February 11, 2010
Dear Everyone:
Each morning and afternoon, when possible, I read
Trivia questions while
our work group does Safety Stretching for about 10-15 minutes.
It gets everyone away from their desks for a little bit.
We recently moved the whole Safety Stretching “operation” out of
the hallway and into a Team Room to avoid disturbing other people whose
offices and conference rooms are nearby.
The “Team Room” is actually just a large room with a bunch of tables and
chairs in it. It doesn’t
have the standard conference room equipment such as an overhead
projector, central table with power and network connectivity, and a
telephone or polycom. As
such, it’s not available for anyone to use for meetings.
We tend to use it as a place to eat our lunches, away from our
desks.
Back to the Trivia questions:
One Geography question last week asked, “How many
US state
capitals are named for
Presidents?”
The answer was, “Four.” But
it didn’t say which four.
Most people just shrugged and went back to work, but two people couldn’t
leave it at that. They
wanted to know which four.
One went to the whiteboard on the wall and systematically began to list
the states, in alphabetical order, of course.
The other went to the other side of the white board and proceeded
to draw, free hand, a map of the
United States.
The first, having only reached the letter “I”, decided that the
second approach was better and, between the two of them, they filled in
all 50 states, including Alaska and
Hawaii, even though we knew that
their capitals were not named for any presidents.
Unfortunately, our manager was in “Hobby” that week.
He can, and has, rattled off the names of every President, from
Washington to
Obama, strictly from memory, in chronological order, of
course. Something he learned
at an early age and won’t give up.
In the meantime, I went to my office and ran a search on US State
Capitals. Sure enough,
someone had gone to the trouble of listing all 50 states, with their
current capitals. (Some have changed over time.
For instance,
Benicia was the capital of
California before it
moved to Sacramento.)
Getting a
list of US Presidents was even easier.
Back at the whiteboard, they were still filling in states, some of
which were definitely not to scale.
Nevada was a little more robust than it probably should have
been, leaving Arizona just a sliver of space.
And New England was quite a bit larger than I think it really is.
I started calling out capitals and we very quickly found three of the
ones named for Presidents.
But even cross-checking against the list of Presidents didn’t find the
fourth until a couple of days later.
The partial list of states and the map remained on the white board until
the day before yesterday when I finally erased it all in anticipation of
the group that needed a conference room and couldn’t find one anywhere.
Since two of their team members are part of our group, we were
able to accommodate them with the “lunch room”.
Today the room is more or less back to “normal” and we are once again
having our Safety Stretching in there.
Tomorrow, all of my co-workers will be away enjoying their “9/80”
day off. I’ll have the
entire place to myself, which means I’ll get tons of work done.
And next Monday is
Presidents Day, a Holiday for those of us who
don’t work a “9/80” schedule.
Love, as always,
PS. (In alphabetical order, or course):
Jackson, Mississippi
Jefferson City, Missouri
Lincoln, Nebraska
Madison, Wisconsin
Jefferson City was the one we missed at first.
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