I went into last week expecting nothing out of the ordinary. By the end of the week, I had done little in the ordinary. Most of my time was spent working on ways to get more work done in less time. The irony was that I did not get much work done, but I hope the fruit of my efforts change that next week. I was just a little tired of blaming others that our office can’t accomplish what needs accomplishing. “We’re underfunded…We need more staff…If the computer system wasn’t so inefficient…” and so on. So, I spent my time trying out computer solutions to our tasks. Why should I continue to be a human “macro” when I could set some things up to take myself out of some of the equation? We’ll see how it works out this week. I have high hopes.

“Let’s just go to Wal-Mart.” I could say that it all started innocently enough, but my father would assert that there is no innocence in admitting to shopping at Wal-Mart. The problem was not wholly my choice of retail establishments, but also the timing: back-to-school shopping was in full, last minute swing and we were to be right in the thick of it. I think back to school shopping might even be worse than Christmas shopping. At Christmas, the items you are buying are at least interesting. There is nothing sexy about number two pencils. Then there are the crowds, and there’s no contest there, Christmas crowds are bigger. However, the crowds for back to school shopping at Wal-Mart were fairly big, and they were concentrated in one place: two isles of back to school supplies. Two isles of shoulder to shoulder humanity fighting over the two pairs of blunt nose safety scissors left on the shelf. Shangri-La it was not.