Planning Around Animals

I was on my way to a meeting today.

There's nothing that unusual about that - I feel like I spend more of my time in meetings than I do anything tangentially animal related.  I think that I actually calculated that, based on the amount of time I spend in them, I will probably die in the middle of a staff meeting someday.  

It wasn't going to be this meeting, however.  I was about halfway across the zoo to the meeting place when I got a text saying that it needed to be postponed.  There were some issues with an animal introduction under progress, and my fellow meeting attendees needed to focus on that.

They say, "Man plans, God laughs."  Perhaps.  But the animals laugh louder, I think.  I've come to realize over the years how mind-bogglingly difficult it can be to schedule things around animals.  I find this to be especially stressful, because I really like to have things planned out and scheduled.  My (human) coworkers are pretty unreliable on this front, even when the animals are removed from the equation.  

Still, it can be almost impossible to plan things around the animals themselves.  This includes things that are rather difficult to reschedule, such as transports and medical procedures.  Against such uncertainty, what chance does a run of the mill staff meeting have?  I've had meetings that have had to have been rescheduled four or five times before they actually happen.

There's a lot of wonderful things about life in the zoo.  Reliability is, alas, seldom one of those.  Punctuality and predictability aren't either.