I did the laundry last night and just got around to folding it and putting it away today. As I was folding the seemingly endless pile of shirts, it occurred to me that, prior to this occasion, I had last done the laundry on the preceding Wednesday.
So one week had passed since I’d last done the laundry, which led me to wonder how – and perhaps, more importantly, why – I had managed to go through eleven shirts in that period.
I’m not really one to go through several wardrobe changes in the course of a day, so one would think that it in seven days I would go through, oh, I don’t know, seven shirts.
As you travel down the food chain from the highest point and the company is broken up into smaller units and sub-units, there are several groups at my job that I am a part of. Today we had an “all hands” meeting for the very first division at headquarters.
It was held in a very large tent out on the lawn, which led me to expect people to start speaking in tongues and shouting “Praise Jesus!” at any moment, given the old-fashioned tent revival feel (Despite the misleading title to this entry, it was not a meeting about our financial health). No one ever did that, but there was some obnoxious cheering and hooting at various points that made me wish I had some hand grenades at my disposal. Okay, so they called your boss up to the stage or they mentioned your department: big fucking deal. Nobody cares. Sit down and shut the hell up.
I will say that I was kind of amused by the various people who tried – and failed – to get some spontaneous applause started as different topics were discussed or certain people were mentioned. It was kind of like some person trying to get a “wave” started at a baseball game and finding that everyone else has remained seated.
It also reminded me of the “slow clap” guy from Not Another Teen Movie.
All told there were about 1,500 people at the meeting. Because this was at headquarters, which is where they tend to congregate, a lot of those people were attractive young women.
Of course, despite the statistically unlikely preponderance of hot young women present, it was only the members of the overweight and over fifty crowd that opted to sit anywhere near me, one of whom was wearing massive amounts of a really nasty perfume that gave me a headache and made my lips burn. There was a cute girl sitting in front of me, though, so that part, at least, was okay.
Scott was without transportation and Brian just generally skips these sorts of things, so I was stuck there by myself, struggling to stay awake and feeling extremely uncomfortable on the folding chair that was placed far too close to the chair occupied by the smelly overweight woman.
There was a “beer bash” held after the meeting was over, but I didn’t stick around for it.
The last time I went to one of the meetings for this particular group it was held in the evening at the Air and Space Museum and we actually got a presentation from a retired astronaut, which made things much more interesting. In fact, the picture of me featured in my Profile was taken at that event (Additional trivia note: In the picture I’m standing in front of the space shuttle Enterprise).
They tried (and failed) to make this meeting a little more interesting by making it interactive. Throughout it they asked some multiple choice questions which we answered via little wireless keypad. Most of the questions were just opinion questions, though there were a couple of “trivia” questions. It’s because they kept a running tally of votes on the screen with each question that I know roughly how many people were there.
Overall it was pretty damn boring and I can think of a lot of ways in which I would have preferred to spend the day, though I probably would have spent the day not doing anything.
Still, at least I wouldn’t have had to put up with obnoxious Arsenio style hooting or perfume that could qualify as a WMD.
April is nearly upon us, which means that the glut of birthdays within my family will begin.
My sister Kim starts things off on April Fool’s Day, followed two days later by my dad, ten days later by yours truly, and my brother Brad’s two days after that.
For those of you keeping track, I will be 34 this year, as will Kathleen, though she is able to take some small amount of comfort in knowing that I hit that point a full eleven days before she will.
Speaking of Kathleen I opted to meet her for lunch before the meeting, since I was going to be on campus anyway.
Of course, she had to be at a 1:00 meeting which left me with more than a half an hour to kill before my meeting started.
As I often do when I’m at HQ, I found myself kind of wishing that I still smoked. It’s such an effective way to pass the time.
Last week when I was there for the Linux training I found myself thinking that it’s too bad that I couldn’t just limit myself to only smoking when I take a training class or something and have all of these breaks during which I have nothing to do.
Oh well.
I’ll actually hit the two year mark for not smoking in a little over a month.
Not much of note actually happened this week, though that’s hardly different from other weeks. Basically, the only difference was that this week I spent a lot less time chronicling all of the nothing that’s happening than I usually do. I’ll try to get back to my normal levels of detailing the pointless and boring minutiae of my existence next week, I promise.
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