Ruminations

I was so tired this morning that I only had enough energy to sit and skim read the news and my Bloglines subscriptions, listlessly. Or maybe I was saving my energy for the day ahead, which was frenetic and non-stop meetings and appointments and included a presentation to my colleagues about wikis.

I got myself into a complete state before the presentation. I completely forgot that I’d booked one of our training rooms for it, and assumed I’d booked a meeting room, which meant that I would have needed to have booked a laptop computer and a data projector. When I tried to do a last minute booking for the equipment I thought I needed, every single laptop and projector had been booked, and then I found that the room I thought I’d booked had been booked by someone else… it was all steadily going pear shaped, until I came to my senses and looked at my calendar and realised that I’d booked a training room and didn’t need any equipment! All this was after running through scenarios in my head and wondering how I was going to tell The Boss and all my colleagues that the presentation was not going to happen, while still thinking about how I was going to describe wikis in a comprehensible and attractive way to my colleagues, and after poor M had spent a good half hour running around on my behalf trying to locate some equipment I could use…

Then, once the room and equipment kerfuffle had been sorted out, half an hour before the presentation was due to begin, I realised that the wiki I’d set up wasn’t going to be viewable using the training room PCs because it was on our intranet and the training room PCs were client ones and on different settings… Thank goodness for my ever efficient colleague JN in our IT unit, who put together a fix very quickly and with no complaints about my ineptitude!

Still, as my colleague JW pointed out as I was running around in a frenzy, if the day starts off so badly it can only get better. True enough, it did. All the stress I just described was over and done with by 9:30am, and nothing else that happened today was bad or unmanageable.

The presentation went well. My colleagues are always interested in whatever new technology I foist on them, and with the wiki I think we all agree that there are many possibilities for us in using it to work on collaborative documents and projects. The Boss surpassed himself by suggesting that we could go national and consider what sort of wiki we might be able to create for the Australian library community. He’s always good at seeing The Big Blue Sky and all the opportunities, is The Boss. (Last time I did a presentation of a project I’d been working on - a blog for our team - he turned it into an organisational blog. This time I was expecting him to suggest an organisational wiki so he went one better. Next time I present something I shall expect us to go international, I think.)

In the adrenaline-fuelled brainstorming post-presentation discussion, while talking about where to next, I let myself get convinced that I would put together another paper, on wikis, for the forthcoming ALIA conference. (Despite the fact that closing date was 1 February, one of the conference admin people has told me that they will continue to accept submissions. So if you’re kicking yourself for having missed the deadline, it’s not too late!)

So I now have wikis coming out my ears, and I have two potential conference papers to work on. And that’s not counting all the other projects I’m supposed to be working on! I can see I’m going to be practising stress management techniques a lot this year.

Categories: work