My company has many offices around the world, but the only one we seem to have semi-regular interactions with these days is the one in the States (probably a language thing. Perhaps I should have learned a few more languages in high school). Even these are fairly rare since they work on different project areas, but the one place that we do still overlap is our company goals and our part in them, so I went about setting up a meeting with several people in my office and one of the people in the US office for a project I am leading.

Although I had the ability to book a meeting room for my coworker in the States, I left it up to him since I’m not familiar with their office and didn’t want to book a “bad” meeting room-meaning one that was too hot/too cold/too noisy/smelled horrible/whatever. I did tell him that I would book one if he wanted me to.

Yesterday he let me know that, because of our booking system, he was unable to book a room for a timeslot in which he was already booked (for my meeting) and could I expand the meeting request to book a room for him? No problem. I went, found one that seemed like a half decent size for one person, and emailed him to let him know what room I had booked.

Shortly after that I got the following response “Um .. that’s not actually a room, that’s the receptionist’s desk.”

Ok.

I cancelled the first “room”, found the next available room and, before booking it, sent a quick email with the room name and jokingly asked if it was a real room.

It turns out that the second “room” was actually the grassy area outside their building.

Riiiight.

Skipping that “room”, I responded that there was only one other room available and asked him if he had access to it. He did, I booked it, and all was good.

About an hour before the meeting he emailed me to let me know that the final room was, in fact, booked by someone else, they just hadn’t marked it as booked in the reservation system, and would I please phone him at his desk when my meeting began.

For future meetings for this project, we decided to forgo any further attempts at booking meeting rooms for him and to just continue phoning him at his desk. Better than sticking him in a storage closet.

Please try your luck again … sucker