Jon And The Quest For The Gray Fleece

I didn’t sleep well at all over the weekend, so last night found a very tired Jon climbing into bed. Despite this, I still managed to wake up at around 8, though I refused to get out of bed and insisted on sleeping. This was made a challenge by the fact that stupid new dog had been left alone again, and so was yipping its worthless head off.
I think my mind has been colored a bit much by all of the Fables I’ve been reading lately, as I took a great deal of pleasure in imagining myself throwing on the Witching Cloak, grabbing the Vorpal Sword, teleporting down there and putting an end to the barking with a quick Snicker-Snack.
Of course, as satisfying as that would be, I recognized the silliness of it, and soon managed to tune out the yipping and drift back to sleep, waking again a bit before 10.
After – reluctantly – getting up, talking to my mother, and making myself some blunch, I said, as I am particularly wont to do on Sundays, “Screw this,” and went back to bed for another hour and a half.
And now I’m up and still tired.
I need to do the laundry, but can’t build up the motivation, and there are some pictures I could be working on, but, well, it’s Sunday. Sunday isn’t just my day to rest, it’s my day to fester.
The company I work for frequently gives out bits of company-branded merchandise to all of us. It’s done to boost morale and company loyalty, and to make us forget that they’re keeping us in a constant state of uncertainty about the company’s future plans and what, if any, roles we’ll have in that future.
The thinking is, “Give them a logo jacket. It’ll take their minds off wondering when we’re going to ship their jobs to India.”
(As an aside, it baffles me that they can complain so much about the rumor mill, when simple open and honest communication about what’s being planned, even if that information is only the broad strokes – we’re perfectly capable of understanding that some things can’t be revealed and that many plans aren’t final – could easily cut the number of rumors by at least 50%. Consider the sale of the Reston facility. For weeks we’d heard through various grapevines that the place had been sold, and we were seeing people being moved. Meanwhile, not only had we not been officially informed of where – if anywhere – we were going, we hadn’t even been officially informed that the place had been sold. For weeks this went on. I don’t understand how hard it would have been to say, “Hey, as you’ve probably guessed, we sold the building. We’re still trying to figure out where to relocate you, but don’t worry, we’re working on it.” Instead we got silence and rampant speculation, and disingenuous shrugs from our managers when we asked what was going on.)
A while back, like rest of the peons, I got a fleece featuring the company logo. I’m sure that management was hoping that we wouldn’t notice that we’d gotten fleeced literally and figuratively, inasmuch as that while we got cheap outerwear emblazoned with company propaganda, select other employees were getting frickin’ iPods.
In any case, it often gets cold in the NOC, so I kept my fleece on hand, hanging in the break room.
Since the fleece was always there, its pocket became a good place to keep the headphones that I also like to have on hand.
For a while I’d been using the ear buds that came with my iPod (the one I paid for myself because the company has never opted to give me one), as I have some pricy noise-canceling headphones I use with it.
But in the course of a 12 and a half hour day, having ear bud crammed in can get a little painful, so recently I bought some nice earphones that clip onto the ear rather than going into it.
Yesterday when I went to grab them at the start of my shift, my fleece, which had been there a scant 12 hours earlier when I stowed my earphones at the end of my previous shift, was no longer there.
Because I tend to expect the worst of people, and because I work some of the people I work with are total assholes, or at the very least immature jerks, I naturally assumed someone had stolen it.
Still, I allowed for the possibility that this wasn’t done intentionally, particularly given how lame it was as a bit of theft. I mean, we all got the damn fleeces at one point, and we’re not talking about terribly expensive earphones.
But the fact remained that I wanted it back. Not so much for the sake of the fleece, of course, but I did want my earphones back.
So I first asked the manager on duty if someone had done some sort of “spring cleaning” on the coat rack, as it did seem to have been messed with, but she was unaware of any such activity.
I wrote a neutrally-worded e-mail asking for its return and had the manager forward it out to everyone.
Some hours later I went into the break room to take a look, and sure enough, there was my fleece on a hanger, complete with earphones.
I can’t help but wonder why it was taken in the first place – maybe someone was cold and thought it was some sort of community property – but I was glad to have it returned.
Still, I won’t be keeping my earphones in it any longer.
And so the quest for the gray fleece was pretty much my big adventure for the weekend. I know, it wasn’t exactly Jason and the Argonauts, but maybe one day, after constant retellings, the story will grow to mythic proportions.
Somehow I doubt it, but you never know.