What Do You Do All Day?
(or "Stop Me Before I Volunteer Again")

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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

 
I Love Efficient Meetings

My second-favorite kind of meeting, after cancelled meetings (see below), is an efficient meeting. I had a meeting with folks at the neighborhood school this morning, to discuss possible uses for an unexpected $77,000 they're receiving for facilities improvements. To my delight, three out of four people showed up on time, the fourth sent a message saying she'd be a bit late and it was fine to start without her, and we discussed exactly what was supposed to be discussed and quickly figured out what our next steps should be. The meeting was scheduled for 7:40 a.m. and I was home by 8:30. If they all went that well, life would be grand. Now we'll see how the rest of the day goes.

How It Went

- Got Alex off to school and made it to my 7:40 a.m. meeting at the neighborhood school on time
- Home from wonderfully efficient morning meeting by 8:30 a.m.
- Spent a couple of hours catching up on Facebook and e-mail (first time I've had any real "desk time" since Friday, so there was a lot to catch up on, both business and personal)
- My printer stopped and refused to print - in any color, even black and white - without a new yellow toner cartridge, so I took some time out to return library books due today and then went to two stores looking for toner, which was out of stock at both places.
- Came home and ordered toner online; should be delivered tomorrow.
- Got a call from the PTA president at the neighborhood school, asking if I could help with the weekly after-school snack sale fundraiser today (which wasn't in my plans); said I'd be there at 1:30.
- Got increasingly suspicious about my printer's toner use (no matter what I print, all the color cartridges seem to run out at the same time, and don't print nearly as many copies as they're supposed to), so I did some Googling and found many reports that all the cartridges in this line of Brother printers are set to "run out" after a set number of copies, no matter what colors have been printed. I also learned that you can "reset" the page counter fairly easily, so you can keep using the still-quite-full cartridges until they're actually empty. It worked like a charm. (Good thing I never got around to recycling all my old "empty" cartridges - I may not have to buy toner again for a year!)
- PTA decided to postpone the snack sale event, so I used the time instead to fire off an angry message about the printer toner issue to Consumer Reports, and to post it on Facebook. Brother deserves all the negative publicity it can get.
- Answered some billing inquiries for the neighborhood council (the city's paperwork for budget and payment-related tasks is truly nasty - they make every little step as difficult as possible).
- Completely lost my focus by about 3 p.m.; had a snack and helped Alex for a few minutes with a school project
- Played with Dreamweaver's site-map tool for the church website project (it's lousy; need to find something else or do it by hand)
- Answered some more e-mail
- Puttered on a flyer I need to do by tomorrow for the neighborhood school, but had a hard time finding a good free piece of clip art and didn't finish
- Knocked off at 6 p.m. for dinner
- After dinner, started setting up the blog I'm creating for Alex as a (we hope) fun tool for practicing his writing




posted by Elizabeth 9:19 AM

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