This afternoon, assessing the mug options in our office kitchen and noting that almost all of them had lipstick marks around their rims, I found myself reaching into the dishwasher to retrieve my dirty mug from earlier in the day.
About that time, a phrase flashed through my brain that had never been so true:
“The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.”And I also realized an even greater truth: Satan lives in the office kitchen.
Just take one look at the communal microwave.
Saturday we grabbed lunch at Elephant & Castle in Chicago. (I know, I’m not a fan of chains either, but it was damn cold out, it was one block from our hotel, and it had a selection of over a dozen good draft beers. So take that.)
Anyway, there was a woman <in her early forties with bleached blonde hair and a loud attention-seeking voice> seated at the bar with three older male companions.
Her voice was so intrusive that Alan kept cringing.
“Honey,” I said to him, but as if I were talking to her, “I’m sure you were cute when you were 20, but you’ve doubled in age. Not so cute at Volume 11.”
Alan added, “And now you look like leather.”
Then he cackled and forecast, “You’re probably going to get me in a fight!”
“No,” I told him. “Those aren’t fighting words. But I’m working on some.”
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind on the work front as I’ve done a mad scramble to conduct Year End Business Reviews with some of our key clients in the Midwest. It’s meant a lot of travel and preparation, hence the absence on PithyPants for a few days.
This week I was onsite at a client from 9am-4pm in back-to-back meetings with different buyers and stakeholders from that company. The day was productive but taxing – especially because my normal eating schedule was disrupted. I tried to discreetly sip on a Diet Mt. Dew during my first meeting, but I felt decidedly W.T. so I abandoned the 20 oz bottle under the table and switched to water.
Interestingly, if you are craving caffeine and substitute your beverage with water, you end up pounding it by the gallon because you’re subconsciously not sated. So every time we had a 10-minute intermission between meetings, I bolted for the bathroom.
This wasn’t a big deal until my primary client – the woman who had coordinated the day of meetings and who is leading the charge on negotiating aggressive contract terms – ALSO needed to use the restroom.
You sit at a table and have formal conversations about ROI, cost-effectiveness, partnership. Then you hit the bathroom and continue the business talk, but with the odd accompaniment of bladders emptying.
Sitting on the toilet, I got a silent case of the giggles, thinking how funny it would be to have an “Austin Powers” moment in which I just kept peeing and peeing and peeing, leaving her to awkwardly stand by the sink and wait. Or how it would be awesome if she concluded her business by ripping an audible fart.
Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I just think there’s just something odd about taking a business conversation into a bathroom.
I suppose it could be worse. At least we weren’t using urinals. And we both washed our hands.
The pool where I swim is a 15 minute drive from my house, so if I forget something mission-critical (like goggles or my bathing suit), I forfeit my workout rather than make the roundtrip twice.
That precise problem reared its head this weekend, when I arrived at the pool only to realize I’d forgotten my photo ID, meaning I wouldn’t be admitted to the pool. GRRRR. Fuming, I drove home completely irked.
When I got home, however, I saw that my towel was still hanging on the back of the bathroom door knob, so my missing ID was actually a blessing in disguise. I can’t imagine wrapping up a workout completely soaked with no ability to dry off before heading out into freezing temperatures.
This wasn’t the first time I’d forgotten something important, and it reminded me of another time recently when I got to the pool only to realize I’d left my flipflops at home. If you don’t understand how flipflops could be critical, then you clearly haven’t spent much time in a public lockerroom.
Remember playing “lava” when you were a kid, trying to avoid touching the floor when you walked? That’s kind of like me navigating a lockerroom without flipflops. I look at the nasty floor and all I can think is, “Plantar’s Warts!”
I flew out of Milwaukee for the first time Friday morning, and do you know what I learned?
Where was THIS guy? Probably already in Florida.
First, I learned that the Milwaukee airport has a unique population of travelers.
I don’t think I’ve ever stood in line at 6:30am with a whiter, more senior, more leisure-seeking crowd. And this is including the cruise docks in south Florida.
I wasn’t really paying attention until I noticed the number of people around me publicly clutching their boarding passes and photo IDs. There’s something about that move that smacks of novice. Business travelers have a routine and need their hands free to check email, so they can retrieve key documents in the nick of time, but they aren’t standing in line as if they’re about to undergo immigration.
Once I noticed that detail, I looked up at the faces and was surprised by how, um, WHITE they were. The line was ridiculously long (but fast moving, presumably because of everyone’s diligent preparedness?) so I had a fair population to sample. Using rudimentary physical characteristics, I was only able to easily identify 3 minorities in a line that included at least 100 travelers.
Coming from DC, which really is a melting pot, this struck me as odd. Then I dialed in and realized that most of those pasty faces were paired with white/blue/no hair. Snowbirds, indeed.
Second, I learned a few details about one specific passenger.
Behind me in line were three women in their early forties who were clearly getting away for a girl’s weekend, and they were beyond excited about it. Since they spoke loudly (at a fast clip with a midwestern accent that was more Fargo than Chicago), in the five minutes they were behind me, I learned a few more things.
For starters, one woman is apparently a real jokester. At least, she and her friends think so, but her husband apparently does not. In fact, there is speculation that he doesn’t “get” her sense of humor because he is “anal retentive” and a “real stick in the mud.” (Quotation marks are standing in for the air quotes they used when sharing this information.)
I also learned that someone in that group is hoping NOT for a spa treatment, but a bikini wax, because things have gotten, ahem, unruly. I’m curious to know if any other passengers in the line threw up a little bit of their Starbucks upon learning this detail. I might have, if I had been drinking anything.
I felt close to another discovery about this group, but they happened to look up and realize they were in the wrong line, so they peeled away and went cackling through the airport looking for the other terminal, presumably to bring joy and nausea into the lives of other passengers.
pithypants 