Cool evening cool on the job

It is a crisply fabulous evening, cool and fresh. I smell autumn around the corner. I can't wait to crawl into bed tonight. This is some mighty fine sleeping weather. Windows open, naturally. If I'm not careful I'll snooze till ten.

Last night brought a hard practice and a late start to sleep. I was a bit groggy today, which worked out more or less since the 2,000 or so employees that make up my company were carted off to Deer Creek (aka Verizon Wireless) music center for a four hour "Hooray for us!" meeting. This is a silly affair, and ultimately surreal for hump day. For the most part we dutifully donned our corporate branded apparel and shivered in the shade of the pavilion at the amphitheater watching a photo/video presentation set to music full of candid pictures of us cube jockies. We heard a speech from our CEO, a bit disappointing with all the stuttering but otherwise painless, after which was a hurried Q&A segment followed by an award ceremony for a few ass kicking employees. I work with one of the recipients, and he is in fact an ass kicker. This was followed promptly by lunch which was edible but full of starch. Back to the pavilion to watch the finalists of our own version of America's Got Talent which we use as a fund raising carrot for the United Way. I got to witness a co-worker sing some baritone aria a cappella, another sang terribly karaoke style to some Christian song that involved such enraptured love imagery I imagined it was originally written for a bride of Christ. Yet another group got up and played short selections with hand bells - only they were more like pitched cow bells. I can't explain it. Just imagine hand bells playing "When the Saints Come Marching In" only very clunky - now multiply whatever clunk you imagined by ten. Yes it's possible. Someone in middle management graced us with some wicked break dancing moves set to JT's "Sexyback" and finally we were treated to a group of line dancers grooving to this song I hear at The Ten all the time, but I have no clue what it's called. Ultimately, it was harmless, and I suppose it's good to recognize good work. It's good to get people together off site for a pat on the back, too. But the average I.T. cube monkey isn't concerned with that. At least, I'm not. I would have preferred an afternoon shooting pool or bowling or something that didn't involve sitting in the shaded outdoors. It was all very high school.

A lot about my job reminds me of high school. Not the actual work, but the mechanics of me attending my job. It's certainly not as strict, but every day I stream into a large building with a coffee in my hand and computer bag on my back. I sit in my chair and work at my desk until I have to go to a meeting which will range in utility from highly productive to worse than useless, but for the most part falls under the category of functional. I am glad that I can say my company doesn't fall into the trap of habitually scheduling meetings that do little but waste time. I occasionally pop my head up for light interaction with my co-workers. So really it's like high school meets college. I have a lot more freedom than I did in high school, but I'm still physically stuck in the same location every day until I'm released. I don't enjoy sitting still. At least I don't enjoy sitting still staring at grey/oatmeal colored cubical walls at a desk that just doesn't seem to fit right. Maybe some decorating is in order.

Today, when I got back to the office I was beat from all the extra food and wasted rah rah rah. When 5 o'clock rolled around I was crawling out the door.

It's been go go go just about every day for me for the past two weeks so I decided tonight would make a great night to do nothing but eat an enormous cheeseburger, watch a movie, and defragment my hard drive. File maintenance is like going to the dentist. I should probably do it twice a year, but I just can't be bothered. My hard drive was so full I spent an hour selecting and deleting MP3 files before I could even run the defrag. If it wasn't for this new beast of a packet analysis tool I have to install on my work laptop I'd be blissfully operating with only 3% of my hard drive free.

All this lackadaisical computing occupies me just enough to notice little else but the crickets outside my window which brings me back full circle to the weather, my clean sheets, and how these two components are going to intersect in a heavenly fashion at the Me axis. I feel my nerves along my arms and legs stretch out for that anticipated comfort. No sense in delaying this gratification.