The Traffic Desk and an Emergency Wine-Buying Trip

When I worked in radio a million years ago, there was a thing called ‘the traffic desk.’ The lady who worked at the traffic desk spent her days trying to fit everything into the schedule: the three minute and fourteen second long top-forty songs, commercials, news, weather, sports, public service announcements, and time for spontaneous banter between on-air personalities. I imagine that all this is done by computer now, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe there’s still a traffic desk.

I need a traffic desk at my house.

The single largest stressor in my life is trying to fit everything in. Google calendar is helpful, but only to the extent that it provides a handy visual display of my life on any electronic device I happen to be holding.

This morning I left the house at 7:30 to go to work teaching orchestra camp. When I got home at 1:00 I noticed - much to my horror as you might imagine - that I was out of wine. Mostly. There is a bottle of Charles Shaw Pinot Grigio (otherwise known as 2 Buck Chuck) sitting forlornly in the bottom corner of my wine cabinet. It doesn’t count. It’s not really wine in my humble opinion.

That I have a wine cabinet at all is ridiculous. I drink wine as fast as I buy it. (It might  be important to note that I buy wine by the bottle, not the case.)

It was noted (accurately) on Twitter that the lack of wine in my house was not only sad, but grossly irresponsible. (Thanks, Tom, for pointing that out.)

As soon as I realized my incredible incompetence in planning and organizational skills (i.e., lack of adequate wine purchasing), my brain immediately went into scheduling mode to try and figure out how to fit in a trip to any place that sells wine. I had a piano student at 1:30, so no time to go before that. I had to pick up my daughter from songwriting class at 3, then take my son to Tae Kwon Do at 4, cramming in the only 40 minutes I have all day to write, fix dinner, then go out and teach three more students, after which I was hoping to have a glass of wine on the patio before the sun goes down.

Options:

1) Stop at the store on the way to pick up my daughter from camp.

2) Run to the store next door to the Tae Kwon Do dojo while my son is in class.

3) Pick up aforementioned wine on the way home from the last lessons of the day at 8 p.m.

Option 1 was the only viable choice.

Option 2 meant that the 40 minutes I could use for writing would be eaten up by a wine buying side trip.

Option 3 meant a significant delay in drinking wine at the end of my day. Unacceptable.

And now, having made an emergency wine stop, I'm dealing with a conflict tomorrow because I have to work and my daughter needs a ride home from class and my ex-husband is out of town, so I’m having to beg for help, which I hate because I will, of course, want to return the favor and I’ll have to schedule that in somewhere next week between working, teaching, meetings, dog vaccinations and grooming, etc., etc., etc.

Which is why making sure there was wine in the house for this evening was a priority at my traffic desk today. 

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