avoidance, procrastination, attention deficit...

[jaeclectic]

I am trying to prepare for a meeting at Sun later in the week. I am having a really hard time concentrating, perhaps because of all the reasons why this seems like a completely stupid thing to be doing:

1. Although they will pay me, 2 hours worth of income (even at a pretty astonishing rate of pay) will just reduce my unemployment check, so no short-term monetary gain will be involved.

2a. The nominal purpose of the meeting is for me to teach some folks how to do the forum metrics work that I'd been doing-- which would have been a logical thing to do while I still worked there, had network access, etc.

b. However, I have reason to believe that these particular people are really interested in generating metrics other than the specific ones I worked on, which means it may end up being more like a training session on the database structure and use of sqlplus. Which I know something about, but you know, they have lots of other folks who still work for them who have at least as much knowledge as I do in those areas.

c. If, as I suspect, they have specific metrics they want to generate, I may or may not be able to help them in the course of a two-hour meeting. Now, if they wanted to send me a spec and have me figure out the sql queries for them, there is a good chance I could do something useful in two hours. But sitting around a conference room? a lot less likely.

So I am just telling myself, it's a goodwill gesture, plus having some actual paid work (however minor) means I can account for this time on my resume by saying I am an independent consultant (albeit a wildly unsuccessful one).

I suppose it doesn't really matter if I am well-prepared, since whatever I prepare for is likely to be derailed. It just seems like due diligence, regardless of how stupid the situation is, I want to minimize the risk that I personally will look like an idiot.

But every other possible thing I could be doing right now seems a lot more interesting. *sigh*