Weeks like this are kind of strange

Have you ever had a week at work where you are jumping back and forth between two totally different types of work? It can be strange and even a little disorienting.

Here's what I mean: This week the chamber staff is helping organize the Zanesville Gus Macker Basketball Tournament. It is an annual project of the ZDA, which is an arm of the Chamber, and it is a major undertaking. So our staff members are running around doing physical set up for the event, alongside dozens and dozens of volunteers. Yesterday, for example, we set up the basket units, which are metal structures that come in pieces on a truck and then are assembled here.

Interspersed with that kind of work, we plop down at our desks every now and then and hurriedly answer phones messages and emails and try to get some essential tasks done, maybe in preparation for an upcoming meeting or something. Then we get back to work out on the street or down the hall.

It is kind of fun and its not hard, although it can be physical. But it sort of throws me off. Switching gears rapidly from physical labor to thinking and concentrating on information and issues is evidently not my forte. All of our staff does it and does it pretty well, however.

This weekend we will all spend two days working various jobs at the tournament. In some ways that is the easiest part since we can just worry about the event coming off okay. There is no administrative work back at the office that can't wait for two days.

Then the event tear down takes place, and as you know the aftermath of a party is always the worst part. For at least few days into next week we wrap things up and put supplies away.

Then its back to our mostly administrative work. And even though we are all very tired by this time, I think all of us kind of miss the nice change of routine we just had and regret now being relatively tied to our meetings, memos and desks.

But its never for long. Some project, meeting or other event will soon drag us out and make us do real work again, before the month is out in fact. And we all look forward to it.