the same location, with the same attendees.)
The only problem was this guy's inability to see the pattern. So instead he spent what must have been quite some time creating those meetings one by one, and then having to deal with the influx of acceptances. And in the future, if that manager needs to change those meetings (and he will; we are moving to a new building soon, so the conference room will change), he will have to change them all one by one.
(A while later, he complained to me that one of the meeting attendees had emailed him, "There must have been a better way to do this." He was all righteous and indignant, and it is a bit rude, but they're right! There was a better way!)
I'm certainly no rocket scientist, as they say, but I do have the kind of basic intelligence (occasional moments of inexplicable stupidity aside) that I can't really understand how people get through life without. I mean, what is that like? I imagine life must be very frustrating. For example, always doing things in time-consuming, awkward ways because you're incapable of seeing the shortcuts right in front of you. I often wish I were smarter — good at math, maybe, or better able to understand the complicated philosophy that The Husband reads — but I suppose I should be grateful that I can do things like determine at what interval a meeting repeats.
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