Typical day not-in-the-office

I had planned to co-present at a meeting last week but the organizer, Wry Woman, emailed me to cancel it. The daughter of one of the principal attendees had pneumonia. I knew Beautiful French Woman's daughter had been sick because I read it on Facebook; I hadn't known they'd visited the hospital. So I inquired about that, and then Wry Woman and I traded stories (by email) about emergency-room visits. She has a daughter a bit younger than mine, who I met at a party in Portland two years ago; the two look alike; and they both make everyone around them laugh while rarely laughing themselves.

So when Beautiful French Woman's daughter was well enough to return to daycare, we had our meeting. We were seven women and one man; five women and the man sat in a room together in Portland, while I and another woman called in. I shivered at my dining room table wrapped in a blanket, drinking coffee, staring into a computer screen with the phone cradled between my ear and my shoulder – and I tried to picture them, how they were gesturing and who was sitting beside whom. (I could hear two whispering but I didn't know which two.) The meeting didn't go very well. The two of us on the phone presented a solution to a problem the others have been having with the web site and I didn't think they liked it. They seemed disappointed. We had worked for weeks on this solution so their disappointment disappointed us; we wanted to argue with them, to talk them into accepting our proposal, but of course that's like trying to force someone to love the Christmas present you bought them. Afterward I emailed or called a few of them privately, and my guess was right: in solving one of their problems we inadvertently caused a different problem, relatively minor but still. Once we fix that I think they will, in fact, love their Christmas present (as it were).

So it goes. Yet another day not-in-the-office.