This post is about how well I manage to be bad at work sometimes. The fact is that I don't have the best overall organization ever (to say the less). As a result, I completely forget about a very important thing to do from time to time.

I'm ashamed to confess that I cannot count the days where I arrive 5 minutes late at the lecture. Some of my colleagues want to take strong decision against late students, and it makes me even more uncomfortable about this. It even happened 2 or 3 times that I get calls on my cell phone from someone in the administration saying "there is about 20 students in my office, looking for you. You're supposed to give a lecture half an hour ago". One of these times, I was even in my teaching office, doing something else. This time was good because I was able to be there in no time. But another time, it was my sun who got the call at home and answered that he was unable to give me the phone because I was still sleeping. Shame added to shame... Each time something like this arrives, I feel so ashamed that I think I could die, and promise myself that it will never happen.

One day, I received a phone call during a practical lab, saying that I was supposed to participate to a jury closing an internship since one hour. The original plan was that since the discussion to choose the day to hold the jury was so difficult, I decided that I could move this practical lab to another time of the week. But then, I forgot to do so, and even forgot completely about the jury. So, I was in the situation where I had to be at the same time in two locations, with a strong pressure to not give up any of them. All this because of me. This time also, I felt I had yet another epic failure.

One of the worst time ever was maybe one year ago. We had an issue with the woman usually taking care of them after the school, and my wife had a unannounced meeting during the lunch time. So I ensured my wife that I could take care of the kids. So, I was in front of the school, waiting for them to finish and come out so that we get back home for the lunch when my cell ringed. It was the secretary of the lab director, saying that I was supposed to give a speech in 10 minutes. The topic was the defense of a 200,000 euro budget we had from the region council: I was supposed to tell the experts what we did from that amount so that they don't take it back. I knew it was a critical presentation: it was the second one, and my colleague who gave the first one answered very badly to the experts' questions. After a fire of questions of half an hour, he gave up and said something as stupid as "no, it does not make any sense that this project got funded from that source", and my mission was to save the things saying that yes, it made sense, and that no, they shouldn't take the money back since we already spent it (to buy a cluster).

How could I have forgotten such an crucial meeting is one of the mystery of my brain. The fact is that I had to ask a neighbor to take care for my kids for a while, call my wife so that she unschedule her meeting to handle the lunch, ask the secretary to reschedule the talk supposed to be after mine before, and run like out of hell to be on "time". Given the initial situation, everything ran very smoothly: the experts didn't notice too much that we changed the talk order, I could breath again after running when it was my time to speak, and I even managed to convince the expert that the council money got well invested. Really, such situations are just impossible and when it happens, you'd better to die than to face the lab director's eyes saying "how could you?".

Today is another such an unfortunate example. I had an examination at 9 am, and at 9:30, we were thinking in family how to use the morning when the remembrance hit me back. As usual, I ran to the location were I was supposed to be like half an hour, and discovered that my colleagues handled the situation just fine. I'm lucky to have them as colleagues, ways more than they are to have me.

I won't go into details, but unfortunately, shit happens in my personal life also because of my ability to not notice that "tomorrow", "Sunday" and the "28. March" don't represent three separate days, but only one.

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