I owe two City officials an apology, and I’ve already issued it by email.
Yesterday, Monday, the HSR’s new Twitter manager reached out to me by email to suggest we meet. He suggested Wednesday at the Mountain Transit Centre. I responded back requesting – because I have no other business to attend to in the area of the MTC – we meet downtown.
He responded very quickly and agreed to meet downtown.
Here’s the thing, and I missed it, his email said tomorrow 11am. For some reason, and I can’t say for sure, I missed this.
Was it that I was multi-tasking? At the time, I was tracing down a problem using my primary laptop, talking with someone in the office, and had my email open on my netbook laptop. This is entirely possible.
Or, was it that my dysgraphia resulted in my missing the word completely when reading the email because I was reading it while writing a response?
As with most human error, it’s never one thing.
There’s another factor which lead to this error, I’m not that busy this week. In a typical week, when someone asks to meet, I send them three suggested times. In this case, I left it open because my schedule is flexible. This usual limitation of time has a positive side-effect of limiting my ability to error in scheduling.
Nonetheless, I put Wednesday in my calendar, and last night, I did an all-nighter after taking a long afternoon nap.
This morning, the City’s new HSR manager showed up for a meeting that I didn’t attend. He emailed and DM’d me, I was asleep.
Not a good first impression on my part, and I wasted his time.
I’ve already offered to meet him at his office.
In terms of preventing a similar mistake in the future, as much as I hate to admit it, I can’t see a system that will prevent a similar human error. I simply missed the word tomorrow, and trying to build systems around that doesn’t make much sense. Don’t multi-task is an idea, but admittedly, sometimes many things happen. That said, there was no need for me to respond to the email so quickly, I was (ironically) trying to make a good impression by responding quickly.