January 30, 1992
Dear Everyone:
Like half the people in this country, I have come
down with a cold (or the flu). The
other half of the people in this country are just getting over a cold
(or the flu).
Actually, a coworker's husband's doctor told
him that there are no less
than three (3) cold (or flu) viruses making the rounds these days.
So it's possible to catch a cold,
get over it and immediately catch another one, so that it seems like a
very long cold when, in fact, it's more than one short one.
Whatever. A
bug’s a bug and this one's got me. Consequently,
I'm feeling a lot like the Seven Dwarves:
Sneezy… Sleepy… Dopey… And (definitely!) Grumpy.
Can you imagine what it would be like if Disney
studios tried to produce
Snow White and the Seven
Dwarves today instead of in the late 1930s?
They’d have special interest
groups swarming all over them! Look
at all the trouble they got into with
Charlie Chan and the
Curse of the Dragon Queen. Oriental
groups cried foul, stereotyping and yelled especially loudly because
Charlie Chan was
played by Peter
Ustinov.
Now look at the Seven Dwarves.
There'd be
dwarf groups filing
class action suits (more work for people like "Jeannie") all over the place.
Politically Correct advocates
demanding to know why there weren't more minority Dwarves.
(Isn't being a dwarf, by
definition, a minority?)
Of course, they'd have to change "Dopey" to
"Intellectually Challenged", which probably wouldn't fit in the carving
on the foot of his bed.
And I can just imagine what the Apple Growers
Association would have to say about the evil queen.
(This is what happens when I try to write a letter
well zoned out on Benadryl Plus©. Better
living through chemistry.)
I spent half the morning trying to explain to my
manager why we need to spend so much time getting the Deleted Pep Codes
straightened out, and the other half explaining to a confused accountant
in "Alamo" why he was billed in December for 21,000 boxes when he
doesn't have 21,000 boxes.
It was because his Pep Code had
been Deleted and the charges were held in an Error File until I could
get the correct new Pep Code, at which time the charges for April
through December all showed up on the same bill.
Aren't you glad
PG&E doesn't work
that way?
The month of February (by which time I hope to be
over the cold-or-flu) looks like a bear.
There isn't a single week when I won't be out of the office for
at least 2 days or as much as 4. I
have "codes" written everywhere: CE…
IDI… CQI… RACF. It looks like
someone spilled a bowl of alphabet soup all over my Yuppie Book.
Translations: CE = Career Enrichment; IDI = the new
Records Management product that IDI is developing and Company will be
testing; CQI = Continuous Quality Improvement; RACF = you don't need to
know. It's just a mainframe computer thing that I do from time to time.
It's going to be a busy month, so there may come a
week when I won't get a chance to write a letter, due to no free lunch
periods. We’ll take it as it
goes.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS. The
other three Dwarves are: Bashful,
Doc and Happy. You've been
racking your brain trying to think of them, haven't you?
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