A. C. Slacker

Ok, so since last night's post was long AND overly emotional (a.k.a. BORING) I'm gonna do something light and brief.

I had an awkward moment at work today. Our boss, who is ultra cool, came over yesterday and said that we'd have a meeting today to discuss how we have been progressing on our given projects. Let me back up a second and explain that for the past few weeks (yes, weeks) we have been pretty much told to do whatever we want, but that there was a small ongoing project we could each work on for a while until the bigger projects come through the pipeline. So after he described what we were doing we were left to our own devices.

Now, I hate to say it, but I'm a bit of a born slacker, as well as procrastinator. Unless I have the fear of God in me, or at least someone breathing down my neck, I usually take it upon myself to look up God knows what on the Internet or play Sporcle, a game-website one of the girls turned us onto. In between games and latest shopping queries, I have been every so often clicking on and actually doing a bit of research for my project- but I was nowhere near anything useful or really definitive yet. So when he mentioned wanting to see our progress, I got that old feeling I hadn't felt since college: slacker panic.

I went home trying to convince myself I would be fine, that I had SOMETHING, just so long as he didn't ask anything specific- like what EXACTLY this company I'm showing him does. My other saving grace, I thought, was that I was collaborating with the other temp, so we could kinda lean on each other.

In the morning he walked over to where we were sitting and suggested we have our meeting at 11, and that we could just email him what we had so far.....this was a problem. At that point all I had was a collection of websites that I could show him. What the hell was I going to email him? Quickly my fellow fremp and I got to work on putting something, ANYTHING, on some Powerpoint slides. It wasn't much, but we managed to get some stuff on 9 different slides. As time ran out I emailed him what we had and walked to our deaths.

Les was up first, and as usual, was way prepared with a nice long and detailed Excel spreadsheet of her project. She seemed informed and understood what she was supposed to be doing. Then it was our turn. He pulled up my first slide (the one I was responsible for) and was quiet. I looked at it through his eyes---what the hell has this girl been DOING for almost 3 weeks? A fourth grader would've put together a nicer slide with more info. And then I did the thing I am most embarrassed by.

I began with an offensive attack, trying to get a head start in commenting on the slides before he had the chance to ask anything, but I found myself stumbling and stammering. At one point he asked a specific question (ohcrapohcrapohcrap), and tried my hardest to not look dumbfounded.

"So..what does that '90% confidence' mean?," he asked.

"Um, well...yeah, it means that they wanted to be 90% confident the information they got was sound and so, uh, therefore....the information they gave back was...90% accurate," I managed to get out. You ever have one of those feelings where you are outside yourself and you are just watching you make a total ass of yourself because the person you are talking to can totally tell you have no idea what you are talking about?

Ah well. Thankfully, it was the last specific question he asked, and luckier, he even said it was looking good and was already helpful. He gave us a few simple points to include and then released us.

We walked out breathing a heavy sigh of relief, and I did the same thing I always do when I barely get by the skin of my teeth in those situations, and reminded myself to NEVER force myself to have to go through something like that again. I like to think I will, but I'll probably just put it off...ooh "Name all the original 13 colonies" on Sporcle, hmmmm