Thursday, October 13, 2011

On making and keeping appointments

My boss has been trying to make an appointment with a phone vendor to look at our phone system here at the office. We have been having various problems for a while now.

Last week he had me start calling vendors to submit quotes to us and come in to do demos. Last week I scheduled a vendor to do a demo today at 1pm.

Yesterday at about 5pm he had me cancel today's meeting because "something came up" today. (Hint: something always comes up.) Today he asked me to try to reschedule with the vendor, plus another one, for tomorrow.

I don't know about you, but most working people try to schedule their time in advance by more than 1 working day.

Neither vendor is available at the very specific times he wanted tomorrow (not just anytime tomorrow, but, like 10:15 or 4:30 only).

His response to this was, "Neither of them can do tomorrow? Neither of them?" ... "OK well schedule a meeting, put it in my calendar, for 4pm tomorrow for you and me to sit down and go over this phone stuff. It is not being dealt with at a high enough level. It needs to be escalated."

Dear boss: You cancelled today's meeting with less than 24 hours notice and then tried to set up a new meeting again with less than 24 hours notice. This is not how normal people operate. Your time management skills are non-existant. FAIL.

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