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| This might be an exaggeration. |
As a project manager, life is
all about milestones and deadlines. If you build a little sway in your scope, everything
tends to go off without a hitch. There’s always something, but for the most
part, schedules, reminders, and consistent updates mitigate the risk.
That’s what my world is all
about.
Enter my oldest son.
Normally, this kid is an
angel. Sometimes, he’s an annoying pre-teen. Once in a while, he’s a complete
disaster.
We were
on-time-toward-running-late yesterday, when suddenly . . .
“Dad?” he called from upstairs.
I could hear the concern in
his voice and the project manager inside me cringed. Mental calculations told
me that we had a window of about five minutes for any delays.
“Ok,” he said, “I was
flushing some toilet paper and—”
“And it overflowed,” I finished
for him. “Ok, no problem. Thank you for telling me.”
I ran to my bathroom to
retrieve the plunger (forgetting that we had one in the upstairs bathroom too)
and that’s when I heard it. The sound of
my carefully laid plan breaking to the tune of a veritable waterfall flowing
from my bathroom ceiling from the lake that had been the floor above me.
“How many times did you try
to flush the toilet?” I asked him as I ran up the stairs, plunger in hand.
“Five or six.”
Did you cringe? I cringed.
It wasn’t as bad as you might think, but it was still bad. The toilet
was still overflowing, water running down the sides with every step I took. Like
a video game ninja throwing shuriken, I tossed down every towel within reach,
pushed the plunger into the toilet, and got to work. Three seconds later, the
toilet drained and then it was just a matter of cleaning up not just one, but
two bathroom floors.
Here’s hoping my space heater
isn’t fried!
So yeah, it’s always something.
