My Atlanta trip

So, where were we?

Last week I went to Atlanta to help out a couple people who work alongside my company, i.e. we send them lots and lots of paperwork.  I won’t go too far into depth, but I’ll give a few highlights:

Atlanta is not my favorite city.  I was fortunate enough to have a hotel room directly across the parking lot from the office where I was working, but I had to go out to get meals and every time was a challenge, both to get somewhere and not get lost, but to also find somewhere where being a woman sitting by herself wasn’t going to get me into trouble.  I’m probably oversensitive and prone to being more fearful than I need to be, but I’d rather be safe.

Thank God for AAA and for rental cars.  My office sent me up in a rental car and on Wednesday I had a flat tire.  AAA showed up at my hotel to put on the spare tire and Hertz let me exchange the car for another one so I could make it home.  And the clerk here was actually at the desk when I got home at 10:00 so she was able to tell me that the man at the counter in Atlanta airport was going to charge me for a tank of gas.  And she believed me that he had it wrong and didn’t charge me for it.

I was able to really give some help to the woman I worked with for most of my time in Atlanta.  I sorted through 3 boxes of paperwork and identified problems in folders, indexed 4 boxes of files, and gave some recommendations and tips on how to tackle the organizing of the rest of her space.  I also helped a gentleman sort through a stack of papers and get him started on getting those organized (10-year old pieces of paper = ridiculous) and gave him recommendations on how to handle incoming papers that would generally end up on that same stack.  You’d think that so much of these papers could just get thrown into the trash, but no!  The nature of the business requires that they get saved and filed and recorded.  Stacks and stacks and stacks of papers everywhere.

But I think I was able to introduce the idea of 5S enough that they might be able to get it started in their offices.  And that would be a huge step because that place is being held together by paperclips.  The papers filling those offices could outweigh a couple elephants.  It’s absolutely absurd.

Friday, after resting away the morning after traveling home late into the evening, I got to help the children’s pastor at my church organize her office.  That was a crazy amount of fun.  We got through the first stage of the process in the few hours we had:  We tidied up the place and found everything a home.  When I go back in July (scheduling around camps and traveling is so much fun) we’re going to dig into her filing cabinets and storage spaces and work out how exactly she’s going to be able to stay organized in the long run.  At that point, we’ll look at how her office is actually organized as a whole, too, and figure if there’s a better way to do it.  I’m fairly comfortable with how it is, but I want to explore it a little anyway.

And then I relaxed the weekend away, getting a brilliant sunburn on Sunday by weeding my flowerbed and going swimming.  You could roast marshmallows on my shoulders.  Poor decision-making in action!

And now I’m back home for a relaxing week of working and catching up.  Next Thursday we fly to Vermont for my sister-in-law’s high school graduation.  We’ll get back Monday afternoon/evening.  I’ll work that week and the week after that and then I’m off for the month of July.

I’m looking forward to it more and more.  I’m ready for a break!