Pawns in Our Own Game

At conference each year, we tour on three motor coaches. Each coach has a "captain," one of the conference planners, and each captain is armed with a heavy-duty walkie-talkie in order to coordinate with the other two coaches while we're on the road. Are you with me so far?

The captains are not normally armed with tape dispensers - this photo was taken just as I had put all of the the bus signs up. I had the best bus, by the way. Did I mention that I had the best bus? Well, I did. Go Green!

Conference is intense and it's a lot of work. But we have a lot of fun too, and one of the most fun things that we do is the bus cheer. It's funny how these things get started. From what I'm told, there never was a bus cheer until conference two years ago (I didn't work here yet, then), when the host city delegate assigned to each of the three tour buses stirred up the spirit of competition. It was a huge deal, that year. "I think by the end of the week," the delegate from that year's host confided to me last week, "we were just about ready to kill each other."

A few people from that year's host always attend conference, though, wherever it is, so the tradition has continued. My Gator Green bus cheer, last year, was written by an attendee from that city. But this year, the delegate had to leave partway through the week - and we pressed on regardless.

It's funny how things take on a life of their own. She started a cheer; no one much cared for it, and I thought it would fizzle out after she left. My two bosses were the captains of the other two buses, and they thought the whole thing would fizzle out too. But our attendees wouldn't let it drop. One of my bus people wrote us an awesome new cheer. I've told you how we actually ended up rehearsing in my room after hours, thereby ruining whatever reputation as a virtuous innocent I might heretofore have held (but let's not kid ourselves).

All that happened, though, was that my boss mentioned that on her bus - the blue bus - she was surprised at who had written the cheer. He's someone from our office, a good friend of mine. He's a funny, intelligent person, but not exactly someone you'd picture as a cheerleader. His supervisor happened to be assigned to my bus. So it all went down like this:

"Hey, you guys," I told my bus, "I heard a rumor that the Blue bus is really good. I heard they've been practicing. And I heard their cheer was written by a professional writer."

My bus immediately began to murmur. A professional writer? Who could it be?! "Isn't Charles on that bus?" asked one of my attendees, but his boss piped up right away: "Oh, I don't think that's the sort of thing Charles would do."

"I know!" I said significantly, "I wouldn't have thought so, either."

Her eyes flashed, and from that point it was GAME ON! Rehearsal was held in my room later that evening. Here I am with the photographer for whom I sacrificed my reputation, by the way. You have to admit he is pretty cute.


But even egging on our attendees this way - and there is some very strange sociology going on here, I have to admit - neither of my bosses, nor I, really knew quite how it got to be so big, or quite where some aspects of the whole phenomenon started off. I mused about it after the cheer competition, which I still think the Green bus should have won. "Does it ever seem to you," I asked my two bosses, "that we are merely pawns in our own game?"

They looked hard at me. "Well, duh," they said.

Just checking.

Forget the tape dispenser. If only I could dress like this for work every day!

Musings to Clean Your Clock By

The other night, Margie and two of her band friends and I were discussing where the phrase "to clean your clock" comes from. None of us knew - and I suppose it's only my own fault that Wikipedia still doesn't have an entry on it - but we did determine that "Music to Clean Your Clock By" would be a great album name.

Also, the band name du jour is "Snotty Literati." I know you were wondering.

Out of curiosity, how many things in your life do you look back on that make you go "Unnngh"? One, or two, or five or twenty? I think I have six or seven: horrible things that never quite fade, and every time you remember that this particular something or set of somethings happened (somethings, of course, that I did), you go "unnngh."

Here's one: I was, I think, 10 or 11, and riding the schoolbus was a nightmare. No, it really was. Mine was one of the last stops, and by the time the bus arrived it was pretty completely full. Nobody wants to let you be the third person in the seat. There was that one small seat in the back, and the person sitting in it used to scrunch down where he wasn't visible from the front. So the bus driver, impatient, would say, "There's an empty seat in the back!" and you knew perfectly well there wasn't, because this had happened several times now; but you had to walk back there anyway because the driver told you to; and as you got close, the kid sitting there would pop up - again - and the whole bus would laugh at you for falling for that one. Again. You dumbass!

So to get out of the ordeal, I started hiding when the bus was pulling up - in the culvert, or around the side of the house, or behind the air conditioning unit. My parents had to drive me to school every day. I told them the bus driver was deliberately skipping the stop where I was waiting.

So they called the school, and some big stink ensued, and I'm sure something happened to the bus driver - he was also a science teacher, by the way, but I was never in his class - and I got in huge trouble at home and had to go back to riding the bus, where the driver was distinctly chilly to me for the rest of the year.

Unnngh!

Of course, that one is long enough ago, and comparatively minor enough (though I'm sure it entailed some unpleasantness for the bus driver at the time) that I can write about it; not that much of an unnngh, now. But I have plenty of others much fresher and unnnghier. So I'm kind of wondering why I have so little empathy for my son, who just did himself up a treat, mate.

"Does life always suck?" he asked me, so I said, "No, only sometimes, and then it gets better... And then it sucks again. And then it gets better. And then..."

I don't know, you just try to distract yourself by hanging out with friendly people and coming up with funny band names, right? And thank every star in the sky you don't have to ride the schoolbus anymore.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

Not really, I've been doing so much, like, omigod you guys, I am sooooooooooooo tired.

Okay. Tuesday I was on by 6:30, breakfast at 7, on the buses at 8, 7 stops and 3 drive-by tours, lunch and dinner, coordinating videos and step-on guides on the bus and making announcements, back at the hotel at about 9pm, check my room set-up for the following morning, go find a banquet manager to make a small change, visit the hospitality suite, back to my room about 10pm.

I was wiped, if you can believe it. Oh and get this, they delivered bed down gifts Tuesday afternoon and they left my door unlatched and the sleeping room doors are not self-closing - in fact they swing open - so I get back to my room at 10 and the door is just wide open. Hello! iBook on my desk and iPod in my backpack and all!! Thank goodness nothing was messed with, but we're having a little word with the hotel about that at the post-con.

Okay. So yesterday it was general session in the morning, and I did not hate the speaker anywhere near as much as I expected to - she was actually pretty funny - but still a motivational speaker, so it can only be so good of course. That being over we boarded the buses and went for lunch, an afternoon of quickie little tourlets, and a dine-around with a couple of bars downtown. This was really fun. Saw a gator wedding..

Now, there were three buses, right? Mine was Gator Green. You have to come up with a cheer. Not my idea; cheers never are, but my boss' boss was on my bus and she was pretty insistent, so we came up with, and last night at the final bar performed, in a cheer-off with the other two buses, which I would like to point out that we won, the following:

Clap four times and shout, "Go Green!
We're hot! (We're hot!)
You're not! (You're not!)
We're mean! (We're mean!)
We're green! (We're green!)
That's right! (That's right!)
We got bite! (We got bite!)
So get back on your bus! And don't you mess with us!
Don't be a hater, cause we're the Green Gators!
Na na na na, na na na na, Green Gators, Number One! (repeat a few times)
Woo Hoo!!! (etc.)

Okay, so we did that at the bar, but there were a whole bunch of us - a busload, not to put too fine a point on it - but back up to yesterday morning, when -

Okay, I'll continue this later, I gots ta go, yo.