Live from the Home Office

Fake Easter

March 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

My sister was all proud of herself, thinking she’d be able to show some authority and independence to my mother by informing her that “No, Mom, me and my family are going away in the Spring and will not be here for Easter.”  My sister is sick of me casually avoiding holidays and family events: “oh, I’ll be in South America for Christmas; ”  ”Oh no! Too bad I’m in Australia during Grandma’s funeral!!”, all the while she feels like she can offer no shock value, no controversy, no “muahahahahah, I’m getting out of this one!”

So it was with equal part glee and malevolence with which she said, “Guess what, Hol?  I get to tell Mommy that we’re not going to be here for Easter.”  Not my sister Joy!  Not the bearer of my Mom’s only Grandchildren!! But oh yes, the beach house had been booked, and Easter would go on sans kids, sans Joy, both  literally and figuratively.

A foreshadowing of a miserable Easter passed before my eyes. What to do without my sister to laugh with! What to do without my sister elbowing me while trying to get to an egg before me in the Easter egg hunt! Who would help take any passive aggressive blows from my mother?!! I quickly identified with how she felt every time I proudly announced that sorry, I can’t make it. I’M the one who is supposed to miss holidays, but oh so how I’ve taken my older sister, my best friend, for granted!

My only solace was in the impending giddiness when my mom would hear that Easter would be Minus my sister’s family of 4. I even asked if I could be conferenced in when Joy delivered the news! Finally, it would not be me who is the disappointing child!

And then… the phone call. Joy was barely audible;l something was wrong. I hurriedly asked, “well, how did she take it?!!!” How would my mother respond to her prize child-bearing daughter skipping— GASP– A HOLIDAY??

"Oh don't worry... we'll have Easter the next week," my Mom calmly said, without skipping a beat

Before laughing for a minute straight, I congratulated my sister on being able to postpone the celebration of the rising of our Lord and Saviour. Easter Sunday, Easter Schmunday.

Jesus can wait a week.

And so Fake Easter is born.

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Pot O Gold!

February 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been out of commission on a business trip that required 16 hour days. I’m back, and went to grab some money from the change jar to buy myself a cup of coffee this morning since I’m back to being office-level addicted to the stuff.  Why buy coffee?  Did the Home Office decide to throw the budget out the window because there is a steady paycheck?  Hell no, it’s just that someone broke the coffee pot*

The change jar is always magically full of quarters. However, on this morning…

WTF, nothin but copper!

Looks like someone has been dipping into petty cash while I’ve been away.  Investigation is pending.

* When I heard the coffee pot drop, my thought wasn’t “Oh no, the coffee pot!” or “I hope no one got hurt in there”, but rather “Thank god it wasn’t me.” Also, now we are faced with buying a new pot even though we are going to register for a new coffee machine. If anyone wants to step up and get us a preemtive new coffee maker, stainless steel with a decanter that keeps it warm, give a shout out hehe

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Dios Mio!

February 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

FACT: Hollie ’s is 5′7″, with red hair and fair skin. She also drove our tiny rental car around the small towns in Mexico*.  

FACT: The average height of a Mexican woman is 5′1″  . During our journey we didn’t witness one other woman driving. 

For much of our time exploring Mayan Mexico, locals (mostly children) stared at us. They were particularly awestruck by Hollie. I nicknamed her La Roja Diabla.

the legend grows of the 7 foot tall Ginger who drove Senor William across the Yucatan!

 *The car was manual and while I can try to drive stick shift on empty roads, I was not about to test my luck on one lane highways. I actually enjoyed being chauffered around for a change. We were curious as to what the hotel staff thought everytime they pulled the car around and gave me the keys – which I promptly handed to Hollie.  “Senor William has a personal female driver – who is this guy?????”

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Mexcellent beach reading

February 15, 2010 · Leave a Comment

 

I figure we’ll do a recap of the Mexico trip in drips and drabs.  It was pretty great, and a good blend of “real” Mexico and swim up bars.

One of the reoccurring vacation arguments pertained to our individual choices in beach reading:

 Normal beach reading: People magazine

 


How about some Blackwater for your beach reading? Relaxing and uplifting!

 

Yes, Will read Blackwater while in Mexico. Look at him, does he look relaxed?  He kept trying to give me updates, too.  “Do you know that the parents of the soldiers dragged through the streets in Fallujah had to sue Blackwater to get information…”  I was like, can we please stick to more vacation level conversation, like how the Duggar baby is doing?

So for every horrific mercenary story I gave him a gossip magazine story. He eventually stopped.  He better hope what Heidi Montag’s mother thinks about her plastic surgery doesn’t come up in dinner party conversation, he’ll be woefully unprepared.

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Moooooove

February 15, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I start a new job tomorrow. Kinda. In that I’ve worked there before. 

Earning me the new Home Office nickname "Grover Cleveland" in reference to his nonconsecutive reigns of presidency

It’s a bit of a different role so I’m not completely reliving the past. And I’ll be already established socially, so I hear there is already a Happy Hour planned on my behalf for my first day to help me ease myself back into the day to day.

Will and I were laughing anticipating IT telling me I’ll have to change my email address to say something like ‘2′ at the end because my original email address was deactivated in the system.  “I’m sorry, there could only be one email address for each particular name, and yours is deactivated. What, would you like us to change our whole IT system to accommodate you leaving the  company then coming back?”

This should be somethin!

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Uno mas cerveza por favor

February 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Thanks to the snowstorm, the staff of the Home Office is stuck in Mexico!  We’re glad we had the foresight to change our flight yesterday, as per the flight tracker we would have been at the Charlotte, NC Sheraton instead of the Westin Cancun.
 
 
It’s actually a bit stormy here too, but I was warned not to complain at all given what we’re missing at home and since I spent the day on an island drinking beer and eating seafood caught that morning under a palapa hut. In fact, i’m working on a blog post of Most Obnoxious Facebook Status Updates I could have Posted During Vacation if I had Access to Internet While being the Only Guest at a Remote Mexican Hacienda

 I miss my dogs!  kinda.

 

 

 

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Donde esta El Home Office?

February 4, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Hello. You’ve reached Live From the Home Office. We can’t take your call right now because we are redeeming Starwood points.

A la piscina at the hacienda. I will wax poetic about the Starwood Preferred Guest program another time.

In a classic white trashy move, at first hint of us having a regular income we are hightailing it to Mexico or a last chance time out. Will asked if I was going to cash the first paycheck and buy a pinball machine. So los perros estan con nuestra familia and we are outie 5.

We are interested in testing out the Espanol– we have continued to take lessons with our teacher from Argentina via web cam.  In a great obnoxious side note, we therefore speak our limited spanish with an Argentine accent.  So no one will really understand what the F we’re saying.  The first half will be spent in a hacienda in a remote area. We are counterbalancing that with a few days in Cancun, where Will is hoping to watch the Superbowl at Senor Frogs or in the comfort of our swim up bar of the good ol Westin.

I also have to do a fair amount of driving, since SOME PEOPLE never bothered to learn how to drive stick.

OK, better go before the health insurance runs out.

Leave a message at the beep.

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Lone Wolf

January 30, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I love how tech savy CNN has become. They want to be so hip with their Twitter pie charts and their Facebook polls. They are so in your face about how “with it” they are –  it’s uncomfortable.

hey Glenn Beck: interviewing people via satellite is so 2006

During the post State of the Union coverage, there were blackberries, multiple laptops, giant touch screens and a sensory overload of flashing images and graphics.  I am sure in 2 weeks, Larry King will be casually thumbing through his interview notes on an iPad.

Amongst this three ring circus of dynamic technology, there stood the ringleader – Wolf Blitzer -kicking it old school,  trusty white legal pad in hand.

screw the netbook, i got me a new Trapper Keeper and some looseleaf paper

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Home Office VP Marketing

January 29, 2010 · 3 Comments

There is a Live From the Home Office #1 Fan who has a new job at a media company.  I don’t know if it’s because he’s the new guy, but his desk is immediately behind the chairs where they record the daily podcasts.  Meaning the whole world can see his computer screen.  It’s pretty funny, and we check it out to see what he’s up to, always hoping to catch him on ESPN.com.
 

So, for example, his screen is here. But closer. And bigger. How about a LiveFromTheHomeOffice.com shout out?

This is an official lobby for it. You’ll get the title of VP, Marketing, LiveFromTheHomeOffice.com. 

We told him that his desk placement gives him perfect opportunity to become a cult Internet hero.  How about dressing in a different color cape every day?  Wacky hat?  Just sitting there, doing your job as usual, but wearing a funny message on your back during the podcast taping.  The Buzz would propel those podcasts further than any New Media discusssion ever would!  If I had a choice between watching people debate the iPad from a site with just two guys on a set, or two guys on a set with the wacky Internet Marketer in the background, I’m choosing the latter.

Cmon!

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Black Belt

January 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’ve worked with some Grade A douches in my day. Sitting comfortably in the top 10% rests Dave, let’s call him. Being in the operations department, he was primed to be an a-hole, but he brought oh so much more to the table than mere mind boggling complicated sourcing procedures, i.e., Get your vendors paid  in 22 easy steps– 4 months late so they never want to work with you again.
 
Although I admit he was fairly friendly with me, his endless angry, bitter, mean spirited tirades were a bit off putting. However, I thought that maybe I was missing something about Dave.  He continually… and by continually I mean just about every time I talked to him… referenced his Black Belt.  

  

 
It takes years and years of dedication, quiet strength and perseverence to make it to black belt. Perhaps I am judging Dave’s character too quickly based on petty work stuff and a few off-putting personal anecdotes

    

 And then one day I decided to visit Dave in his office since he had been avoiding my calls about a partcular project. He motioned me to have a seat while he finished his call.  As I’m looking around at the photos and office paraphenalia my eye catches something on the book case.    

A series of binders labelled “Six Sigma Training.”  Six Sigma* is a business managment strategy that “seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes” per wikipedia,   ”blah blah blah blah blah” per me.    

In a flash my head swirled to the framed certificates on the wall.  There it was.    

“Dave Douchebag completed the Black Belt-level Six Sigma training on [this date] at [this company].”    

My head spun and I started replaying conversations in my head, realizing that at no time when he referenced his black belt training did it have anything to do with martial arts or patience, or quiet strength, but rather some business situation that required some efficient processes. It was kinda like that reveal scene in The Sixth Sense when you are shown all those scenes and are like, “Holy shit… no one every interacted with him, no one can see him, oh my god, he’s DEAD!”      

I know people say LOL a lot, but when I say I Laughed Out Loud, I Laughed Out Loud. Right there, in his office, after making this discovery and realizing my stupidity and the hilarity of the situation, I started laughing so hard I was shaking trying to hold it in.      

And then I took a deep breathe as he got off the phone, accredited my laughter to a funny story my sister told me, and took solace in the fact that there really was nothing deeper to this guy… he was just a regular ol run of the mill office asshole.    

*  Yes, even though Six Sigma has saved Fortune 500 companies hundreds of billions of dollars since its inception, I’m still categorizing this post under “Ridiculous company initiatives”

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