December 8, 2005
Dear Everyone:
I had been thinking lately that I might move Letter Night from Thursday to Wednesday, as it might fit better with my evening schedule. So last week, I wrote the weekly Letter on Wednesday. Some of you may have noticed.
It proved to be fortuitous. Last Thursday, the first really big, wet storm of the season blew in and knocked out the power at my place. I knew instantly when I got home that night that the power had been out. This was because the lamp in the living room was not on as it should have been. This lamp is on a timer that turns the lamp on just after 4:00 pm.
The fact that the lamp was not on yet meant that the timer hadn’t reached 4:00 yet. This indicated that the power had been out for a while. I determined that it had been out for about 90 minutes. So I puttered around the house, resetting clocks, then sat down at the computer to do some work.
The power went out again at 5:24. The only light in the whole house was that coming from the screen of my laptop. The laptop had a battery of its own, plus it was plugged into a “UPS” (Uninterrupted Power Source). This was just enough light to allow me to grope cautiously into the bedroom and find the flashlight that is always in the drawer of the bedside table.
That flashlight enabled me to go downstairs to the kitchen and find a larger flashlight. And candles. Eventually the power did come back on again, but it would have put a serious crimp in writing a Letter that evening, so I was glad I had done it already. (Yes, the laptop would have worked for a couple of hours, on battery, but that doesn’t make the printer work.)
This week, I didn’t write the Letter on Wednesday
because it was ARMA night.
We don’t usually get a lot of people at the December meeting,
what with
IT equals Information Technology (the computer
people)
RIM equals Records and Information Management (the
records people)
SOX is the common abbreviation for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (the Congressional knee-jerk reaction to the Enron-Arthur Anderson debacle of 2001)
The presentation was really more about “Office Politics” and how to use it to your advantage, plus what a nifty font Adobe Acrobat created in 1981. Not exactly sure how that fit in, but it had something to do with computing storage needs based on quantity of pages to be scanned and how smart it can make you look when you can rattle off relevant statistics in the middle of a meeting.
In other news…
It’s been really Q-U-I-E-T at work this week. All the Really Important People have been in “Hobby”, attending a Really Important Planning Meeting. No doubt it will change everything we do and how we do it next year, which is really only a few weeks away. But in the meantime, I’ve been able to get a lot of things finished or at least neatened up.
I’m thinking of spending some time tomorrow rearranging my office. Things tend to be especially quiet on Fridays because a lot of people work the Alternate Work Schedule that allows them to be off every other Friday. And that means more parking spaces for those of us who do work on Fridays.
For the past month we’ve been short one parking lot
because they were redesigning it, part of an overall project that will
produce about 800 more parking spaces over the next 17 months.
Naturally they started with the lot closest to our new location
in Building K (nicknamed “
I have all of my holiday shopping figured out, what to get for whom, where and when. Now all I need is some time for shopping. I’ve found the best time to shop is right after work, when the people with the rug rats have to take them home and feed them. So I’ll hit the shopping center tomorrow and put yet another dent in my long-suffering credit card.
One more week until vacation.
Love, as always,
Pete
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