Evariste

I am a busy exec­ut­ive.

The bank has put me in charge of its admin­is­trat­ive affairs. When I took the job, I ima­gined my day as a sequence of well-ordered steps, cul­min­at­ing in mat­ter of fact decisions with clock­work pre­ci­sion.

It is 8:30 in the morn­ing.

Monday.

The week­end is behind us. Lunch was nice in the little res­taur­ant in the hills.

The phone rings. Joe, the down­town branch man­ager is inter­rupt­ing my email sort­ing ses­sion.

“I have a prob­lem with the air con­di­tion­ing equip­ment, the day is going to be hot!”

I won­der why Joe has called me dir­ectly, the head of main­ten­ance is the per­son to call.

“Where is Lilian?”

“She has called in sick”.

Alan, my assist­ant, is now search­ing for the tele­phone num­ber of the A/​C repair man. The depart­ment has decided not to go through the hassle of a main­ten­ance agree­ment with the A/​C sup­pli­er:

“The new mod­els do not break down!” So they said.

Alan gets hold of Georges, who, with the heat wave approach­ing, is busy with his steady cus­tom­ers, those with a main­ten­ance con­tract. The hours pass, the tele­phone keeps ringing, Joe is irate and I feel help­less.

At around 3:00PM Georges is at last in the down­town branch. Five minutes later, anoth­er phone call and the A/​C is back online.

Joe pays the A/​C man from the petty cash box and requests a report and a receipt. These will go in the draw­er. Someone will enter the trans­ac­tion in the Banking applic­a­tion petty cash ledger. The repair report will end-up in the branch fil­ing cab­in­et.

What a mess: we will have to think about a bet­ter way to handle all this paper work.

It is almost 5:00 PM. So many things to do, and so little achieved. The stack of requests grows. It will have to wait until tomor­row.

Another day in my life!