Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Friday, October 04, 2002 Weird day. First of all, I spent most of the morning under my desk, dismantling enough electronic equipment and wiring to fill an FBI surveillance van. You can imagine how much I’m looking forward to putting it all back together on Monday. Really, the time-consuming part was making and attaching all of these little labels to both ends of every cord I detached before I detached it, so I don’t go to put it back together, plug it all in wrong, and accidentally send myself forward in time or something. Sending myself back in time wouldn’t be so bad, because then I could warn myself to leave it alone and just make the IT department do it. But as Mom always told me, uncontrolled temporal displacement is not something you want to be rolling the dice on. Where was I? Oh, right. So I get that out of the way, and then my boss tells me that the new voice recording system is here and it’s too big for the delivery guy to load onto the elevator from the dock to the second floor. This is another instance where a visit from my future self would have been handy, because he would have told me to say, “that’s his problem.” Instead, I went down to the loading dock with the guy and led him back up to the second floor with a large pallet of boxes. The second pallet was quite a bit bigger. The delivery guy was right about it being too big to fit in the elevator. We would have had as much chance of that as we would have had parallel parking a Honda in there. So like an idiot, I signed for the thing and cut him loose, figuring that if nothing else, I could open up the crate and get the contents carried up in pieces. While I was signing, a janitor walked up to us and asked me, “Do you have any idea where Ben Franklin is?” Since answering the question would require me to know what Ben Franklin was in this context, I asked for clarification. The janitor explained that an electrician from a company called Ben Franklin was in the building doing some work. “I thought you might be able to help me but I guess you don’t have a clue he sneered, turning away. I ran up behind him, hurled him to the floor, and started banging his head against the tiles while the delivery guy kicked him repeatedly in the stomach. No, that never happened. Instead I snapped, “Hey! What’s your name?” He stopped short. “Kevin,” he said. “Kevin, do you talk to everyone that way, or just people at your workplace?” “You’re not my boss.” “Yeah, you’re right. What’s your boss’s name?” “Boy, are you in trouble,” the delivery guy observed. Long story short, dude was carrying his personal belongings out to the parking lot within an hour. Okay, that didn’t happen either. I did roll my eyes extravagantly while the delivery guy made a sympathetic crack about his rudeness. I’m such a loser. Anyway, now I was more worried about the larger-than-an-elevator-car box in the basement that I had made myself responsible for transporting upstairs. Once I cracked it open, it became apparent that the contents were going upstairs either in one piece or not at all. I drafted a couple of phone reps to help me load it onto a cart, but once we’d done that, it was clear the crate was going to be too tall to get through the door. We ended up borrowing some tools from the janitor (a different janitor) and tearing the crate apart. Fortunately the cabinet inside had wheels when we upended it, so getting it down the hall and up the elevator proved to be no more difficult than wheeling a fully stocked industrial refrigerator through a corn maze. No problem whatsoever. So then I had to finish clearing off my desk and now my workspace looks like someone picked up one side of it and tipped it into a rolling wooden cart. Except of course for the single VCR I wired back up to the video wall so people could watch the game. I’m not used to seeing this much Formica from my seat. The sounds of my keystrokes echo strangely in the empty space. It’s like somebody attacked it with an experimental bomb that only destroys binders and office supplies. It’s just going to get weirder, though, because tonight Trash and I are going to the Mall of America. On purpose. We’re seeing Girl Detective and G. Grod tonight, and we didn’t want to go downtown (Twins playoff game, torrential downpours, road construction, and terrorism evacuation drills) and they didn’t want to go Uptown (insufficient parking, torrential downpours, Uptown’s high idiot quotient on Friday evenings), so there we are. I think this will make a baker’s dozen of trips to the Mall for me since it was built. I should cut down, I think. I wasn’t actually serious about the terrorism evacuation drills downtown. I think that might be going on at the Mall instead. We’ll see. posted by M. Giant 3:24 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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