Just a thought

Getting to teach beginning SCUBA classes is something that I look forward to. The Local Dive Store (LDS) that I work for is fairly large and we have many part-timers like me who teach on a fairly consistent basis.

However, I do have one pet peeve. The senior instructor (full-timer) who schedules the instructors for the classes seems to have scheduling and time management issues. The problem apparently is that his “system” of scheduling is (to put it kindly) by the seat of the pants.

More often than not, it takes at least three phone calls and a few personal reminders to get the schedule for the next three to six months. Sometimes I feel guilty about asking so many times, but it seems to be the only way to get the senior instructor (SI) going on setting up the schedule.

Perhaps it is that SI is getting along in years and forgets that he needs to get the schedule done. Alternatively, it could be that he is genuinely disorganized and has a difficult time on getting administrative tasks done (judging from his desk, I think that this might be true). I don’t really know, but I sure wish we had a better system.

Having a person that has time management issues set up a schedule seems to be a contradiction. In the case of SI, I think the old saying “a stitch in time saves nine” could be more accurately stated as “a schedule in time saves many phone calls!”