A few months ago I had to fill out a Pre-Evaluation Worksheet at my place of employment. Those things are awful. I fill one out, my boss fills one out, and we hope our answers meet somewhere in the middle. It's chock-full of uncomfortable questions. ("What can your chain of command do to assist you more effectively?" Right. I'm gonna criticize my superiors, in writing, in a document that stays in my personnel file for 5 years.) There's also a horrible fill-in-the-blank section. One of the sentences there is: "I am better than anyone else at ____________________." My first impulse was to fill in the blank with the word "procrastination". Honest, but probably not conducive to a raise. In support of the assertion that I am better (actually, worse) than anyone else at procrastination, I offer this:
My dryer stopped heating about 20 months ago. It stopped working altogether about 16 months ago. Today it was finally repaired. I did nothing whatsoever towards that end--it was Charlie who called the repairman on Friday.
Twenty months. Almost two years. It took the repairman less than an hour to fix the dryer. First he put an electrical thingy (a voltimeter?) on the dryer and determined it was getting only 110 current, not the 220 it needed to work. We ventured into the basement and discovered that half the breaker for the dryer was tripped. I felt sorta stupid for not noticing this myself, but the repairman said that the switch was only a wee bit away from the ON position, so it wasn't obvious. He reset the breaker and the dryer came on, but it still wouldn't heat. The thermal fuse was blown. He replaced that, turned on the dryer, and it worked beautifully. In celebration, I put my jammies in the dryer to heat 'em up and then ran and jumped into bed before they cooled off. (After the repairman left, of course.) It was quite lovely. Even though, since it was almost 50 degrees this morning, that wasn't really necessary.
The first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem.
"Hi, my name's Jaynie, and I am a procrastinator."