I have a lot of meetings as part of my job. Different customers to discuss updates in staffing plans and standards, different interviews with candidate employees, etc. My work calendar is pretty full.
I also have a personal life, which means I’ve got quite a few entries in a personal calendar. The occasional dentist and doctor, dog grooming appointments, vet appointments (also for the dog), the odd lunch with old friends, ferrying my mother to her appointments. Another “etcetera” required.
Then because I’m human, I occasionally double book myself. This usually happens because I’ve got an off-normal personal appointment conflicting with a work appointment, and I didn’t check both calendars before agreeing to one over the other. You know: vet calls while you are juggling two things at once and says they have to cancel my appointment on date X but they can squeeze my pooch in at Time Y so you agree without thinking things through. That kind of a thing.
Since I pride myself on punctuality, I always feel an overinflated sense of embarrassment when these occasions occur.
However, I may be human, but I’m also a grown up. I have a general awareness of my calendar, and, dare I say it, I can probably come up with 90 percent of my calendar from memory because a lot of it is relatively fixed. Every Tuesday at 9am I’ve got a call with Client X. Every Thursday afternoon is reserved for interviews. Don’t you dare call me for at least 36 hours after Netflix drops my new favorite season because I’m busy.
Said another way: the double-booking situation is pretty rare.
It’s been a minute (ok, fine, maybe more than a minute), but I feel I had this same general awareness of my calendar when I was in school. A few weeks into a semester, it was well cemented that I had class at noon on Mondays and Wednesdays and a seminar at five in the afternoon on Thursdays. I didn’t need to check my calendar to work around that type of appointment. I just knew.
Turns out, that type of awareness is…not something one should expect out of an adult?
I recently spoke to a lady who called expressing interest in a job working for one of our school districts as a custodian on the second shift. When I pulled her file, I saw that we had offered her a first shift position with the same district about a month-and-a-half ago, but she never finished the hiring paperwork. When I asked her why she never completed the hiring paperwork/process when we spoke to her a month-and-a-half ago, the lady said that she was in school, and the schedule wasn't going to work out for her.
<crickets chirp>
Riddle me this: Why would you apply for a job that was fundamentally incompatible with your school schedule?
Yes, this lady had gone so far as to actively accept a job that required her to work the same hours that she was attending class, and then decided the schedule wasn't going to work.
Uhh…
Did she forget she was going to school during the mornings and, therefore, could not work a job during that time? How does one forget something like that?
Getting back to the call I was on: I inquired what schedule she could work now. She tells me she can do second shift after 2pm. When I tell her that the position she is interested in can start as early as noon, she spontaneously acquires availability for anything that starts after 11am because she's not in class anymore.
Uh huh. But that specific client needs people, so I finish the interview and offer her the position after a detailed review of the expected work hours.
Whether or not she actually starts the job is a whole 'nother thing. We’ll see.
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