Who's on Crack?

Somebody where I work is on crack, but I don't like to say anything, just in case it turns out to be me.

A few months ago, I was assigned to plan a safety training session for a group that my section belongs to. We all have to attend these things about once a quarter, and they're always dull as dirt. They are, in fact, so dull that sometimes the guest presenters don't bother showing up; and when that happens, we all have to sit through the work-zone safety film "One Step from Death" AGAIN.

After you've seen this film six or seven times, you start rooting for the cement mixer. Kill! Kill! Kill!

"You're creative," my boss told me when the session was assigned to me to plan. "These meetings are always so dull. I know you can do something much better. Let's show 'em!"

If that doesn't translate into "Hire a snake guy," I'd like to know what does.

My boss, as it turns out, is terrified of snakes. Fair enough: she doesn't have to attend. But she seems to have a certain odd hangup about letting other people do something she personally wouldn't enjoy, and she's also very anxious about doing everything as much by the book as she can manage. If there's not a book for her to go by, she'll get somebody to write one. So even though this snake guy has done multiple safety presentations for other groups in our organization, she decided (though I was supposed to be the one planning this) to take initiative and send an email to the Legal folks, and ask if they were okay with us hiring someone to bring a couple dozen venomous snakes to a safety meeting.

Legal wrote back that they were not sure this was such a good idea.

"Well, forward the email to me," I told my boss, "and I'll talk to them, I'll see if I can straighten it out."

So I wrote back to them, and explained the situation in more detail. I sent the snake guy's long and impressive list of references, mentioned that he does this for schoolchildren and birthday parties, for heaven's sake, and assured them that it was completely safe. Not to mention cool as shit; but I didn't think they'd care about that.

Nothing doing. I'm sure they wouldn't have taken any notice of it if they hadn't been outright asked for their written permission. I talked to a woman from one of the groups he's presented to several times in the past, and she said it had simply never occurred to her to clear it with Legal, because she didn't consider there to be any safety issue. "Snakes can't fly, you know," she informed me.

I knew that.

Anyway, while I was on vacation, Legal wrote back to my boss again reiterating that they could not give their blessing, so it's off. My boss came into my cube today and sat down heavily.

"I got in so much trouble with my boss about the snake guy," she sighed, closing her eyes and shaking her head. "She was so mad. We shouldn't have handled it the way we did. I'm not blaming you, but you never should have contacted Legal. We never should have asked. We should have just planned it, and now we can't. You should never have - we should never have emailed them."

She left me with a bit of a dazed look on my face, I guess. Wait a minute. Am I dreaming? Is she on crack? Did she just chew me out for what she did? What the hell kind of Howard Johnson's is this?!?

So I emailed the snake guy, apologized profusely, explained as much of the situation as I could, and regretfully informed him that we'd have to cancel. I did not use the word "dumbasses" at any point, and I'm rather proud of my self-control; aren't you? He wrote back that he was surprised and disappointed, and that in twenty years of doing this he's never had a presentation cancelled for safety reasons. He didn't use the word "dumbasses" either, but he didn't really need to.

Anyway, this is a terribly long lead-up to the two important questions blazing in the forefront of my brain tonight:

1. Am I on crack?
2. Should I be?

Innocence Beware

In a slightly surreal turn of events, the Bubbly Bitching Nonsmoker seems to feel I need protection from men with nefarious intentions.

She approached me at our conference registration table this morning. "If Cocky McPenis* comes up to you," she said, "just walk away! I'm telling you. He's bad news."

"?" I said.

"Oh, he's got a reputation," she went on. "He's nasty. I mean, what do you expect with a name like that?" She walked away and took her seat in the meeting room.

O...kay?

In the afternoon the conference divided into two breakout sessions: one dealing with the system that B.B.N. and I work in, the other dealing with a related, but separate system handled by other people in our department. B.B.N., the other systems analysts, and I were seated at the front of our breakout room for a panel discussion, and she leaned over and whispered to me:

"Yeah, you need to look out for him. He noticed you. He's attending this session, and it's not even his job, he belongs with the other group."

Maybe he bribed her? Because, of course, at this point I was positively dying with curiosity. I looked around the room, trying to spot a namebadge with Cocky McPenis on it. I didn't see one, though, and a couple of hours later I'd mostly forgotten the incident. I really do like B.B.N., in sort of a cautious way (she sometimes bites), but I wouldn't necessarily put it past her to be on crack.

As the afternoon presentations were wrapping up, I excused myself and went back to the empty general session room to plant a few ringer questions in the anonymous question box. (Legitimately, I mean - two of my coworkers had to address them; and none of the attendees had asked any.) "Wow," said a man's voice, "I think I've listened to about as much as I can take of that stuff."

I looked up and found that Cocky McPenis himself had followed me. He's quite a bit younger than I expected and looked nice enough, not too much like a dissipated, lecherous old reprobate, though he did have an unmistakable I'm-picturing-you-naked glint in his eyes. I smiled and said something noncommital about the material being a little dull, but I was busy writing down questions and didn't really have time for chitchat in any case.

"I mean, it's not exactly rocket science," he went on. "Some of those people! I don't even work in that system, and I got it totally figured out right away."

One wonders if perhaps this is the correct way to approach a girl when talking about her area of, for lack of a better word, expertise; because even though I'm not completely brimming over with pride at what I do, I suddenly wanted to slap a really gnarly set of construction plans on him and say, "Oh, well, you shouldn't have any trouble with these, then."

But of course I didn't have any handy, only a stack of index cards on which I was still trying to jot down five or six questions before the general session reconvened at any moment, so I just laughed again, and said something else I don't remember, and then somebody else walked in and Cocky took his leave. "See you tomorrow!" he said.

Oh no! My ironclad virtue is under attack! But everything will be all right, because I have the Bubbly Bitching Nonsmoker to look out for me.

------------
*Not his actual name

Bright-Tailed and Bushy-Eyed

What an ungodly hour to be awake on a Sunday morning. I didn't get to bed until four. Did you know that Oilcan Harry's gets to be incredibly crowded? And that Magnolia Cafe after the bars close down isn't much better? And that, if you drive down South Congress at 2:45 a.m. in a decked-out Happy Fun Car, some drunk guy in a pickup truck might scream and moon you? Honestly, after Friday's happy hour, I'd already had my fill of crack.

I so totally meant to blog about that and forgot. It was heinous. There's not enough spackle in all the Home Depots in the world. No one we know: just some guy at the next table who apparently isn't averse to a bit of a draft.

Last night I had a dream about interviewing for the job I applied for on Friday. This is, of course, entirely Tony's fault. I dreamed that I was attending some high-level frou-frou meeting at a picnic table in the mud, but then the pilot arrived and the picnic table took off, and once we were airborne, one of the high-level frou-frou attendees began asking me interview questions.

Picnic tables are less than ideal, aerodynamically speaking. The flight never got very high, and was shaky and shuddery, and we kept narrowly missing trees. And of course our feet were sort of hanging out the bottom, so I felt a little vulnerable. It was hard to concentrate. But I think I did well!

We'll take the dream as a promising sign. Maybe I'll be picking up some new interview duds at Mall of America in a few weeks. Fingers are crossed!