Visiting the mothership
Earlier this week I flew to Atlanta to spend a couple of days in a workshop at my company’s home office. The workshop consisted of eight hours worth of material related to disaster recovery. Exciting stuff. Actually, a lot of it didn’t apply to the environment I work in, but some of the structure in which the irrelevant material was couched was useful. It was cold in Atlanta, and after leaving at 3:20pm on Monday afternoon, I got into Atlanta at 12:30am and took an hour cab ride to my hotel. So I got to bed at 2am. That’s not so bad, considering that it was only 11pm in Los Angeles. The hard part was having to get up at 7am the next morning, when it was 4am in L.A..

While out there I had biscuits and gravy for breakfast both days, and had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in which no one seemed to know what horchata was. The folks at the corporate office were nice, and I made a point of tracking down nearly every person who I’d worked with by phone during the last couple years and introducing myself. I also had a productive planning meeting related to some network migrations that will be coming up. All-in-all it was a very productive time.

A couple of days before I left I told Espen that I’d be going away and that it would be on an airplane. For the next couple of days he kept bringing me a Richard Scary book with an airliner in it and asking questions about it and about this “other work” I had to go to. Then he wanted to know why I had to go to work at all, since there were a couple of boxes of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard. He somehow got the impression that that’s why I have to go to work. To bring home macaroni and cheese. It’s been a hard misconception for him to shake. Personally, I’d rather bring home bacon or shawarma than mac-n-cheese.

itchy & scratchy
On the flight home I had an aisle seat and a couple rows up from me, across the aisle, was a young woman who spent the whole flight talking about e-commerce with a man across the aisle from her. She was tall and well-proportioned, with long and full beautiful brown hair. She had a well-shaped face, but had some complexion problems. She wasn’t exactly striking, but what kept drawing my attention to her was that she kept picking and scratching at her face. She was talking and gesturing animatedly for a couple of hours, but every time her hands weren’t engaged in motions related to the conversation, they were scratching her forehead, her nose, her cheek, her neck. Picking at something on her wrist. Pulling at parts of her lips. Then she’d rub her thumb and forefinger together to collect whatever debris she’d gathered and gesture toward the floor to discard it. A few times she’d root around inside of her ear and then look at what she’d found. And periodically she’d clean the detritus from beneath her fingernails. It was really difficult to watch, and I wondered if the person she was talking to had even noticed. It’s the sort of thing that, once you notice, it’s hard to ignore. I was even considering writing her a note. Something along the lines of “You’re really quite lovely and vivacious, you’ve got w, x, and y positive attributes, but you’ve got to leave your face alone in public!” I think I’m coming from the direction that the scratching is her only problem, while someone else would probably say that it’s merely symptomatic of other issues.

I also noticed that she seemed to have fingers like my Heather’s, ones that bend all the way back to the wrist without much discomfort. Having such a range of movement leads one to naturally let ones fingers assume crazy configurations, and it’s not that hard to find pictures of Heather in which her fingers are doing something slightly strange and artful, a knuckle here or there misbehaving and creating witch twigs of her digits. Never play Mercy with Heather. The flexibility of her fingers and the rigidness of her will are each reason enough to doom you.