Into the Office - 12/27/07

Well today I drove in to the office and stayed there all day. For those of you doing the math, that's an hour and twenty minutes or so round trip and 7 hours actually in the office. In exchange I think I managed about 30 words with a real person. That's a pretty crappy rate of return but since absolutely EVERYONE in my sphere of immediate influence was out of the office today by some unpleasant holiday miracle, not a particularly surprising one.

Just for amusement, let's recall those 30 words: E gets credit for 10 words as she saved the company 41 cents by delivering something to me by hand rather than mailing it. I think I could have squeezed a few more words out of her ever-smiling countenance if I'd thought to mention that she can just save them up ad infinitum and I'd pick them up on but I wasn't quick-thinking enough to manage that one. The other 20 words go to T as he accosted me literally as I was walking in the door this morning. T is one of these people who could strike up a conversation with a tree and the tree would have a comprehensible response. It is, frankly, an amazing talent. I'm *SO* jealous. I did get a chance to do what I call the 'accidental conversation termination dance' though. Here's how it goes:

1. Conversation starts unexpectedly, generally across some distance
2. Subject A approaches subject B and conversation continues
3. Subject A senses a lull in conversation and takes it as a hint that the conversation is over and begins to leave.
   
4. Subject B begins speaking again so A dashes back to B so as not to appear rude or disinterested
   
5. By the time A arrives back at B, B has stopped talking and the conversation really is over
   

I really must stop doing that as it's most embarrassing, especially since it generally only happens with people you don't talk to very much anyway and might actually be offended by the maneuver.

Alright, enough of that. The office silence was certainly not a problem today. I heard all manner of interesting background tidbits including a complete inventory of all the Christmas gifts received within a 10-cube radius, detailed instructions and FAQ on how to pay a citation online and the hardware requirements of an entire department. All in all, much more interesting than the Leave it to Beaver reruns I'd get at home.

On returning home, however, I found chaos and a general miasma of pissed-offedness. It is too early to draw a causal relationship between going to work and the death of domestic bliss but things were clearly not in a good form. Children were being obnoxious and demanding, adults had headaches, crap littered the areas I had picked up just yesterday. Only hours later did everything return more or less to normal. I guess we'll see how things go when I finally make it out of the house again on the 8th. *grumble*