One of the products that I manage, let’s call it snafu, had been misbehaving lately. Actually, we’re not sure if it’s been misbehaving. An app that uses snafu, let’s call it FM, is misbehaving and snafu is the only thing that changed. The fact that we undid the change to snafu doesn’t seem to matter – I touched it last and the TIL rule is all that counts.

I was told to call a meeting with all parties involved with FM to try to figure out how to fix FM. So I called a meeting with everybody – application administrators, developers, security specialists, network specialists, environment managers and a couple of managers. We gathered at the appointed time in a cramped meeting room. I fired up a webex session and a teleconference and we’re ready to go except for the network guy.

The network guy works out of a different office a few zip codes south of us. While we wait for him to dial in, I bring everyone else up to speed with what we’ve found out about the problem with FM. I finish my summary and still no network guy. I got ready to call him by clicking on his name on the meeting notice.

His name wasn’t there! I’d forgotten to invite him! And the network guy is the most critical guy of the lot! I’ve got 9 people squeezed in with me and we can’t do a beeping thing because I didn’t invite the network guy.

I considered my options:

1. Hunt him down and don’t find him.
   This means that 9 people will sit around while I fumble thru IM chats and phone numbers.
2. Hunt him down, find him, and sandbag him.
   Since he wasn’t invited, he won’t be prepared. When we last spoke, he thought that he’d ducked his involvement. I didn’t want to call him cold and tell him that he needed to explain himself to 10 people who he couldn’t see.
3. Reschedule the meeting and bring the network guy up to speed.

You can probably tell by my rhetoric that I chose 3. I told everyone there “I’m sorry that I’ve wasted your time. I don’t want to waste any more of your time. I’ll reschedule this and try to invite everyone who’s needed.”

This is how I became a time-wasting moron.