After Midnight
Hello World,
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, and may I say, in all sincerity, that I have a dream. Actually, it was the late and lamented Dr. King who had the dream, and it was a doozy, as I recall, something about not judging others by the color of their socks, but by the color of their children's children's socks, or something along those lines. I'm thinking I might not have hit that right on the head as accurately as I'd like to, but you can believe me that in 1968, this was the bee's knees of dreams, and it continues to stand the test of time, no matter what color your socks are. Feel free to quote me on that.
I must confess that my plan to roll away our little table-top Christmas tree at work into a spare office certainly solved one problem, while managing to create a host of others. Seriously, this empty office had been just laying around deserted for so long that it literally had dust all over everything in it, and you couldn't force anyone into it at gunpoint. Now that the tree is hiding in there temporarily, suddenly the place has turned into Grand Central Station, and every Tom, Dick and Harry in the Queen City wants to get in there. The day after I moved it, Housekeeping sent over a fellow to vacuum our offices and hallway. The last time someone came to vacuum in our building, it was a Hoover, and here I'm talking about President Hoover during the Great Depression. So I move the tree, and out of the blue, they send someone over to vacuum for the first time in years. I had to lock the office so he didn't go in there and bump into the tree. After that, I went to file some year-end reports in that office, and realized that I had put the tree in the only place that would make it impossible for me to get from the door to the cabinet where I needed to file them. I left them on the desk for "later" which at this rate could mean the next millennium. Then we had a meeting of six people in our conference room, and when two of them needed to break apart and meet separately for a few moments, in they went to the spare office with the tree. If I do this same thing next year, I'll remember to print up tickets I can sell to this prime spot on the Purchasing map, because it certainly turned into the destination of choice, once I had a reason to keep people out of there. You know what they always say in real estate: Location, location, location.
Ever since that fateful day of the Christmas Tree Caper, we have all had to listen, long and loud, to the unending complaints of people coming down our hallway in the face of that horrible fun-house mirror that we've got at our end of the corridor. We would honestly get fewer complaints if we left Santa Claus taped on the wall all year long, month in and month out, than people having to look at themselves in that mirror. You can see yourself in it all the way from Payroll, which is all the way at the other end of the building (and is depressing enough in a non-profit organization!) and as you walk towards Purchasing, you can just watch yourself getting smaller and fatter, wider and more mis-shapen with every step. It's a good thing there's no windows nearby, or people would just jump right out on the spot. Of course, as I once remarked to a co-worker who said he was going upstairs to throw one of the secretaries out the window, the building is only 3 stories, and not nearly high enough to do any real damage. You'd have to carry them all the way across the courtyard to the main building, and throw them out the 9th floor, and let's face it, who has time for that?
One funny thing happened after I finished last week's note, and it was much later than it usually is when I finally wrap things up and go to bed. I had gotten home late, so we ate later than usual, and then ran some errands, so by the time we got back, I was way behind schedule. So at long last, I walked out of the den into the hallway, and this is what I'm thinking to myself as I head toward the stairs: "Will you look at that dark spot in the middle of the floor there. It's amazing that you can see, even in this dim light, that one spot is so much darker than everything around it. Even though the floor is all dark wood, and should be all the same kind of brown everywhere, you can see this one spot is just so much darker ... " and then it blinked at me. Why, hello there, Captain Midnight! Yes, it was indeed our very own inky black stranger, The Invisible of Invisibles, the guy who puts the "stealth" in "stealthy," the one and only Captain Midnight, fresh from his hiding place under the kitchen sink and out here in the wide open spaces of the front hall in the middle of the night. And I can tell you true, if he hadn't blinked at me, I would have walked right past him, because it really is true that his coat totally absorbs light and you just can't see him at all. If he ever gets a pair of sunglasses, we're in big trouble.
Normally, this is where I'd be telling you what's new and exciting in the wonderful world of higher education, because everyone knows I'm in favor of the use of hallucinogenic chemicals in school children. No, no, no, that can't be right. That isn't at all what I meant by the term higher education, but rather, the Spring 2006 course offerings at the New School in the heart of Greenwich Village. (Wait a minute, maybe that WAS what I meant by "higher" education after all!) They say that nearly 1,000 courses await me in 10 curriculum areas, taught by scholars, artists and other professionals, and which will open me up to an exhilarating new educational experience. (Hmm. That sounds more like that other definition of "higher" education again.) Anyway, I would be telling you about these exhilarating new curriculum areas, except that they didn't provide any examples of these exhilarations, just a postcard that I could mail for their course catalog. That seemed like a little too much deferred gratification for my liking, especially after that build-up, and we all know that people who believe in better living through chemistry have notoriously short attention spans. I can repeat that for those of you on drugs. I said, I can repeat that for those of you on drugs.
Speaking of people on drugs, here's a story from work that probably makes more sense among those members of the high society, as it were. For years, every week I would call to have one of the hospital's trash containers picked up and emptied by our waste company. Finally I asked them if I could instead have it picked up automatically every week on Wednesday, and in the Dispatch office, they said they couldn't help me with that, I needed to speak with Abigail in a special department. So the week before Christmas, Abigail and I had this conversation and she said that we could have the container picked up automatically every week without me calling, but it would be on Tuesday and not on Wednesday. I said that was fine and wished Abigail a merry Christmas. I was off from work after Christmas, so in the middle of last week, I figured I should call and make sure the container was picked up the last week in December, when I had called for it, and also the previous day, when it was supposed to be picked up automatically. In Dispatch, they told me it was picked up on the 28th, but they had no call for it on the day before, so they didn't pick it up. I told them the story about me and Abigail having this conversation where we made these arrangements, and they said I would need to straighten it out with her. I reminded Abigail of our conversation in December, and she looked it up and agreed with everything I said, and then she started talking to me like I was the Village Idiot: "I ... SAID ... I ... WOULD ... SET ... IT ... UP ... FOR ... EVERY ... TUESDAY ... SO ... IT ... WILL ... BE ... PICKED ... UP ... ON ... TUESDAY ... TODAY." (With this sense of "you moron" implicit in her comments.) Everyone knows I'm too polite to laugh, but even I had to say, "Today is Wednesday." I have to say, in Abigail's defense, this completely threw her for a loop, since apparently she had no idea that it was actually Wednesday and not Tuesday, because she literally gasped when I said that (I'm thinking she would have been surprised on Friday when she didn't go in to work because she thought it was Saturday, so it was a good thing we got that squared away on Wednesday instead.) Anyway, she called me back later and said that they had actually picked it up on Tuesday, even though Dispatch told me they didn't, so to say that I have no confidence in this whole scheme would be putting it mildly. Don't think that I'm not going to call them again next week and probably have the same conversation about whether they actually picked up the container on Tuesday or not, and at this rate, things are going to get pretty smelly around the hospital if not. I'm sure glad I came up with this idea to save time on my part, so I don't have to call them every week!
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, and may I say, in all sincerity, that I have a dream. Actually, it was the late and lamented Dr. King who had the dream, and it was a doozy, as I recall, something about not judging others by the color of their socks, but by the color of their children's children's socks, or something along those lines. I'm thinking I might not have hit that right on the head as accurately as I'd like to, but you can believe me that in 1968, this was the bee's knees of dreams, and it continues to stand the test of time, no matter what color your socks are. Feel free to quote me on that.
I must confess that my plan to roll away our little table-top Christmas tree at work into a spare office certainly solved one problem, while managing to create a host of others. Seriously, this empty office had been just laying around deserted for so long that it literally had dust all over everything in it, and you couldn't force anyone into it at gunpoint. Now that the tree is hiding in there temporarily, suddenly the place has turned into Grand Central Station, and every Tom, Dick and Harry in the Queen City wants to get in there. The day after I moved it, Housekeeping sent over a fellow to vacuum our offices and hallway. The last time someone came to vacuum in our building, it was a Hoover, and here I'm talking about President Hoover during the Great Depression. So I move the tree, and out of the blue, they send someone over to vacuum for the first time in years. I had to lock the office so he didn't go in there and bump into the tree. After that, I went to file some year-end reports in that office, and realized that I had put the tree in the only place that would make it impossible for me to get from the door to the cabinet where I needed to file them. I left them on the desk for "later" which at this rate could mean the next millennium. Then we had a meeting of six people in our conference room, and when two of them needed to break apart and meet separately for a few moments, in they went to the spare office with the tree. If I do this same thing next year, I'll remember to print up tickets I can sell to this prime spot on the Purchasing map, because it certainly turned into the destination of choice, once I had a reason to keep people out of there. You know what they always say in real estate: Location, location, location.
Ever since that fateful day of the Christmas Tree Caper, we have all had to listen, long and loud, to the unending complaints of people coming down our hallway in the face of that horrible fun-house mirror that we've got at our end of the corridor. We would honestly get fewer complaints if we left Santa Claus taped on the wall all year long, month in and month out, than people having to look at themselves in that mirror. You can see yourself in it all the way from Payroll, which is all the way at the other end of the building (and is depressing enough in a non-profit organization!) and as you walk towards Purchasing, you can just watch yourself getting smaller and fatter, wider and more mis-shapen with every step. It's a good thing there's no windows nearby, or people would just jump right out on the spot. Of course, as I once remarked to a co-worker who said he was going upstairs to throw one of the secretaries out the window, the building is only 3 stories, and not nearly high enough to do any real damage. You'd have to carry them all the way across the courtyard to the main building, and throw them out the 9th floor, and let's face it, who has time for that?
One funny thing happened after I finished last week's note, and it was much later than it usually is when I finally wrap things up and go to bed. I had gotten home late, so we ate later than usual, and then ran some errands, so by the time we got back, I was way behind schedule. So at long last, I walked out of the den into the hallway, and this is what I'm thinking to myself as I head toward the stairs: "Will you look at that dark spot in the middle of the floor there. It's amazing that you can see, even in this dim light, that one spot is so much darker than everything around it. Even though the floor is all dark wood, and should be all the same kind of brown everywhere, you can see this one spot is just so much darker ... " and then it blinked at me. Why, hello there, Captain Midnight! Yes, it was indeed our very own inky black stranger, The Invisible of Invisibles, the guy who puts the "stealth" in "stealthy," the one and only Captain Midnight, fresh from his hiding place under the kitchen sink and out here in the wide open spaces of the front hall in the middle of the night. And I can tell you true, if he hadn't blinked at me, I would have walked right past him, because it really is true that his coat totally absorbs light and you just can't see him at all. If he ever gets a pair of sunglasses, we're in big trouble.
Normally, this is where I'd be telling you what's new and exciting in the wonderful world of higher education, because everyone knows I'm in favor of the use of hallucinogenic chemicals in school children. No, no, no, that can't be right. That isn't at all what I meant by the term higher education, but rather, the Spring 2006 course offerings at the New School in the heart of Greenwich Village. (Wait a minute, maybe that WAS what I meant by "higher" education after all!) They say that nearly 1,000 courses await me in 10 curriculum areas, taught by scholars, artists and other professionals, and which will open me up to an exhilarating new educational experience. (Hmm. That sounds more like that other definition of "higher" education again.) Anyway, I would be telling you about these exhilarating new curriculum areas, except that they didn't provide any examples of these exhilarations, just a postcard that I could mail for their course catalog. That seemed like a little too much deferred gratification for my liking, especially after that build-up, and we all know that people who believe in better living through chemistry have notoriously short attention spans. I can repeat that for those of you on drugs. I said, I can repeat that for those of you on drugs.
Speaking of people on drugs, here's a story from work that probably makes more sense among those members of the high society, as it were. For years, every week I would call to have one of the hospital's trash containers picked up and emptied by our waste company. Finally I asked them if I could instead have it picked up automatically every week on Wednesday, and in the Dispatch office, they said they couldn't help me with that, I needed to speak with Abigail in a special department. So the week before Christmas, Abigail and I had this conversation and she said that we could have the container picked up automatically every week without me calling, but it would be on Tuesday and not on Wednesday. I said that was fine and wished Abigail a merry Christmas. I was off from work after Christmas, so in the middle of last week, I figured I should call and make sure the container was picked up the last week in December, when I had called for it, and also the previous day, when it was supposed to be picked up automatically. In Dispatch, they told me it was picked up on the 28th, but they had no call for it on the day before, so they didn't pick it up. I told them the story about me and Abigail having this conversation where we made these arrangements, and they said I would need to straighten it out with her. I reminded Abigail of our conversation in December, and she looked it up and agreed with everything I said, and then she started talking to me like I was the Village Idiot: "I ... SAID ... I ... WOULD ... SET ... IT ... UP ... FOR ... EVERY ... TUESDAY ... SO ... IT ... WILL ... BE ... PICKED ... UP ... ON ... TUESDAY ... TODAY." (With this sense of "you moron" implicit in her comments.) Everyone knows I'm too polite to laugh, but even I had to say, "Today is Wednesday." I have to say, in Abigail's defense, this completely threw her for a loop, since apparently she had no idea that it was actually Wednesday and not Tuesday, because she literally gasped when I said that (I'm thinking she would have been surprised on Friday when she didn't go in to work because she thought it was Saturday, so it was a good thing we got that squared away on Wednesday instead.) Anyway, she called me back later and said that they had actually picked it up on Tuesday, even though Dispatch told me they didn't, so to say that I have no confidence in this whole scheme would be putting it mildly. Don't think that I'm not going to call them again next week and probably have the same conversation about whether they actually picked up the container on Tuesday or not, and at this rate, things are going to get pretty smelly around the hospital if not. I'm sure glad I came up with this idea to save time on my part, so I don't have to call them every week!
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:24 AM
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