2 November 2000
	Last year: If anyone ever tries to tell me that the Fates don't have a sense of humor, I will laugh at them.
	I made my first scoring catch at Ultimate Frisbee last night. And I managed a fairly impressive defensive knock-down. I also made a bunch of misses, but that happens. I had fun. The teams were very well-matched last night, even if Elizabeth and I did sortof get short shrift most of the time. But that's all right; we guarded each other and that was a good match, too - she's small and quick and can change direction so fast it makes my ankles hurt just thinking about it; while I am capable of short bursts of speed that left her in the dust.   Anyway, it was fun, and I pretty much went the distance this time. We showed up at about 5:45 to start warming up, and played until almost 7:45. Elizabeth and I sat out a couple of times to catch our breath or coddle strains, but I don't think our "out" time totalled more than half an hour, all told.   I'm surprised I can walk today, though. I made a dive for the frisbee at one point that - if I had caught it - would have been a thing of beauty. Instead, I landed on the ground with one leg twisted the wrong way and the frisbee only inches from my outstretched hand. My twisted knee wouldn't let me run for the rest of the evening, though I limp-jogged on it rather than sit out and let it seize up in the cold night air. But I was fully expecting to find it too stiff to move today and spend the day scarfing Advil like candy. Instead, it's a little stiff, but no more so than my other knee - and both are considerably less stiff than the first time I played. (It helps, I'm sure, that I stretched out my hamstrings and calves every time we stopped.)   Slowly but surely, I'm getting the hang of this. And despite my aching knees, I will sing no threnody for evenings spent at home watching TV or vegging in front of the computer. There is still plenty of time for those nights, and my life is better now than it has been in years.   One week!   Meetings, meetings, meetings. How did I get stuck going to so many meetings? I'm not even a manager, and in the past seven days I've spent at least an hour a day in meetings! Now some of them have actually been useful - the manager-low meetings in which we've discussed the current project. But some of them have been useful only to others - the weekly staff meeting in which my manager gets a report on what we're all doing, for instance. I'm sure it's useful to him, but to me, it's a waste of an hour.   Some of them have potential. We had a two-hour meeting on Tuesday with a company whose technology we might use. I didn't really need to be in the meeting, and if I'd heard the guy use the word "strategic" one more time I was going to throttle him... But the potential for usefulness was there.   Some of the meetings have been useless but necessary. Yesterday's meeting that came down from corporate, for example. Or the two-hour "training" meeting I've got tomorrow. These meeetings really require nothing more than my name on the attendance sheet, to be filed with corporate HQ. Time-wasters. I've started taking a notebook to these meetings and doing actual work during them.   Actually, yesterday's meeting was kindof fun. We were divided into teams, and then each team read a situation from a card to the other team. The other team discussed the situation and tried to decide what the proper official response should be, and then the first team would read the answer from the card. All this in the name of establishing the company's "Values" policy.   One of the situations went like this: A woman under your supervision comes to you and tells you that a male employee invited her to, "rub up against me if you want to." She told him, "No, not not, not ever." He laughed, and now every time he sees her, he said, "If you want to..." What do you do? Okay, it's obviously a sexual harassment case, and the proper response is to report the guy to his manager (or if you are his manager, to tell him in no uncertain terms to stop it). Easy enough.   But that "If you want to..." really got us. Programmers are a touchy lot. For the rest of the afternoon, we joked it: "Hey, Mike, can I borrow your pen?" "If you want to..." "Let me get that door for you." "Well, if you want to..."   Yeah, we're a sick, sick, sick bunch of people. Stay back. We're contagious.   Word of the Day: threnody - song of lamentation for the dead; a work resembling such a song; elegy
	Currently Reading: - Dune by Frank Herbert   Current Projects: - Jingle Bell stocking
	Previous Reflection Current Reflections   Reflect Back Next Reflection