Thirty Second's Worth of Distance Run

I was never cut out to be the secretary of anything. Last night I wrote out a set of minutes (ten days after the meeting) for an organization where I am temporary secretary. I had them all done and was spell checking when the word processing program just, click, shut down. The document recovery feature gave me the first five lines when I used it. I went to bed both grumpy and puzzled. This morning I managed to recover a temp file with most of the material in it, re-saved in several formats and watched one format go pop again. Copied to a new document and that seemed to work. I proofed and sent it off in an email to the group. Without attaching the document. Luckily the organization is getting a new, better qualified, secretary next month. So all I have to do is tidy up the files I am using and pass them on. Whimper.

Almost seventy years of working at this sort of stuff has not made me good at it. I am not the right personality type at all. Give me an emergency deadline, hand me a bunch of posters or whatever to design, need something done in a hurry and I will come through. But the neat and tidy, precision stuff (unless it has to do with ems and hairline rule) is not my thing. I think you are born one way or the other. I have two daughters: one of whom is Ms Organized Precision; the other is your perfect example of adrenaline-charged Last Minute Mabel. They have been like this, both of them, from the moment they left the womb. If you kept the infant Ms Organized on a schedule, she was a happy, thriving child. Upset the schedule and she turned into Miss Hyde. The other daughter, hauled around a wet, windy Expo site at three months old, fed at weird intervals, forced to sleep in a bouncing backpack, was her cheerful self all through. Genes rule, I strongly believe. Nurture can only modify what Nature has created.

Not that my Very Organized mother did not try.

I get angry at myself from time to time, especially when I blow something. Especially when I have volunteered to do something that is not in my skill set and end up doing it badly. Sadly, experience does not teach me; I continue to take on stuff, to say yes to things that I really don't want to do, usually just to get them done when no one else is volunteering for the task. I have a fundraising event to run in the spring. If the event were to take place next week, I could just turn in and whack it together. But with several months' leeway on some of the tasks, what do you bet that I let them slide and end up running in circles in the last few days. Also, I don't delegate well. It almost always seems easier to do what needs to be done myself, rather than find someone, explain the task and monitor the results. Oh, well. At least I get to do all the posters and art work.

In the main, though, I manage to tolerate myself. There are things I am good at, that I do well. I hope there are enough of them to balance off the messes I occasionally make. To have patience with myself. Even to laugh at myself. Last night I was stamping around stewing at the computer and my own sloth. This morning I can be amused at the whole sorry mess. Especially since I did manage to recover enough of the job that I did not have to do it twice. Otherwise, I might still be sulking.