Much ado about 15 minutes

Here’s the a downside of working east coast hours while living on the west coast:

I try to start work by 9am Eastern, so I get up no later than 5:45 Pacific.  My first meeting of the day is usually 9:30 Eastern, giving me half an hour to go through some email and wake up a bit more before I have to talk to anyone.  On Thursdays, I have a 9am meeting with my boss, just him and me, so on Thursdays, I get up at 5:30 Pacific – enough extra time awake that I can be coherent.  It’s feels like it’s a whole hour earlier when I wake up, but I get over that once I get out of bed.

That’s not the downside I’m talking about, although it is one.

No, the downside is when your boss, who you thought was a kind and understanding man, deprives you of that 15 minutes of sleep by rescheduling your 9am meeting to another day and making that schedule change at 8am the morning of.  I woke up at 5:30, crept downstairs in the dark to avoid waking John up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, put my contacts in, and then, all awake, I sat down in front of my laptop and found that my boss, who is clearly a cold-hearted monster with no regard for my feelings, had moved the meeting to next week less than an hour before.  If he had made the change last night, I would have seen it AND I COULD HAVE SLEPT IN.