No Show

I was out of work on Friday taking a personal day, but I received an e-mail invitation to a meeting from my boss for today, and I accepted it (this is our routine for scheduling time). Our department, which includes the two of us and our awesome office coordinator, has been working on a proposal to realign some job responsibilities in order to free up our time to spend with kids. You know, because we're school counselors. But, we were proposing our idea to our principal today, so needed some time to get things together before that proposal this afternoon.

12:45 rolls around, and he's not there. He operates on a somewhat informal clock, so our coordinator and I started looking over the proposal and chatting, making some edits. 15 minutes later, he's still not there, so I call over to the office where I know he's talking with colleagues, and asks if he will be joining us or if he has a timeframe. "5 minutes," he says. 10 minutes later, he's still not there, so we wrap up and I go on to take care of all the other things I could and should have been doing during the 25 minutes I wasted waiting for him to arrive at the meeting he called. WTF?

I enjoy my boss a lot. We work well together, get along, and can be pretty frank with one another. But today, I was not feeling very collegial. I was feeling pissed. I know that things come up. I know that his other meeting had some big stuff going on in it. But we needed to go over our proposal and for the love of the good Lord Jesus he was the one who scheduled the meeting. If you're not going to show up on time, what's the point of setting the time aside?

I acknowledge that I am a pretty structured person and that working by appointment works for me. I know that if anything, I err on the side of being too rigid. That said, I think it's incredibly impolite to blow off an event where people are waiting for you. It send the message that their time isn't valuable. Which really rubs me the wrong way.

Luckily, we have the sort of relationship where I can express this to him, which I plan to do tomorrow. I don't want to stew and be resentful, so I'm just going to put it out there. Here's hoping he's able to hear me.

And God grant me patience, which is something I need to work on as well.