Intelligence Minus Common Sense

Yesterday was an incredibly frustrating day at work.  Any day that starts out with a two hour meeting where I have to sit around listening to planners drone on about important but significantly over analyzed data is not promising.  The toughest thing is that the planners involved are all really nice people that I truly enjoy working with but, as with all planners, they seem to lack the ability summarize, so I had to be nice.

After the meeting I was supposed to spend the day with my favorite technology van for hopefully his last day of coordinate collecting.  We knocked that out and returned to the office around 2:30.  The plan was for him to refuel and get some needed downloads from his home office and we would head back out.  This had the added benefit that I would miss another meeting with the planners down at their office.  

One of the other people involved in this project is an IT consultant that was brought in to insure we were asking the right questions of the technology.  He’s a brilliant guy just a couple years out of a world famous and prestigious technical college.  He’s a very nice guy with a scary level of intelligence and absolutely no common sense.

I was still sitting in my office at 3:30 when I decided to call the van operator and find out why he was delayed.  It turned out he was already out collecting with the consultant – color me extremely displeased.  When I finally did link up with him the consultant had to depart for the same meeting I was missing under a cold stare trying to impart a significant level of contempt.  The van operator told me as soon as I got in that he told the consultant about our plan but the consultant said that I would be at the meeting – not bothering to check at all (my office door being a whole fifty feet from where he got in the van).

The consultant, in his haste to depart forgot his beloved cell phone in the van.  As soon as we started out it began frantically ringing trying to return to its master and I forbid anyone from the van to answer it.  We started collecting the coordinates and I learned that the consultant had directed the van to go the wrong direction at a critical node so basically everything he tried to accomplish while I was sitting in my office had to be re-done, by me.  The van operator (great New Yorker type) and I ended up laughing really hard about how much education in common sense the young consultant was getting.

We were just finishing up the collecting when the other meeting ended and we were invited to the social hour that followed.  We finally released the hostage phone back to its relieved owner. Over a couple of beers I gave him a ten minute lecture on the importance of coordinating, since basically that’s what his entire job consists of.  He was appropriately apologetic (I think in fear for his life) and actually learned something.  When I asked him why he had gone in the wrong direction – he said he thought it was wrong but didn’t want to speak up at the time.  Still got a ways to go.