Buffering

Sometimes I will pause in the middle of a sentence, because I’m searching for the right word. Lately, the people I’ve been talking to have started asking why I stopped, assuming something is wrong or that I thought of something else mid-stream. You can tell I've been hanging around computers too much, because the first thing that came to mind to tell them was, "Please be patient, I am buffering and there is a lot of traffic on the network."

The Corporate Food Chain

Most of the people at the company I work at have been here for more than a decade. This attracted me when I first looked at the company, thinking that people like it enough to want to stay for a long time. Besides, the company must be loyal to its employees to keep them around that long. However, I have since seen the drawback to this phenomenon. If nobody ever leaves, then there are never any openings for promotion available.

The situation has gotten so bad lately that people have started making personal attacks on people higher up on the chain. For example, they wait for them in the parking lot and try to run them down when they are walking out to their cars. Who knew that competition for a job would get so intense?! The only good thing for me is that I’m at the bottom of the chain, so nobody has it out for me. And I’m pretty sure nobody has yet suspected that I’m the parking lot hit-and-run bandit.

A Rocking Meeting

We had a team meeting yesterday for our project right after lunch. Everyone was sort of sluggish and the meeting seemed to be dragging a bit. Then one of the guys at the end of the table started rocking in his chair, most likely in an attempt to stay awake. A moment later the guy next to him started to rock too. All of a sudden, the next guy, and then the next started to rock until everyone around the table was rocking in their chairs. The project leader looked up from writing on her pad to see all of her workers rocking in their chairs and smiling goofily. She gave us a strange look, part “You people are out of your minds” and part “Why are these people all rocking at the table.” After an uncertain pause in which we all were keeping our eyes on the project leader to see what she’d do, not stopping our incessant rocking, of course, she started to rock too. A big grin broke over her face as she realized how fun it was.

It’s nice to have these innocent, childlike moments at work sometimes to break up the monotony.

The Low Sodium Kick

My wife went on this “no salt” kick for a while, because she said I was consuming too much sodium in my food. She started buying no-salt V-8 juice, no-salt soup, no-salt green beans, etc. I tried the things she bought, but soon decided that there is a reason that things have salt in them.

One night, she came into the kitchen and caught me shaking salt from the saltshaker into the V-8 bottle. I made up some lame excuse about the salt releasing the vitamins out of the vegetable juice. She didn’t buy it. However, I think the real low point came when I had to start hiding “salted” green bean cans in a “secret stash” in the back of the pantry behind foods we rarely ate. Who has ever heard of someone having to hide a stash of vegetables, so his wife wouldn’t find them?!

The Wig Shop

J.D.’s daughter C. is four years old. She has a very advanced mind for one so young, yet still holds that completely innocent and simple way of looking at things that is so common in children. The other day she was walking along the sidewalk with her mother, and they passed a wig shop. There displayed in the front window were a variety of mannequin heads with wigs of every color and shape to attract the passer-bys on the street. C.D. looked up at the window and asked her mom, “Mommy, can you go into that shop and just trade your head out for a new one?”