Flirting with Disaster

When I went to lunch with former coworkers yesterday, I tagged along with a current one, J. She's cool, but I've never really gotten to know her that well. She's sort of an on-and-off member of the three-martini break group - she often doesn't come to break; and when she does, she hardly ever finishes her third martini.

On the drive to the restaurant, we got to talking about stalkers, of all things. Don't ask me how we got on that subject. She was telling me about one she used to have a few years ago; and of course shortly after I started there, my cube neighbor A had a huge incident with some poor crazy bastard who became convinced that they had a tacit, but serious relationship, just because she once asked him conversationally if he weren't cold without a jacket on. A's stalker pushed things a lot farther than J's, who apparently backed off not too long after he should have; A's lost it completely and got fired, and to this day we have a security guard stationed in our hallway, every single day except the second Tuesday and last Friday in odd-numbered months that contain the letter E. (Or something like that. I have not yet actually figured out the pattern; but then, I'm not much of a stalker.)

"Damn," I said to J in the car. "It seems like, where we work, every girl gets a stalker. Where's mine???"

She laughed, but looked at me a little oddly. Nobody understands me.

She had to stop on the way and get stamps, and from the post office parking lot I got my first glimpse of the newly demolished Intel Shell. I stepped out of the car to snap a picture with my phone.

It looks pretty messed up, but not, perhaps, quite as thoroughly demolished as I'd expected.

The demolition charges went off this past Sunday, early in the morning, and I heard the booms from my house. Being mostly asleep and not remembering that the demolition was scheduled for that morning, I didn't know what they were. They didn't sound like anything I could identify - sort of like very loud thunder, but without the rumbly dying-away bit. The house that backs up to ours is steeply uphill, and they have a huge, somewhat rickety-looking addition that comes right up to the fence, looming over our backyard. We keep thinking that one of these days, it's just going to give way and slide right down the hill and crush us. I thought perhaps Sunday was that day.


But it wasn't, so I'm still here, and will still be going back to work on Monday, more's the pity. Perhaps I'll see about posting a job requisition for my very own personal stalker. My division is rife with likely candidates. Must have skin.