A really dumb mistake

My husband and I decided to take a computer class together. We were going to learn Excel so we could Excel-erate our business. Together, we own a public relations agency and a printing business.  We wanted to create beautiful spreadsheets with forecasts and reports.

So I found a series of four Excel classses at the local community college. I asked Charlene Williams  from my staff if she wanted to go with us. She couldn’t go, because she is going to be in Las Vegas next week for a convention.  but she offered to sign us up.

She then e-mailed me and said, ‘you’re all set for your course.”  I wrote down the dates in my calendar. and entered them in my Outlook but I did not enter the location, or at least I didn’t double check the location (turns out I had entered it into Outlook but I hadn’t checked it today. Because there was a long weekend, I wasn’t as tuned into my calendar as I normally would be on a Tuesday.)

 I had it in my head that it was at Kennebec Valley Community College in Fairfield. So we left our son’s last school baseball game of the year after the first inning to drive to Fairfield. We also arranged for my mother, aka ‘Oma,’ to come up and pick the kids up at the game, bring them home, get them dinner, and put them to bed.

We got there a little late because I had ordered a cheeseburger from the concession just before we left and it wasn’t quite ready. The money raised at the concession benefits our son’s eighth grade trip to Boston next year. So we had to rush from Stratton to Fairfield in an hour and fifteen minutes. It is normally and hour and a half’s drive. We got to the campus about ten minutes late. I didn’t have any info with me about the classroom number or the instructor’s name. We walked around frantically asking everyone we bumped into if they knew where the Excel class was. We even found an Excel class, but after we barged in late, we learned that it was only for the employees of a company I had never heard of.

So I called Charlene on my cell. I told her we were at KVCC and we couldn’t find the class. She gasped. She told me we were supposed to be at CMCC in Auburn!  Ouch!  Auburn was an hour away from Fairfield. I felt so dumb. It was too late to get to Auburn. Plus the subsequent three classes would all build on tonight’s class. I was full of rage, all directed at myself for not double checking my calendar. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a multi-tasker. Sometimes it pays to just focus on one thing at at time. (note to self:  next time, double check the location, time and instructor’s name)

So we  now need to back out of all of the classes in the series of four. I was actually a bit worried about being ready for ‘intermediate’ Excel rather than the beginner’s Excel.  Frankly, I think Jay is relieved because we were going to have to miss more Little League and Babe Ruth baseball games,  and he prefers baseball over Excel spreadsheets. I don’t understand why.

So forgive me if I can’t insert a forecast here of the number of blog posts I intend to create and the proportionate relative increase or decrease in hits, users, visitors, readers and deleters. (is that a word?)

However, watch out, because one of these days, I’m going to take those classes and then I will be a real whiz-kid on the Excel spreadsheets. If I can get Jay to go with me, it will truly be a miracle. Who knows what we can create together?