Meeting Back and Forth
The other day, I had to go to Oxford, Mississippi, for a business meeting. Of course, Oxford is best known as the home of the University of Mississippi, although for some strange reason, everyone just calls it Ole Miss. If you mention the University of Mississippi to someone, they just look at you strangely until you finally say, “You know, Ole Miss.” “Oh, yeah! Why didn’t you say so?”
Anyway, Oxford is about an hour and a half from Memphis, where our office is. That means that getting there for a meeting requires some planning. And for me, it takes a lot less time to drive to Oxford from our house than it would to drive to the office and then to Oxford. So I went on my own, and I was going to meet a few others from Memphis there, too.
After I had driven for almost 30 minutes, I got a call saying that the meeting was being postponed by an hour. Of course, all of us from the Memphis area were already on the way, so there wasn’t much use in turning around to go back, only to have to leave again. We were supposed to meet with an architect and the project owner, and the owner was going to be late, which was the reason for the postponement.
All of us involved went on to Oxford to just wait it out. Fortunately, we were going to meet in the meeting room of a hotel. So we were able to sit in the hotel lobby and enjoy their wi-fi and Sportcenter on their TV until the architect finally arrived.
But then the architect broke some more news to us. He had just talked to the owner, who was still tied up in the meeting he was in, and it looked like he wouldn’t be able to make it at all, although he wanted to meet with us at another time. We went ahead and talked about what we could without the owner, and we still had plenty to talk about.
And why was the project owner tied up? He was meeting with someone else.
In Memphis.
Yes, Memphis. As in, where we had just come from.
Sigh.
Wouldn’t it have made much more sense to just meet in Memphis in the first place?
Oh well, at least it was a nice day for a drive. And back.
