Festivus – March 16, 2006

Today is Festivus and we will perform feats of strength later. For now, we will focus on the airing of grievances. Actually we will focus on them at 7:00 pm tonight. Hopefully the airing will lead to changes, that will remove the need for Festivus. But, then again, maybe not.

Grievance: Lack of Proof-reading on permanent printed materials (courtesy of the Dallas Arboretum)

Today I went out for lunch and ate a hamburger with bacon and cheese from a place called Purdys. It was delicious. Equally delicious were my friend’s onion rings that she let me steal all through the meal, which amazingly did not last very long. We left work, ordered at the counter, got our food, doctored it up, chowed down and returned to work in about 40 minutes or so. That is speedy, people! SPEEDY!

At my work, there is some parking under the building, which is great when it is raining or especially sunny or hailing. To get to the underground parking you need to have a clicker to open the gate. There aren’t enough parking spaces for everybody, so not everyone has a clicker and not everyone can get in. To make sure that you can’t get in, they’ve put up a big fence, all the way around the lot, even though my building backs up to a wooded ravine. Today, as we were driving through the gated parking lot, we see one of the big time guys from my company on the other side of the fence. The wrong side. The side without cars or pavement. The side with the big slope and the trees and the ravine. And when we saw him, we think he might have fallen down because he was dusting himself off. The three of us were watching him with disbelief, concern and amusement when we all just burst out laughing — windows down and all. Oh, he heard us.

We watched him a little bit longer and he just kept walking along the fence line, sort of looking down into the ravine. We thought about checking to make sure he was okay, but we thought we’d leave well enough alone; also we didn’t really want him to know who’d gotten such a big laugh at his strangeness. I’m pretty sure we’re safe though, because I’m guessing he’s not going to be talking about whatever it was he was doing back there. It will just be our secret.