I Said Sprocket, Not Socket.

So, I signed up for the AAM conference rather late. Today, I stood in line three different times at the ticket exchange counter trying to see what tickets had been returned for any of the really cool events tonight. To no avail. No plans for the evening.

Way down in the program I saw a small notice for something called Dinner and Dialog. There was a list of several topics that would be discussed by various professionals at dinner. The note said "Sign up at Restaurant Reservation Desk."

It took a while to find the table, but finally tucked up on the third floor was an lady manning a table with a notebook and a pin.

"When you sign up on one of the sheets I will give you the reservation information. When all ten places are filled I remove the sheet. If the sheet is not in the notebook, then that topic is full," she said.

I opened the book. There was one sheet left for Monday night. It was a discussion on "The Challenges of Time Management."

"Do you find it funny that the last thing there is to sing up for is a Time Management discussion?" I said. "When people come up here to sign up you should say something like "Oh, your just in time!"" Or maybe, "I guess you really need this dinner don't you." or "Sorry, you are too late, just kidding."

"I am not here to make jokes," she said.

"Come on, I am giving you gold here, this is really funny."

"My job is not to sit here and be funny," she said. "Are you going to sign up for the reservation."

"I'm not going to sign up to go to dinner with a bunch of losers who waited too long to sign up for anything good and then had to go to a dinner about Time Management!"

About two minutes later I went back.

"I just don't think you appreciate how amusing this is that the last thing available to sign up for is The Challenge of Time Management. I am going to sign up for this and I bet you that this is the best thing I do all day."

So, by total accident, not my fault, I was 25 minutes late to the dinner on The Challenge of Time Management. Five out of the ten people had shown up. And, just as I thought. Not really a discussion about Time Management. Just five people who had forgotten to sign up for anything good. About the time introductions had been made, Deneen called. I excused myself and stepped outside.

When I came back to the table the moderator and the rest of the table were talking about the "monkey article." Betsy was like, "so I thought the monkey article was really important." And Mark was like, "Well at our museum I wished we had the monkey article to talk about."

After a few minutes I jumped in, "Did I just step outside and you'all were like, "When he comes back lets pretend we're talking about a monkey article."

"No, we're talking about a reprint of a classic article in the Harvard Business Review about how to keep your employees from putting monkeys on your back."

"Monkeys on your back, really." I said. "Like Ken Blanchard in the One Minute Manager who discusses the need to manage with a decision making process where you take monkeys off your back and give them to your staff."

"You just won the Monkey Article," said Betsy. At which point she pulled out a copy of Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? by Oncken and Wass. It was a discussion about Time Management!

That ended the formal discussion. These five people were good humored. Dinner was funny. We sat at the House of Blues for the next three hours talking about museums, the struggle of a job search, and about what people thought about the conference so far.

It was the best thing I did all day.