Are you nervously eyeing the calendar, fretting over the quickly shrinking number of days left to shop for Christmas presents or finish other 2006 projects before the year ends? You’re not alone. We’re all behind.

Though AT&T said last week that it would launch its third IPTV market this week, I was surprised that the company was still targeting a goal of 15 IPTV markets by year’s end. It’s now Tuesday, and I haven’t seen any announcements from AT&T on the subject. Excluding the holiday, they now have only 12 business days left to launch the other 13 markets. Then again, Chief Financial Officer Rich Lindner downplayed the 15-market goal earlier this month, saying that the company had “a good shot at” achieving it but insisting that “the important thing is that we look ahead to 2007.”

If you think AT&T has a long way to go and a short time to get there, 13 IPTV markets in as many days is nothing compared to what the Bush administration has to do by the end of the month. The administration only has a few weeks left to make good on the president’s stated goal of “universal affordable broadband” by 2007. They had almost three years to get it done, but like me in college, they’re going to have to stay up all night right before the deadline to get it done. Luckily for them the assignment was so vague to begin with that there’s enough room to wiggle through. And anyway, there are more pressing assignments that are also overdue: namely, Federal Communications Commission approval of the AT&T/BellSouth merger, which has been delayed long enough to really irk the equipment vendor community. (Those folks are usually torqued up this time of year anyway, waiting anxiously to see how carriers spend the year-end remains of their annual budgets.)

I hope everyone has all their shopping done and hadn’t planned on taking a lot of time off for the holidays. It’s going to be a tense few weeks until January.