digital pen, digital paper.

Articles of Confession

From: <Me>
Date: Mon, Jan 9, 2006 at 4:26 PM
Subject: RE: Monday misery
To: <GChat>

So far my day has been pretty good (and I apologize in advance, for this story will end with no climax and is filled with parentheticals).

About a month ago, my CEO decided to volunteer some of the people in my office for crew (rowing) practices twice a week for the purpose of team building. They are planning on early morning practices before work (6am), and luckily my position (graphic designer) is not one of the more crucial ones as far as group work is concerned (marketing manager, sales manager, customer service), and I was not chosen as one of the volunteers.

I did however row in high school, and Lake Brantley (my high school) shared a boathouse with the Orlando Rowing Club (the group providing the coach and equipment for my company). They are still working out all the details of the practices and costs, etc., and so today they planned a trip for the CEO, CFO, and Administrative Assistant (fancy name for receptionist/secretary) to go meet the coach in person and learn a little about what they are getting themselves into.

So shortly after coming into work this morning (8:30am) my CEO tells me to grab the camera and ride along to take some photos (CFO and receptionist will actually be getting onto the water). The boathouse is pretty much how I remember it (big cement block building with boats in it). There is a new building next door (edgewater highschool’s boathouse); A giant tree is missing (aliens?); The grass has become overgrown in the ditch we used to shove people into (3 feet deep) if they were standing on the bridge over it and not paying attention; And the sand (which was green) had disappeared because the grass (which is yellow) had grown over it.

Green sand you ask?

Funny thing about the lake they will be rowing on (Lake Fairview): its highly polluted. A few times in the past, the lake had been closed to the public (until the pollution was cleaned up a bit) and one time they found an old lady floating dead in the water. Another time, my glasses (I now wear contacts) fell into the water close to the shoreline, and while searching around in the shallow murky water, I pulled up a bone far too large to be fish or bird (human?).

The whole experience brought back some fond (and some horrible) memories.

By the time we got back to the office, it was almost lunch time (11:30am), so instead of trying to get any work done (I’m also as lazy as California), I went into the warehouse to shoot the shit (pete: do farm town bumpkins such as yourself really pass the time by shooting bullets into poop?) with our shipping/receiving guy. I went home for lunch (one street away), which came and went as I watched an episode of West Wing. When I returned to the office an hour later, a game of foosball was in progress (

For Christmas, our management decided to buy a foosball table for our office as a gift to the employees (I would have preferred a bigger Christmas bonus (only got a $50 gift card to smokey bones)). HR decided it would be fun to have a random pairing (I got paired with my boss’s (improper grammar) wife (cute little Christian girl) for a foosball tournament (prize: 1 extra vacation day).

).

I took some photos of the game and wasted another 30 minutes. 1:37pm rolled around and Marcela sent out an email (RE: Monday misery). Since then I have slowly been writing (poorly) this email while sort or roaming the office (wasting time) and commenting on work related things (to look like I’m not wasting time). The time is now 3:30pm (only an hour and a half left!) and I am about to begin some actual work (not actually). I am gonna start to burn some DVDs (30 – guh!) for a co-worker (HR dept.) and then explain to another co-worker (the head of our engineering dept.) that in the world of fonts, TrueType and Fixed Width are totally different things (I really have nothing better to do with my time).