Wednesday,
February 20, 2002

A blow-by-blow snapshot of Melanie's day

I'm extremely tired, so I'm cutting and pasting this in from an email I just wrote to the Forever Fabulous list I'm on, in response to LCM's own recounting of his day. Enjoy:

Well, lessee -- after spending 10 hours yesterday working on finishing up a suite of help files (doing this at home while I was recovering from a sinus infection so that I could lie down occasionally when the screen started to swim too much), the alarm went off at 5:00 AM. I slapped it dead, then dozed until 5:30 AM when I realized that I really did need to get into the office so that I could finish and deliver these help files to the dreadfully impatient programmer in SF who's been hopping around on one foot, he's so eager to get them.

I get in at 6:30 AM. There's nobody in the office. Dawn is breaking over the horizon. And I read an email that says the external beta test (the reason why the programmer was so impatient to get his hands on my help files) has been put off a week. Fate spits in my oatmeal once again.

Well, that's not totally true -- I did find my first Commerical Company paycheck on my desk. I will have a small but not unimpressive lump of cash in the credit union, once I manage to make it there during lunch and cash this check. Of course, much of this lump is already allocated for bills, but it's still nice to see it in my account, even for a short time.

I sit down and hammer through the rest of the help files. They're not pretty, but they'll do for external beta, and I'll tweak for content later. I send them off. By this time it's almost 11:00 AM. People have filtered into the office, but the Man from McKinney (who is currently being referred to as the Meathead form McKinney for reasons I shall explain later) is off in San Diego, so I have no one with whom to eat lunch. Instead, I head off to the credit union, deposit my checks, pull out $200 for Lyndon (who lent it to me when I went off to SF last week), drive idly around Irving because it's a beautiful spring day (yes, I know it's February, but what do YOU call temps in the high sixties and not a cloud in the sky?), then finally return to the office.

I stop off in the cafeteria to get a chicken breast sandwich, and a guy from my office chats with me briefly. I think he's the CEO, I'm not sure, but he knows my name so I'll be friendly.

Back at my desk, I get a call from the nice project manager acknowledging receipt of the help files, and what am I working on now? I tell him the FAQ file he asked me to start last week, and he thinks this is fabulous. I do, too, until I realize that I can't FIND the FAQ file on my system anywhere, and suspect that I left it in SF. Damn spit dirty socks.

So I start to recreate, then develop a splitting sinus headache. By this point it was 3:30 PM and I'd already been there an extra half hour, so I say fuck it and go home for a brief nap before heading out to Steve's house to babysit his kids while his wife teaches a piano class.

My sister wakes me up from the nap -- she's going to Sweden, and can I help her figure out where to fly out of? It turns out that someone in her husband's law firm was offering around two free round-trip flights to Götberg -- my BIL snatched them up and told Stacy they were going to Sweden, but needed to book the actual flight tomorrow so could she call Melanie and find out where SAS flew in Scandanavia because he wanted to do some sightseeing before they left?

I dig out my European road atlas and tell her to fly in to Gūtborg and fly out of Copenhagen, as it's down the coast and would be a lovely trip for them. I then have to cut the call short and get over to the MfM's house. His lovely and patient wife Anne heads off for her lesson, and I play computer games with their youngest before popping him into bed. I then call Stacy back on my mobile phone and we firm up details of the trip.

At this point, the house phone rings -- it's the master of the house. "Can I call you back later, Stacy? MfM's on the other line," I explain.

"Where ARE you?" she demands, suddenly suspicious.

"Um, at his house."

"His HOUSE?"

And suddenly the penny drops. Previous comments make sense. I realize that my sister thinks I am having an affair with the MfM. Oboy.

I finally get off the phone with my extremely suspicious sibling and talk to the MfM, who is NOT in a good mood, as he was frisked and his things searched at SFO Airport (he doesn't like ANYONE going through his things and infringing on his personal rights). I finally get him off the phone (he was driving to LA, of all places) and wait until Anne comes home, then head home myself where, by some miracle of God, I find the first season of "Sex and the City" on DVD waiting for me courtesy of Amazon, which manages to improve my mood quite a bit.

And I claim my life isn't interesting. Ha!