No, you're not about to read some sort of extensive technical discussion of how time works. Nor are you about to read an explanation of why causality works, nor any of the other things that might interest you if you're a scientific weenie (no offense to scientific weenies, intended; after all, sometimes I'm one too).
You may or may not have heard the saying, "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once; Space is what keeps it from happening in the same place." Interestingly enough, though, there's nothing in there that says that Time keeps everything from trying to happen at once. I'm starting to be convinced that most important events or circumstances really want to happen all at the same time and will certainly try to compress the intervals between themselves down to the smallest possible.
Two simple (and, unfortunately, timely) examples are from yesterday and today. Today's crises first, though. All I can say is that it was a good thing that I was running late this morning because Anna and I wound up getting into our cars at the same time. This is a good thing because her car didn't start. You know that sound that a car makes when the battery just isn't up to getting the engine to turn over? Yup - that's the sound that her car is making.
Lovely... The jumper cables are still at my mother's house and I don't really want to call AAA to have them come and get her car started. So, I give her a ride to work. On the way, we decide that I'll pick up the jumper cables this afternoon, pick her back up from work and we'll get the car started and tool around this evening to recharge the battery. That sounds like a plan.
Except that I forgot that the perversity of the universe tries to ensure that the maximal amount of bad stuff happens at once. So, when I talk to my Mom to arrange to pick up the cables, I find out that she's not feeling well and would really appreciate if I could do some minor lifting-and-hauling for her. No problem. Oh, and she's sort of running low on food since she hasn't been feeling well, so could I run by the supermarket as well and get some groceries. Still no problem.
But then I start doing the mental math to figure out the timing and realize that, while no problem, it's going to get a little bit tricky to get everything to happen. So, I call Anna and make sure she's in the loop on what's happening and tell my boss that I need to leave a little early (and explain why). All this for a simple dead battery... Sigh...
Which brings me back to yesterday. As you may know (or may not, I don't remember if I've said this explicitly before), Anna and I bought a new construction townhouse a little over a year ago. "New construction", as in "brand new"; as in, the place didn't exist before we bought it and moved in. So, we've had our share of things that have needed to be fixed.
The good news is that, for the most part, the builder has agreed that things needed to be fixed and tried to get people in to fix them. The operative word there, of course, being tried. I've done project management for large-scale projects, with multiple groups having multiple interdependencies and schedule juggling when someone slips a date. I know that it's not only possible, but it's really not that hard to keep things straight when you're dealing with a simple schedule.
So why can't this particular builder ever (and I do mean ever) get things to happen when they say they will? Weeks ago, we'd scheduled that they'd come by and spend the entire day fixing a draft in our guest room. Since the first step in fixing it was going to be cutting a whole in the ceiling of our garage, they wanted to do it all in one day so we weren't stuck with an even bigger draft. They promised that they'd be by at 8:00 AM to get started.
Anna's on semi-vacation this week, so she'd be able to be available some of the time. [The "semi-" nature refers to the fact that she's still trying to get some clean-up stuff done at the office, but the doctor isn't there, so they're not seeing patients.] Somehow, the builder misinterpreted Anna telling them that she could make herself available and thought that she was perfectly willing to wait at home for them to just come by and do stuff.
So, they never showed up until after lunch and, even then, just cut the hole and said, "Oh, it looks like someone else will have to look at this." and walked away. After a few rounds of phone calls, they were able to reschedule someone to come back tomorrow (today's tomorrow, not yesterday's tomorrow) to do the next steps. On top of which, we still have a bunch of other things that need to be repaired which aren't going to be scheduled for this week.
Really, people, it's not that freaking hard to say "Our people will be by at 8:00 AM.", write that into a calendar and then make sure that someone shows up at 8:00 AM. And then, since you should expect that you'll need to do everything to fix it, you also write it into the calendars of everyone else who'll need to be involved and tell them to show up too. Maybe not at 8:00 AM - maybe that's just for the guy who's going to cut the hole, but definintely for the same bloody day!
Yarf... Builders - can't have homes without them; can't shoot them when they mis-schedule things...
Ok, so I'm not sure that there's really all that much that's trying to happen simultaneously, but, let me tell you, when you're in the thick of things and trying to keep two calls juggled and figure out when everyone can schedule things, it sure feels that way.
Author: ben@tmk.com