Patterns...

[fajrdrako]

Speaking of routines: I have been the secretary of the Ottawa Science Fiction Society for a while now, and I've noticed a pattern in the way I write the minutes.

1. I go to the monthly executive meeting. Take careful and copious notes in an illegible scribble. Go home resolving to type them up immediately.

2. Get home. Decide I'm too tried. Put my steno pad in my purse for dealing with immediately the next morning.

3. Morning comes. I decide I don't need to to it right away. Tonight will be okay.

4. Too busy to do it tonight, so I postpone till tomorrow. Repeat. Then repeat again.

5. A week later, I've forgotten I haven't written up the minutes. I've forgotten there was even a meeting.

6. A few days before the next meeting, someone reminds me that there is a meeting coming up, and I realize I haven't written up the minutes of the last meeting yet. Time to do it before anyone knows how long I procrastinated. But then I can't find my steno pad. It was right there in my purse... wasn't it?

7. Search for my steno pad in increasing panic. Fail to find it.

8. Resolve to confess all to the other members of the OSFS executive, hoping I will be forgiven, despite my shame and ignominy.

9. I find my steno pad. Hastily write the minutes. Proofread and e-mail them to the other members of the executive as if I always meant to send them on the day of the meeting. Really. After all, if I send them early, they'll only forget them, right?

10. Arrive at the meeting with steno pad in hand, trying to appear blithely competent.