22 January 2001
It was a weekend of many and varied surprises.
To begin with, before the weekend was even begun, we had a staff meeting in my office in which they announced that we were... Well, never mind the numbers; we'll just say this office was found to be significantly in the red for the past couple of months. As a result, they're going to lay off and/or place on furlough a "significant percentage" of the people in the office. As of the meeting, they were still running the numbers, trying to decide who and how. We're supposed to get details early this week.
What's funny - in a sort of "gallows humor" kind of way - is that the project I'm on, which has cost the company millions of dollars already - which those of us on the project refer to as the "Money-Sucking Black Hole of Doom" - is, in the company's books, a research project, and therefore considered fully funded.
So my job is probably safe. Though I spent some time going through the classifieds this weekend, just so I know what's out there.
That led to a sickening moment, too: The index on the classifieds section said the jobs were on page D12. So I opened up the paper... And found nothing. Well, not nothing, of course. There were sales positions open, and "business opportunities" - but no actual jobs. Not even for awful jobs like cashier. I read more carefully, dumbfounded. Nothing. In utter disbelief, I turned to the front page of the section and started scanning from the beginning.
Oh. There's the beginning of the job section, on page D2. Stupid index misprint.
There's not much out there anyway. Only four pages of want ads, and I found maybe two jobs I'm actually qualified for, and another three that I suppose I could do if I had to. If I actually do get laid off (or decide I can't take it anymore and need to find another job anyway) I think I'm going to have to go through a headhunter.
Oh, well. At least there was some warning this time.
Anyhow, Friday evening Matt and I drove down to my parents' house to take my dad out to dinner for his birthday. He'd picked Samurai, which is where Matt and I had gone with the Brandts for my birthday. When we were there, Braz had chosen what the restaurant called the "Imperial" dinner, which was filet mignon, chicken, and a choice of either shrimp or scallops, and then a choice between sake and plum wine to drink. It had looked fantastic, so I'd promised myself I'd try it the next time I was there.
Wow. I was not disappointed. The chef managed to keep my steak pretty rare, and it practically melted in my mouth. The chicken was nice and tender, and I even ate the shrimp, which as anyone who knows me will attest, is something amazing in and of itself. Being neither a wine nor a sake drinker, I shrugged and opted for the wine - but even that was amazing; an extraordinarily sweet dessert wine, with just a hint of almond.
It was right up there as one of the more expensive options on the menu, but it was worth every penny.
Saturday was K.T.'s AD&D game. I can't say I had really been looking forward to it all that much. It was originally designed for beginning players, and is therefore somewhat hack-and-slash. To make matters worse, not only the characters but the players aren't exactly the best of friends, and so there hasn't been a lot of character interaction. We tend to go off and do our own thing a lot.
So K.T. had come up with an idea to help us do more inter-party roleplaying. I was a little dubious about this, too: She was going to give each of us a henchman, which for those of you unfamiliar with roleplaying or AD&D, is a character who comes along with the party and is loyal to a player's character. They help the party along with whatever skills they have (they tend to be less advanced adventurers than the party members) without the expectation of pay, willing to take a smaller share of treasure collected. If you go strictly by the rules, our characters are currently better suited to be henchmen than to have them.
But K.T. had a twist. Instead of playing our own henchmen, we'd play each others'. And these henchmen weren't exactly welcomed with open arms, either. To wit: My regular character is Danna, an older woman who decided to go adventuring after her husband had died and her children had grown up and moved away. And so K.T. has Joel playing my henchman: her granddaughter Bette, who ran away from mage-school because the other children were teasing her for having a pig for a familiar. Joel's character is Porto, a halfling thief. And so K.T. has Kevin playing Slarg, a goblin cleric/thief that Porto once rescued from a band of hobgoblins. Kevin's regular character is William, an upright and strictly correct cavalier. And so K.T. has John playing Gwyddion, a bard who plays fast-and-loose with the truth in his quest to create an epic ballad about William's exploits. John's regular character is Ash, a priest for a goddess of fertility who uses his position as a convenient excuse to attempt to seduce every pretty girl he meets. And so K.T. has me playing Marissa, a priestess of a different god, who fell in love with Ash and is determined to prove her devotion and loyalty... and incidentally put a halt to his bed-hopping.
It worked better than I could possibly have imagined. I think it worked better than even K.T. hoped. Joel is usually pretty reserved in games, hanging around in the background waiting for combat, but he leapt into the granddaughter's role with enthusiasm, even telling a story that K.T. later confided he'd invented from whole cloth himself. John made up some amusing tales about "Brave Sir William" (a la Monty Python's "Brave Sir Robin"). Despite the fact that Kevin was playing lying on the floor, no-one had any trouble distinguishing the upright Sir William from the grovelling Slarg. And a great amount of merriment was to be had in Marissa's somewhat ruthless interruptions of Ash's wandering.
Even better still: In commiserating and teasing each other about their henchmen, the regular characters began to interact more than ever before. Since the game, I've been working out how Danna's going to keep her somewhat over-enthusiastic granddaughter out of mischief, and planning Marissa's next move in her plan to snare Ash for good. I can actually say that I'm looking forward to the next game.
We spent Sunday mostly being astonishingly lazy. We did the laundry, I made some cookies, I did a little crocheting... But other than that, Matt and I both spent the day lounging around various parts of the house, playing computer games and watching TV.
What surprised me about Sunday was the number of phone calls we didn't answer.
Our cordless phone gave up the ghost about a week ago, and Matt had suggested that when we replaced it, we get a caller-id ready phone. I hadn't been hankering after caller-id, but I didn't object to it, so that's what we did. The first day's experience taught us that telemarketers and other annoying phone calls register on our phone as "Out Of Area." Since we have an answering machine to catch any possible non-telemarketers, we've been not answering the "Out Of Area" calls.
I'd never really noticed before how many of those damn calls we got. Even after only a few days of the service, I've decided it's worth the $7.50 a month it'll cost us, just to be able to avoid talking to telemarketers.
Hooray for technology!
So now it's Monday morning, and I'm back at my desk, wondering if I'll still be here on Friday; wondering who among my friends will still be here with me.
Keep your fingers crossed for us.
Word of the Day:
hyperborean - of or relating to the extreme north or arctic peoples; frozen
Currently Reading:
- The second book in Dave Duncan's King's Daggers series. I still can't remember the title.
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan
- placemat set