Thursday I found myself a bit virtually over scheduled.
My schedule for the day was as follows. From 9-11am, I was registered to attend a virtual conference. I had to leave that a few minutes early to serve as moderator of a webinar from 10:45 to noon. Then from noon to 1pm, I had to give a presentation, with yet one more presentation to give from 1;30 to 3.
As parents, we worry about how much screen time our kids have in a day. This was clearly a day where I was going way over my limit.
But, thankfully, all in all it went OK. But Murphy’s Law did hit me at one point. On the webinar I was moderating, I basically had to give the introduction at the top of the hour, and then be there to handle the question and answer session at the end.
The speakers knew I had to jump off to another presentation as soon as it was over, and made it pretty clear that they worked really hard on timing and had a lengthy presentation that would wrap up close to the one hour mark. In fact, maybe even a little after, so I gave my next group a heads up I might be a bit late.
As it happened, this was also Henry’s first day of full class pre-K, and being stuck on this webinar, I wasn’t able to walk him to school. Erin got him ready to go, and about 40 minutes into this definitely-going-t0-be-an-hour presentation, I stepped away for 3 minutes to wish my son well and say goodbye.
I sauntered back to my computer and when I put my headphones on it was dead silence. After a few seconds, I heard, “Jim? Jim?”
Yup, the 3 minutes I decided to step away was when this “oh my god we’ll barely keep it under an hour” presentation miraculously ended like 20 minutes early. Sigh. Oh well, I did the best I could in recovery and made it through the Q and A pretty well.
After all the presentations were done, I was able to walk to school and meet Erin, Amelia and Henry on their way back after picking Henry up. He was in a great mood and loved his first day of pre-K. We were thrilled and so proud of our little guy.
It was also really good to be outside and getting some fresh air and finally not staring at a screen for the first time in hours. When I was a kid I remember being told that sitting too close the TV and watching too much A-Team would rot my brain, but that’s got nothing on a day full of back to back Zoom calls and webinars.
