Give it a second or third chance

I’ve been in a frustrated-ready-to-run-away-to-the-workstation-for-three-weeks kind of mood recently (my friends on our cellphone network can attest. There have been some pretty cranky texts recently.) due to a generally inability to get things done on the first try. For the last week, I have been climbing a mountain of meetings that keep having to be rescheduled, commitments that pop up last second and minutes spent waiting for things to happen.

Most of these text messages and complaints pointed to a a specific cause of this mountain: Beninese men. I blamed the people here for not taking things seriously, for not respecting my time and wanting to get all that they could from me. 

And then today, one of colleagues made it all work out. Yes, he was late to all our meetings and rescheduled two of them, but he also made a third meeting happen that needed to and left my house at 22:00 with work still to do.

So now, as almost all my previous problems of the week are solved, I need to reevaluate my initial thesis. Turns out, sometimes you have to change things, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get done. And like in the US, those here who are ready and willing to work hard have a tendency to double book themselves.

As someone who usually opts to work with herself, the issue this week wasn’t working with Beninese men. It was the nature of having to work with other people.