archive for March 2008

should i take offence?

On a road trip for work today, in a different city.

And I have a question.

Is it wrong to feel slightly offended when your ability to successfully utilize instructions to the coffee shop fails and you are forced to return to the Giver Of Instructions for a second attempt?

And prior to elaborating on the instructions, the Giver Of Instructions ever-so-slightly scolds you for not being able to follow such a simple set of directions?

As if she were gently — oh, so gently — rubbing your nose in the poop you left on her nice clean floor?

And once the Giver Of Instructions begins to break the instructions down further — using one syllable words, expansive gestures, and a whole lot of volume (like a tourist in a foreign land) — I realise something?

That when she said “Go down the stairs and there you are”, she didn’t actually mean “Go down the stairs and there you are!“?

Instead, she honestly believed that it should have been obvious — even to me and my little brown-stained snout — that “Go down the stairs and there you are” actually meant “Go down the hall, take the unmarked door, walk forty feet down a hallway, enter an open atrium, go the stairs hidden behind the plants at the back of the atrium (not those plants — THOSE plants), go down the stairs, discover you are in a second subterranean atrium, walk through the scrum of people, look for the unmarked white wooden dividers — unmarked white wooden dividers that TOTALLY AND UTTERLY HIDE THE COFFEE SHOP FROM THE SIGHT OF BOTH MAN AND BEAST — and then look behind them and there you are!“?

Is it wrong?

I’m not saying that I’m going to take her children and then cook them in a pie and then feed her the pie and then tell her what was in the pie and then watch her regret eating the pie or anything like that.

I’m just saying — when I leave today, I ain’t putting my chairs back.

It’s how I roll.

brushing off the cobwebs

[Lurches into frame. Bangs shin on misplaced ottoman. Rubs sleepy bugs out of eyes.]

*Cough*

Uh.

Hey.

How you doing?

Me? Where have I been? How dare I? What gives me the right? Who do I think I am? After not a word not a peep for weeks and you’re worried worried sick that I’ve fallen in a ditch somewhere and there I am lying in the rain with ditch water rising slowly around me bleeding profusely (are my tetanus shots even up-to-date?) and with nary a cookie in sight to revive me and then I just waltz back in here like nothing’s happened! Well, have you got news for me!

My absence? Tragic yet unavoidable.

I’ve been crushed under the weight of developing not one, not two, but EIGHT websites for simultaneous launch on March 1st.

Which — of course — meant that only one of them actually launched on the 1st.

Colour me shocked.

What colour is “shocked”? Sort of a pale Sepia? Burnt Sienna? Carnation Pink?

Or am I just blindly named Crayon colours?

Goldenrod? Mulberry?

But… as of today, four of the eight sites have either launched or been quietly slid into the client’s mail slot.

And me? I am but an empty, withered husk of a man. Whose Lovely Wife has forgotten him. Whose cats have given up for dead and taken a few tentative nibbles of his corpse.

Whose RSS reader has over 5000 news items waiting to be read.

So I think we all know what this means.

RHINO SONG!

RHINO!

[Singing] Rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhino rhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-no!

I missed you guys.

And yes, my tetanus shots are up-to-date.