meetings

So many jobs revolve around meetings, mine no less. Two consecutive days I drive a hire car into Gippsland for six meetings with varied people in various roles. It’s the beginning of establishing networks and contacts I can work with in one of my three regions.

Gippsland is as cold as the rest of Victoria at 7:30 yesterday morning when I head off. The heater is going full bore but I’m well down Eastlink before any warmth penetrates the footwell. Ground mist skims the paddocks as I make for the Latrobe Valley.

Just out of Morwell my mobile goes off. My KM colleague Lisa’s hire car has flat batteried at her motel. I duck off the highway, pick her up. As repayment she guides me kilometres in the wrong direction from our destination, a community health centre in Traralgon.

Three mental health promotion officers meet with us. The acronyms fly. One I can work with, one I don’t need to work with, the other is a mindless complainer and blatherer. Scratched.

Back to her dead car Lisa waits for the RACV while I meet two job-sharing workers with families where a parent has a mental illness in a Traralgon café. They’re good, but one has a low voice and I work my arse off just to hear her. The brain spins looking for ways we might work together, support each other.

Weak late afternoon sun magnifies behind glass as I drive back to Croydon.

Today I leave at seven, another chill morning. First meeting is at the regional education department office in Moe with the head of student well-being. She’s ill but her colleague fills in with great detail. Lisa spruiks KM like crazy; I admire her spiel; she’s got thirty lines to my one.

I race off to a local secondary college. Four of us meet to plan the professional development I’ll present there late this month. It’s productive and we all come out happy. Straight in the car and away to a café in Morwell to meet two school focused youth service offices. One doesn’t show, which mystifies her colleague.

This conversation bears little fruit, the lunch that comes after doesn’t inspire either. I motor away to Warragul, suss out the college, power-nap for fifteen minutes in a quiet car park in town.

I meet a former colleague from my previous job in youth mentoring who’s now the head of year 7 learning at the regional secondary college. Three other staff eventually rock in to the meeting, ill-informed and none too bright. I wonder where they’ve been the past 20 years. The saving grace is they want to run MM in their school.

On the way home a tiny petrol bowser lights the dash. I barely make it to a glitzy new service park at Officer South, if such a place exists. I’m out of gas too.

Rock on.