Stranger than fiction

Wow. I happened to have two department-wide meetings today. (Or rather, the first was for the department and the second was for a sub-department, or maybe even sub-department and sub-sub-department.) There were several interesting bits, but the biggest came near the end of the second meeting.

Announcement: the picnic scheduled for Thursday is postponed.

Announcement: we hope to soon offer training sessions on better communication.

Seriously, there was a picnic scheduled for noon this coming Thursday. It was going to be a potluck picnic and bakeoff competition, a few miles from the office so people have been setting up car-pooling sign-up sheets. It's BYOB, the first office event with any kind of alcohol in my memory, not counting at a restaurant. It would have been more work for me personally than I like - normally I bring things like chips and dip to potlucks or just mooch, but I've dug up an interesting salad recipe - but it would have been fun, and a good excuse to leave the office early that day. Family were also invited, so probably at least a few spouses were taking a personal day or kids were getting pulled out of daycare.

Long story short, all in all, it's a fairly big event that takes a fair amount of planning. But late in this otherwise nearly pointless meeting less than two days in advance, the boss mentions that the picnic isn't happening. Apparently about half the department is committed to an event that conflicts with the picnic, a seminar or training session or something, and the same guy set the day and time for both, but forgot about it. It's being rescheduled for some time next week, but nothing definite was announced.

And as far as I could tell, the department head didn't even notice the irony of offering training in better communication immediately after that. I was struggling to keep from laughing about that afterwards. Sure, it screws with my schedule a bit, but next week is probably actually even better for me. I only really feel sorry for H. yet again, because she, of course, was doing a lot to organize the picnic. She only found out about the cancellation at the same time the rest of us did. Yeah, I want to listen to this guy's advice about effective communication, all right. What not to do.