Productivity (how do I make that word look sarcastic, anyway?)

I'm not having a good morning, for various reasons. I just returned from a very short trip to a local car service place where there was one car being worked on and no one waiting inside, and I was told it would be almost 2 hours before they could do an oil change and state inspection. Oh, and they don't take appointments. It seems, though, that I'm actually lucky today--our once-monthly housecleaner normally gets here around 9am, but hasn't shown up yet (it's 11), so at least I can hang around the house without being in the way (and feeling guilty about watching someone else work) instead of trying to find somewhere else to entertain a baby while I wait.

When I first got home from the car place, I decided to make a phone call or two. Thursday we were told that our surgeon wanted to postpone Trystan's surgery, and that the secretary would call later that day or Friday to re-schedule. She never did. I didn't actually expect her to, as I had to prompt her to get it scheduled in the first place. I called this morning, and she said that she still needed to "communicate" with the doctor to find out when he wanted to schedule it. Great.

We also have some repairs we need made to our house. For those who have seen the front of our house, you've probably noticed the big crack in the wood over the garage door. We finally found a list of names of people to call who might be able to fix it--out of 6, exactly 1 bothered to call back and show up to even look at it--he hasn't yet gotten back to us with an amount yet (it's been about a week). Another company initially returned my call (I talked to a secretary), but no one has ever called back or just shown up to look at the problem. I started calling people over a month ago, thinking that within a week of my first phone call I might be able to just have the thing fixed (we're talking about probably one afternoon's worth of work, that's all).

I think this is why I like "managing" computers and not people-computer don't make so darned many excuses for why they don't get anything done.