Sometimes It Doesn’t All Get Done

I’ve put on the way back machine for tonight’s post.  I was working as a co-op at IBM for several months at this point.   I was still in college, but I had gotten into the swing of doing things within the department and team I was working on.    I didn’t have a good understanding of work in the business world, but that’s what I was there to learn.    I was also there to do any and all of the little jobs the team members could come up with for me to help with.  

There were co-ops that got boring, mundane, time filler and time killer jobs to do but the team I was working with wanted to give me things that I could learn from doing.   As I think back on it now, I was fortunate to be placed with that group because I did indeed learn a lot and I had a good time doing so in the process.  

I struggled with something for a while without telling anyone though.    I had lots of things to do and some of those things were more important to get done than others.   It wasn’t in the prioritizing of the work that I had an issue, it was that some of the things they had asked me to do were just not going to get done at the rate new things came along.   

The types of things I hadn’t had a chance to address were the kinds of long-term, lower priority projects like, “Come up with an organizational strategy for past product builds.”   We were working hard on just getting the builds out, going backwards and tidying up the older builds, which may or may not have been a complete mess, just wasn’t going to get done…unless there was a bored co-op with nothing else to do, in which case it would be staggeringly dull busy work I could fill my days with.

My manager came in one day and asked how it was going and if I had any questions.   I told him I was worried because there were some things I didn’t think I was going to get to with all the other things I had to do.   Also, there weren’t any due dates on these other things and could he help me with that?   Coming from a college environment, there are always due dates.      He said with all seriousness to me, “sometimes, things don’t ever get done—and that’s okay.”   

I wasn’t going to write about this tonight, but I was going through my list of things to do and in so doing, marked several things to archive that I didn’t even start and as of today, don’t think I’ll ever do.   It reminded me of that day with my manager so many years ago.

The Big Boy Update:  My son said to us today, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?”   Without stopping to hear my of my daughter’s answers he said, “I’m thinking about Reese.”   He did not explain what he was thinking though.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Eighty-four questions today about what food could she eat or when was it going to be meal or snack time or what was for dinner or that she was hungry.   Eighty-four times I had to try and distract her and get her to focus on anything else.   I offered healthy foods like carrots and apples but they were mostly rejected.   There were likely more than eighty-four times, but I just started counting after nine o’clock.   May favorite one of the day was, “Mom, is it snack time yet?  Because I ate all the apples.”