The Party's Over

Sheesh, take a week off from work and the whole place falls apart!

Well, maybe not the whole place. But this morning I came in to find that the conference table where people gather for lunch has been removed, and two empty cubicles set up in its place. This makes me sad. I have such happy memories of that table, where I could liven up a rather monotonous diet of soup with conversation and comics, crosswords and sudoku. I used to look forward to lunch there every day, so I kind of fail to see how a couple of empty cubicles are an improvement.

This is true even though, I have to say, sudoku does get a little old after a while. Once you've figured out the basic pattern of how they work, actually doing the puzzles is more time-consuming than challenging. I mentioned that to my dad, and he said he'd arrived at the same conclusion, so amused himself by writing a little program that solves them instead.

That's my dad!

Last time I took a week off from work was also to visit with him and my stepmother, when I flew up to Syracuse in September '05. But then, I was working for that miserable marketing hellhole in Corpus. So although I used a week of vacation, I still had to bring my laptop and spend a couple of hours every day checking email, IMing with coworkers (some of whom were unaware I was supposed to be on vacation at all), and working on buildout of a client website that had gone way, way past deadline. I have a fine appreciation for how wonderful it is to have spent a whole week without thinking about work, to come back to a small handful of non-urgent emails, and to have nothing more on my plate than a couple of meetings and an appointment at the blood drive.

In fact, I kind of need something to do. Maybe I'll organize a fruitless campaign to get our lunch table back.